If you're already on BlueSky, I'm not asking you to ditch it for Mastodon - I'm asking, "Why not both?"
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n the one hand: I, as an up-and-coming writer, am incentivised to ride the influx of growth, even if I know that such growth came from the same tactics that Facebook sprung on MySpace, and Discord on Skype and TeamSpeak.
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That is to say, "us? We're not like them:"
Those of you who are on BlueSky are there for two reasons: 1) it's where your friends are, and 2) it's just like how Twitter used to be.
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Network effects help clarify the first. If you have only two telephones in the world, it doesn't really have much social value. But the more telephones you add to the network, the bigger it grows:
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Network effects are, among other things, how multiplayer games grow:
They explain the how of adopting a new service. However, "going where my friends go" fails to articulate the second reason - the 𝘸𝘩𝘺.
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I've seen many of my friends dive headfirst into Bluesky. They have voted with their feet and decided they want the same shit from the same assholes. Perhaps Lord Vetinari, the Tyrant of Ankh-Morpork, put it best (
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> "Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness… **They accept evil, not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.**
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Or did he? Is it really a 𝘺𝘰𝘶 problem? And BlueSky? Evil? Hardly. But I've seen the hat trick, friends, and it will end in tears. 𝘓𝘪𝘢𝘳, 𝘓𝘪𝘢𝘳 is playing on TV, and I've seen that one before.
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For artists, 'friends' are not just the people who know you and your work personally, but also those who react to your work and pass it onto their friends, too. It's a gold rush scenario - buy your picks and shovels and plug away at the rocks in the hope of finding a nugget.
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But that's not 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 'hope,' is it? It's more of a thinly-veiled optimism, fatalism's positive charge. On vibes alone, you think that, no matter what, things will only get better on 'the good Twitter.'
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Well, I'm on this 'good Twitter,' and sometimes, I get interactions from strangers who haven't followed @ap.brid.gy (My friends, on the other hand, have been more frugal). It's alright, I guess.
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And BlueSky really 𝘪𝘴 'the good Twitter,' in the best and worst possible ways. It's all you lot want - or, so I'm led to believe.
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But the only companies who claim to provide that experience are the same ones who turn 'the good Twitter' into 'the bad Twitter' once they know you can't leave. Or, yknow, get bought out.
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Bolting for the exits to BlueSky because it's 'the good Twitter' isn't a very good reason, IMO, but it's absolutely not your fault that most social platforms lack fire exits (h/t @pluralistic
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As Cory Doctorow describes above, some of you are now going through the experience of setting up your connections all over again. If Twitter gave you a fair right of exit, you wouldn't need to do this.
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It would be disciplined, to some extent, by its users having the power to leave at any time:
> "Click-click-click, and you're in the new place. Change your mind? No problem – click-click-click, and you're back where you started."
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Folks, I won't deny Mastodon's different. I won't deny you the frustration that there's some friction in setting up shop. But once you're in, this click-click-click business 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 is that simple.
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Mastodon, like BlueSky, is essentially an interface to its underlying protocol (ActivityPub for Mastodon, ATProto for BlueSky). But in the latter's case, BlueSky's been promising fire exits since before it went public, and they still haven't materialised.
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You can move about 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯 BlueSky's ecosystem, but you still can't leave it entirely.
(And, for the avoidance of doubt: this isn't a post about whether ActivityPub is 'better' than ATProto or not. That topic is a social experiment I don't want to be a part of.)
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So, what stands between BlueSky being "the good Twitter" and "the bad Twitter" is a time-honoured Big Tech promise - that it won't be evil. It's a nice promise.
It wouldn't be a promise if it couldn't be broken:
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If in Act I a business has you at its mercy, hope like hell they promise to not be evil. Not being evil means they have to get a lot of people in on it – on post-its, DMs, in guest talks, in the canteen kombucha…
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