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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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 πΈπ©πΊ.
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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 πΊπ°πΆ problem? And BlueSky? Evil? Hardly. But I've seen the hat trick, friends, and it will end in tears. ππͺπ’π³, ππͺπ’π³ 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 π³π¦π’πππΊ '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 πͺπ΄ '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 β 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 π³π¦π’πππΊ 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 πΈπͺπ΅π©πͺπ― 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 β on post-its, DMs, in guest talks, in the canteen kombuchaβ¦
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Not being evil, so far as a business is concerned, is persuading everyone that they're nice.
Hope like hell the business doesnβt do evil β by Act III, no matter how long it takes to get there, someone will dig up all that nice and find that π―πͺπ€π¦ π’πͺπ―'π΅ π¨π°π°π₯.
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On Mastodon, by contrast, if your community's owner starts getting their evil on, click-click-click - and fuckity bye! If the Mastodon π±π³π°π«π¦π€π΅ does a heel turn? Click-click-click - myriad Fediverse projects await you and your connections: Misskey, Sharkey, Akkoma, etc..
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