An eight-minute spiel of blue-sky thinking:
- Do I join BlueSky (the real McCoy – no bridges)?
- Network effects: They explain how people move, but as to why, we need to dig a little deeper;
- Why not both?: If you’re already on BlueSky, join Mastodon – it’s not perfect, but you’ll find a place for you.
Over the past year, one question has managed to carve a hole in my floor with all the pacing I’ve done around it: do I join BlueSky (the real McCoy – no bridges)? No amount of abstinence kills it dead:
https://brologue.net/2024/05/14/fool-me-twice-we-dont-err-what-was-that-first-thing-you-said/
On 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. That is to say, “us? We’re not like them:”
https://brologue.net/2024/04/11/enscattification/
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. 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:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect#Examples
Network effects are, among other things, how multiplayer games grow:
https://brologue.net/2024/10/18/players-make-the-game/
They explain the how of adopting a new service. However, “going where my friends go” fails to articulate the second reason – the why.
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:
“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… Tʜᴇʏ ᴀᴄᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴇᴠɪʟ ɴᴏᴛ ʙᴇᴄᴀᴜsᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ sᴀʏ ʏᴇs, ʙᴜᴛ ʙᴇᴄᴀᴜsᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴅᴏɴ’ᴛ sᴀʏ ɴᴏ.“
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.
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. 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.’
Well, I’m on this ‘good Twitter,’ and sometimes, I get interactions from strangers who haven’t followed Bridgy Fed. (My friends, on the other hand, have been more frugal.) It’s alright, I guess.
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. 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. 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:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/
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. 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.”
pluralistic.net, “Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits,” https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/
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.
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. 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.)
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:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/31/users-arent-free-until-big-tech-is-wee/
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… Not being evil, so far as a business is concerned, is persuading everyone that they’re nice.
Hope like hell the business doesn’t do evil – by Act III, no matter how long it takes to get there, someone will dig up all that nice and find that nice ain’t good.
On Mastodon, by contrast, if your community’s owner starts getting their evil on, click-click-click – and fuckity bye! If the Mastodon project does a heel turn? click-click-click – myriad Fediverse projects await you and your connections: Misskey, Sharkey, Akkoma, Pleroma, etc., etc..
Vetinari is wrong: it’s not that people don’t know how to say ‘no,’ it’s that people are not allowed to learn how to say, ‘no.’
The why, you see, is down to material conditions, or, to put it simply, “late stage capitalism.” That, plus being constantly told at every turn that there’s no alternative, and we should put up or shut up. To which I think the only correct response is, “things do not have to be this way.” Not what you’d call an intellectual response, but again – most folks don’t have the time to sit down and figure out how to articulate why they hate these platforms they feel they can’t leave.
I’m on Mastodon because the Fediverse is not like Twitter. I participate in the Fediverse because I believe that none of what we take for granted about social media platforms are inevitable. I wish others would, too:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/15/i-want-my-twitter-friends-back/
I participate in the Fediverse because it looks at how every other platform is built for hockey stick growth, and says, “I would prefer not to.” Contrary to popular belief, the Fediverse does not “compete.” That is its biggest strength and weakness: it is, as David Gerard put it, “run by the sort of people who have opinions on Linux distributions.”
I don’t know if you know this, but GNU/Linux has never exactly “competed” with Windows:
The Fediverse doesn’t compete with traditional platforms, and yet, it still maintains a healthy band of returning users. People can and do organise themselves here:
Because that’s the Fediverse’s other major strength: all of those niche Twitter sub-communities you found yourselves in can be turned into their own dark corners!
Ask yourself, “What part of my identity is most important to me?” Are you Scottish? Join mastodon.scot. Are you Scottish, but only want to interact with your fellow Glaswegians? Join glasgow.social. Games or art? Communities aplenty – pick one. Do you get horny on main? An NSFW community might be right for you.
I should be very clear, however, that Mastodon’s host to moderation issues all its own. I won’t pretend that federation is a magic bullet. As Mekka Okereke and Jon of the Nexus of Privacy show, many communities are host to racism that isn’t killed by simply blocking – be that individual users, or whole communities. This has been the case since before the one-man apartheid tribute act bought Twitter:
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/113550873948734102
That, for now, is not so simple as click-click-click. Bang, and the racism is not gone.
So, yes, I am a little crestfallen that Bluesky’s where the party’s at for the time being; that “”””the good Twitter”””” is all folks demand. You deserve so much more. You’ve seen what happened to Twitter – I fear that, in four years’ time, it will happen again.
No matter what happens to BlueSky, you should claim your username on Mastodon, and join a community, even if you don’t see yourself using that account much. On the “old, good” internet, that’s all you could do2:
https://hackers.town/@lori/113504897152887807
One can choose not to join certain platforms, AND one can choose to diversify their presence online. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. If you’re already on BlueSky, I’m not asking you to ditch it for Mastodon – I’m asking, “Why not both?”