this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 181 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

I looked at the terms of service and noticed that they bind you into arbitration, limit your terms to $100, mandate you to travel to Delaware for dispute, and force you into mass arbitration if your dispute is similar to others.

Pass

[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Unfortunately that's standard for pretty much every service in existence until the government determines otherwise or the users demand it en masse. No company is going to willingly expose themselves to any more risk than they absolutely have to. There's zero benefit to them.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Let's not call disabling the right to sue a "business risk". That's like calling the right to stop paying for the service a "risk" - it's riskdiculous.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Let's not call disabling the right to sue a "business risk".

...and why not?

That's like calling the right to stop paying for the service a "risk"

But...that's what it is? I promise if they could remove that risk with a few words in the TOS, and it was legal, they'd all be doing that too.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

By "business risk", they just mean bad for the business, ethics aside

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

And we should just accept that?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Doesn't matter if you should or not. Point is you accept it or you don't use any service whatsoever.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

While I understand that, I'm in America. My first priority has to be getting people off of Twitter.

Would I prefer open source, non-profit software? 100%. It's the smarter and better choice for so many reasons.

But if Bluesky is going to gain critical mass, I'm not going to fight it. I'm having a hard enough time getting people off Twitter. I've written the media address of environments I'm familiar with asking them to organize a move, and I mentioned both Bluesky and Mastodon.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

Arbitration of what? It's a free service. What money could they possibly owe you?

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

If the mods or admin do something that causes you injury, such as ignoring requests that will prevent harassment.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You're not thinking evil enough, honestly. Two examples off the top of my head, each being fairly innocent mistakes: If you enter your phone number for 2FA, it's not going to be public-facing. It's their responsibility to keep that information private from internal and external threats. Ok, so what if it leaks... right? Oh, it turns out the hacker SIM swapped your phone number for the 2FA, and did a password reset on your account via support chat. Still no big deal, its just social media... Except you've been giving updates to all your patreon backers on your project that's shipping soon. It suddenly vanishes off the internet, replaced with a crypto scheme, and all your supporters just flooded your bank with chargebacks. Your attempts at getting your account back are met with silence and your supporters are now furious. Was any of that your fault? No. You get $100.

Let's try another example: Bounty programs are used by companies to collect bugs and other possibly exploits so they can be fixed. "Too expensive, nobody will know if there's a bug anyway." So the app on Google Play store gets installed by 30 million users with a critical flaw... if a very specific image is opened in it, the phone bricks. All the news sites cover the bug, pushing the image to the front page. You open the app and... Your expensive phone just died. Were you at fault for that? No. You get to join the arbitration group and get an individual settlement of $12.

Think more evil. Don't stick with the "I have nothing to lose" because you almost always have something to lose. The fact these terms were even thought of and written means you do have a financial investment in the platform.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago

During signup, they make it sound like it's a federated service. It is not. Dumped it when it was explained to me.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Mastodon has around 1 million active users³ Bluesky has around 3.5 million active users²

Bluesky doesn't have a decent way to see active user count, but it is likely higher than 3 million

Mastodon retains 10%, Bluesky retains 10% also, but I can't confirm it

Edit: Using unique likes, it shows about 2 million active users on each day¹

Source:

Bsky Analytics¹ • Bsky Stats² • Mastodon Analytics³

[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

What annoys me is that people are buying the idea that BlueSky is federated.

Not only is it not federated, the very architecture they designed means that it's probably not federateable, at least not by normal users.

The way they designed it, a relay is required to collect and forward every single BlueSky post. That means, as the service grows, it becomes more and more impossible for anybody but a company to run a relay. Someone did some calculations back in November when it was a significantly smaller network, and they calculated that at a minimum it costs a few hundred dollars, possibly as much as 1000 bucks a month just to handle the disk storage needs for a relay on a leased server. The more the network grows, the more those costs skyrocket.

What good does it do to have a network that theoretically can be federated, but practically costs so much to run a single node that nobody except a for-profit company can manage it?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

Sounds like the protocol equivalent of regulatory capture.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm not familiar with Blue sky, do they advertise as federated or how exactly do they claim to differ from a regular platform like original Twitter?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture

And reading an article from TechCrunch,

"The social network has a Twitter-like user interface with algorithmic choice, a federated design and community-specific moderation."

"Is Bluesky decentralized? Yes. Bluesky’s team is developing the decentralized AT Protocol, which Bluesky was built atop."

"However, the launch of federation will make it work more similarly to Mastodon in that users can pick and choose which servers to join and move their accounts around at will."


So it definitely is pitching that is it decentralized and federated. Maybe the argument is that it "will be", but at the moment it is not and at the moment it does not look like it will be an actual possibility.

Now people leaving Twitter is great, don't get me wrong, but it's possibly just kicking the can down the road. In a few years we'll likely have articles complaining about missing "Old Bluesky" and how "new Bluesky" has the exact same problems that "Old Twitter" had.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Nice. Glad to see people leaving xitter en mass.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

I feel like we're going to have a similar issue a couple of years or decades down the line with Bluesky. People would be better off on the Fediverse instead.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago

No, this time will be different, I swear!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago

And that's fine. What the exodus to Bluesky is doing is making it easier for people to stomach switching to similar platforms, so if Bluesky also went to shit, the inertia is much lower for people to abandon it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

People are atleast getting used to the @username@instance thing through bluesky... That would make mass exodus to fediverse in future easier (if that ever happens)

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Another corporate social media platform, what could go wrong?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I can't wait for them to bring in ex CIA/IDF types to "clamp down on disinformation".

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 weeks ago

Love an app that defaults me to people I actually follow and doesn't bombard me with endless reams of ads or engagement bait.

We'll see how long that lasts. But for now, its a blast from the past to be on a social media app I don't hate.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Whenever I see how they keep getting brought up, I'm always reminded of that Dilbert ep about how people just fall for blue logos that are easy on the eyes. They don't even have to know what it is... just the fact that the stupid logo is blue is enough. lol

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

To anyone bemoaning BlueSky's lack of federation, check out Free Our Feeds.

It's a campaign to create a public interest foundation independent from the Bluesky team (although the Bluesky team has said they support them) that will build independent infrastructure, like a secondary "relay" as an alternative to Bluesky's that can still communicate across the same protocol (The "AT Protocol") while also doing developer grants for the development of further social applications built on open protocols like the AT Protocol or ActivityPub.

They have the support of an existing 501c(3), and their open letter has been signed by people you might find interesting, such as Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

I feel like the reason the reason why it's taking off so much is because it's not federated.

It's like people hear the term federation and they get afraid. I know it's not that simple but still.

In other words, people don't know what they actually need.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

another trash platform its just matter of a time, use mastodon and fediverse to don't migrate again in few years

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Mastodon and the fediverse are nerd shit with massive usability issues. Even I gave up on Mastodon and I would consider myself far more willing to put up with shit than the average user will ever be. The mass will - never - migrate to the fediverse and in many ways, especially looking at moderation issues, that is probably a good thing.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

And how many users does Mastodon have?

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 weeks ago

Sorry to hear that, but at least some of them are not on Xitter.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Is this 30 million accounts created? Active user numbers would be a lot more meaningful.

As an illustration, if you have a platform that’s gaining 100,000 users each month and losing 100,000 other users each month, it’s basically going nowhere. But it will eventually reach this “30 million users” milestone too if all it means is account creations.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

As a former mastodon believer, Bluesky is so much better. I'm sorry but the kind of content I wanted on mastodon was never there. Bluesky feels good. Things change, for sure. For now though? This is the best we have for a replacement for Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I tried to figure out Mastodon a few months ago. I'm with you.

Someone asked me to follow them on Mastodon. I couldn't find them in the app. He sent me the direct link and it opened up a browser on my phone, refusing to recognize the app.

I finally added them directly from a browser by by remembering which server I was in, log into that, visiting their link again, adding them from my logged in server, and then it finally appeared in the app.

And if I'm dealing with thet level of monkeying around, how many others are? How the hell are we supposed to contribute and add content and find social circles when we're fighting with the UI?

Lemmy seems to have figured out how to not make a sucky experience with multiple servers.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

why are people frothing over Bluesky? this is just Twitter but owned by a different oligarch

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I never trust meta statistics anymore because you know they're filling out their "numbers" with bots to try and keep their stock prices up.

In terms of real users I bet bluesky has already surpassed them.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

6 more months before it monetizes...

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I never had a twitter account, not because of political beliefs but because the core of that social network is bullshit and the internet should be better than that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It's literally just Shower Thoughts: The Website.

I really don't understand the appeal.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It is a decent format for businesses, organizations, musicians/comedians/touring acts etc. to announce events and goings on to the general public. For discourse, it's complete garbagepuke.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (10 children)

Bluesky is like Twitter but with about 1/10th the idiots, and no mechanism that the idiots can elevate their racist, moronic hot takes above other comments.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Try hosting your own instance and sorting through the content of 30m people for the one post you want. lol

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