I had a Twitter account which I left and deleted a couple of years ago because of Musk and the people who back and fund him, and the overt fascism they directly pursue or foster, under the laughably hypocritical guise of so-called Free Speech solely for bullies and authoritarians. I set up shop so to speak (personally and not for any commerce, just topical chat) at a series of Fediverse servers, for the most part running the Mastodon software that I don't find to be particularly challenging as a user but I choose also not to set up and run my own "instance", as well as PieFed which is organized by topic & community much like Reddit. Lately many of my friends have joined the concerted effort to tank Twitter by joining BlueSky in particular which is only nominally open ("federated" with other services and their users). My Mastodon server admin touts his server thus: "All are welcome to sign up, so long as the rules are followed.
"We federate with Threads, some do not. Read our Threads FAQ.
"We use Cloudflare to block artificial intelligence (AI) bots, crawlers, and scrapers from scraping your content for training large language models (LLM) to recreate posts without your permission.
"While most Mastodon servers are limited to 500 character posts, here posts can be up to 12,000 characters because we think you have important things to write. [BlueSky's character limit is a terse 300.]
"We also relay with over 1,500 other servers, some very large. This means we share each other's posts and accounts in real time. Your posts go to those servers immediately, even if there are no follow relationships. Servers without relay relationships only share posts when there are follow relationships. Your audience is large here, and you see more posts than you would on servers that do not relay..."
I can find many friends, can make many new ones and, most importantly for me, find a lot of journalists, authors & storytellers, artists & photographers, and bona fide experts on a number of human pursuits - likeminded or not. (I don't place high value on being in an echo chamber). I'm not much of a writer so this isn't a home for me but Mastodon does feel homey and at the same time expansive, to me. BlueSky is bustling. I will avoid Threads.
I meant to mention a benefit I have found to Mastodon and related, federated services. I said I went through an initial series of servers to find the one at which I'm comfortable and energized. That is something which is trivial to do: If I sign up for an account on a new server and want that to be my home I can take my follows and followers with me if and when I cease logging in at the legacy site.
Yeah, I don’t think I’m likely ever to go there. I think people have been given an impression (possibly strategically) that it’s a requirement. There is no shortage of so-called client software that does all the work for the casual user. I think, too, that most people don’t want to look at the choices, preferring to be given a single official method of setup and interaction. I use android and web, and both are fairly straightforward. There is a single ‘official’ Mastodon client for iPhone with an android version, which does work quite well with default settings - at least with Mastodon servers. On the web, there’s a fantastic interface called phanpy.social for Mastodon, that looks a lot like the Twitter experience but is far better in terms of design. People see or feel “learning curve” and that hasn’t been the upshot of my experience. Sorry to go on (especially after saying I’m not a writer). I just wish more people gravitated toward openness rather than product-consumption.
I was sorta liking BlueSky before reading the following (privacy does matter, at least informed consent regarding usage of one's own [?] data). But also, I don't get why I can't edit my own posts to repair a typo, there. No such restrictions on any of the federated platforms I've tried, and privacy/audience controls are mostly fine-grained and transparent to use. Do these issues matter to most folks? I think they would, if we could talk about them.
“Now that the seal is broken on scraping #Bluesky posts into datasets for machine learning, people are trolling users and one-upping each other by making increasingly massive datasets of non-anonymized, full-text Bluesky posts taken directly from the social media platform’s public firehose — including one that contains almost 300 million posts...”
I made the move to Spoutible, https://spoutible.com/ , and it is great.
Thanks! I'll check this one out
I switched to Bluesky and found it to be very familiar to the original Twitter minus the massive troll presence.
I was wondering how it was so similar and then I found out it's literally just an open-source version of it
I had a Twitter account which I left and deleted a couple of years ago because of Musk and the people who back and fund him, and the overt fascism they directly pursue or foster, under the laughably hypocritical guise of so-called Free Speech solely for bullies and authoritarians. I set up shop so to speak (personally and not for any commerce, just topical chat) at a series of Fediverse servers, for the most part running the Mastodon software that I don't find to be particularly challenging as a user but I choose also not to set up and run my own "instance", as well as PieFed which is organized by topic & community much like Reddit. Lately many of my friends have joined the concerted effort to tank Twitter by joining BlueSky in particular which is only nominally open ("federated" with other services and their users). My Mastodon server admin touts his server thus: "All are welcome to sign up, so long as the rules are followed.
"We federate with Threads, some do not. Read our Threads FAQ.
"We use Cloudflare to block artificial intelligence (AI) bots, crawlers, and scrapers from scraping your content for training large language models (LLM) to recreate posts without your permission.
"While most Mastodon servers are limited to 500 character posts, here posts can be up to 12,000 characters because we think you have important things to write. [BlueSky's character limit is a terse 300.]
"We also relay with over 1,500 other servers, some very large. This means we share each other's posts and accounts in real time. Your posts go to those servers immediately, even if there are no follow relationships. Servers without relay relationships only share posts when there are follow relationships. Your audience is large here, and you see more posts than you would on servers that do not relay..."
I can find many friends, can make many new ones and, most importantly for me, find a lot of journalists, authors & storytellers, artists & photographers, and bona fide experts on a number of human pursuits - likeminded or not. (I don't place high value on being in an echo chamber). I'm not much of a writer so this isn't a home for me but Mastodon does feel homey and at the same time expansive, to me. BlueSky is bustling. I will avoid Threads.
I meant to mention a benefit I have found to Mastodon and related, federated services. I said I went through an initial series of servers to find the one at which I'm comfortable and energized. That is something which is trivial to do: If I sign up for an account on a new server and want that to be my home I can take my follows and followers with me if and when I cease logging in at the legacy site.
I had the same thought about Mastodon. Setting up a server or an instance will turn a lot of people off right off the bat
Yeah, I don’t think I’m likely ever to go there. I think people have been given an impression (possibly strategically) that it’s a requirement. There is no shortage of so-called client software that does all the work for the casual user. I think, too, that most people don’t want to look at the choices, preferring to be given a single official method of setup and interaction. I use android and web, and both are fairly straightforward. There is a single ‘official’ Mastodon client for iPhone with an android version, which does work quite well with default settings - at least with Mastodon servers. On the web, there’s a fantastic interface called phanpy.social for Mastodon, that looks a lot like the Twitter experience but is far better in terms of design. People see or feel “learning curve” and that hasn’t been the upshot of my experience. Sorry to go on (especially after saying I’m not a writer). I just wish more people gravitated toward openness rather than product-consumption.
I was sorta liking BlueSky before reading the following (privacy does matter, at least informed consent regarding usage of one's own [?] data). But also, I don't get why I can't edit my own posts to repair a typo, there. No such restrictions on any of the federated platforms I've tried, and privacy/audience controls are mostly fine-grained and transparent to use. Do these issues matter to most folks? I think they would, if we could talk about them.
“Now that the seal is broken on scraping #Bluesky posts into datasets for machine learning, people are trolling users and one-upping each other by making increasingly massive datasets of non-anonymized, full-text Bluesky posts taken directly from the social media platform’s public firehose — including one that contains almost 300 million posts...”
#privacy #bigData #xitter #yourNameHere
https://www.404media.co/bluesky-posts-machine-learning-ai-datasets-hugging-face/