NotesTildes is a non-profit community site with no advertising or investors. It respects its users and their privacy, and prioritizes high-quality content and discussions.FeedUnfurl
NotesWhat is a social object? Learn about social objects from the Corporate Culture Consultants at Gapingvoid, a top Change Management Company!FeedUnfurl
NotesIn a world of growing social isolation where just over one in six Australians experienced loneliness in 2022, repair cafes are proving popular as a meeting spot and the network is growing.Unfurl
NotesTimeline algorithms should be useful for people, not for companies. Their quality should not be evaluated in terms of how much more time people spend on a platform, but rather in terms of how well they serve their usersā purposesFeedUnfurl
NotesHooray to Bluesky for releasing its new RSS feeds! Now anyone can now obtain an RSS feed for any Bluesky user. We've taken them for a test drive, and here's what you should know.FeedUnfurl
NotesMetaās size makes it de facto unkillable, and Iām sure itāll exist in some form for centuries. But itās my hope that it will exist in the sense that IBM exists today. Theoretically you know itās out there, but itās very hard to grasp the point of it and it feels thoroughly irrelevant. Nobody remembers who started it or why.FeedUnfurl
NotesI think Bluesky is doing about as good a job as a group of people can do with the design they have and are trying to preserve. But I don't think the global context-collapse firehose works, and I'm not sure it's what users want it either, and if they do, they really seem to want both strong central control to meet their needs but also to not have strong central control be a thing that exists when it doesn't.FeedUnfurl
NotesMy guiding principle for using BlueSky (or any platform or SaaS product for that matter) is to assume that it will go away in three years. Itāll either go bankrupt, get bought, or change its strategy to enshittify the product. You can make an argument that BlueSky has some technical protections against this (though Cory Doctorow is still skeptical about how enshittification may play out with BlueSky) but I think the heuristic above is still the right one to follow.Unfurl
NotesThe kingdom gets absorbed by another neighboring King that has no idea why people where there in the first place and starts changing the laws and everyone leaves. Example: Tumblr
There are countless tales of this happening. EVERY SINGLE EXTERNAL KINGDOM will do this to you. No matter how ācoolā or āhipā they are right now. They will let you down.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesI will never forgive these people for what theyāve done to the computer, and the more I learn about both their intentions and actions the more certain I am that they are unrepentant and that their greed will never be sated. I have watched them take the things that made me human ā social networking, digital communities, apps, and the other connecting fabric of our digital lives ā and turned them into devices of torture, profitable mechanisms of abuse, and find it disgusting how many reporters seem to believe it's their responsibility to thank them and explain why it's good this is happening to their readers. FeedUnfurl
NotesMetta Spencer, a sociologist whose online broadcasts regularly feature world leaders in the fields of peace, climate change, pandemics, famine and, ironically, cyber risks said she spent weeks trying to convince YouTube Canada that the porn clips were the result of a hacking attack, without success.
NotesThe social internet should be a forestānot The Dark Forest, but something much more like a real one: Interconnected from the densely mycelial underground to light-filtering overstory but also offering infinite niches and multi-scale zones of sheltered exchange and play. Deeply human in the way that real forests are the result of human and other-than-human collaboration running back into unrecorded time. Balanced, neither extracting too much from its component organisms nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all. (Predation is inevitable in any system, but a working ecosystem starves out the ones who overfeed and provides cover for growth and for the long, continuous experiment of evolutionary change.)FeedUnfurl
NotesSo the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one thatās inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data. Van Strienās original act clearly showed the difference in culture between AI and open social web communities: on the former itās commonplace to grab data if it can be read publicly (or even sometimes if itās not), regardless of licensing or author consent, while on open social networks consent and authorsā rights are central community norms.FeedUnfurl
NotesSo what's it like to set up your own GotoSocial server? Well, I can walk you thru what I used for my setup. Yours might be different; that's OK! I made these up-front choices to simplify the operational overhead because I didn't want this to be a hassle and I don't need the extra engineering that comes from trying for nine nines of uptime:
NotesElon Musk confirmed that posts containing links in their main text are deprioritized on X in a revelation that renews criticism that the platform is restricting the visibility of and access to external sources of information.EmbedUnfurl
NotesCrucially, though, what defines a member of the posting middle class is their love of the game. They donāt post because theyāre trying to sell a product, or solely to advance their career. They donāt post to advertise themselves or their company. They post because they must. Thereās something fundamentally wrong with them and the worms in their brain makes them spend entire days posting away on the computer.FeedUnfurl
NotesIn a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible. He explained that he had chosen the name ironically, because he had once discussed the effect with physicist Murray Gell-Mann, "and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have."FeedUnfurl
NotesOur systems do not need to be high-maintenance, intensive on resources and energy needs. They donāt have to answer every request with availability and latency that measures up to however many nines or zeroes are the current industry standard. They have to attend to the needs of those who are using them, which can be much less demanding. We can run both infrastructure and software at more human scales and learn other ways of growing or shrinking, and we can also scale to high performance and availability too. This is what the concept of a network enables after all, but it is often used to centralize and create dependency instead.FeedUnfurl
NotesFrom hosting email and simple HTML websites in my youth to the current attempts at decentralized Twitter- or YouTube-like platforms, the tech community keeps waiting for everyday people to take the baton of self-hosting. They never willābecause the effort and cost of maintaining self-hosted services far exceeds the skill and interest of the audience. The primary āfeatureā of self-hosting is, for most, a fatal flaw: itās a chore. Itās akin to being āfreeā to change the oil in your carāitās an option, but not a welcome one for most.FeedUnfurl
NotesBluesky is built by good people who care, and it is providing something that people desperately want and need. If you are looking for a Twitter replacement, you can find it in Bluesky today.
However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.
However, "credible exit" is a reasonable term to describe what Bluesky is aiming for. It is Bluesky's term, and I think Bluesky should embrace that term fully in all contexts and work that they can.FeedUnfurl
NotesI built Sill because I value the people in my social network, and I believe I can learn the most about the world by reading what they read and hearing what they have to say. Sill listens to them at scale and helps me understand the conversation. In the month or so Iāve been using it myself, Sill has completely changed my relationship to my social network.Unfurl
NotesIn practice, this means that users can see posts by people they follow on the app, the standard view Bluesky defaults to. But they can equally opt to see whatās popular with friends, an algorithmically-dictated selection of posts that your peers enjoy. There are feeds specifically for scientists, curated by those working in the field, or ones to promote Black voices, which are often thinned out by algorithmic filtering. One feed even specifically promotes āquiet postersā ā users who post infrequently, and whose views would otherwise be drowned out by those who share every opinion with their followers.FeedUnfurl
NotesBetween 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.
Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.Unfurl
NotesI still hope that social media itself will fade away. In the meantime, though, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, noshing on news, performing identities, picking fights, and accruing cultural capital or longing to do so. These unhealthy habits will be hard to shake. And so we canāt help but try to keep them going, for however long we can.FeedUnfurl
NotesBut I do know that the energy on Bluesky is exciting, that the app and website are very usable, and that, as a journalist, I appreciate a platform that does not and says it will not punish links in any algorithm and which mostly operates in reverse chronological order. I think that the āStarter Packsā that let you follow tons of people at once according to your interests have made the onboarding process really easy. Whatās happening on Bluesky right now feels organic and it feels real in a way no other Twitter replacement has felt so far, and it feels better than X.com has been ever since Elon Musk took over. If the masses are going to move off Twitter, we can do much better than Threads. And we could do much worse than Bluesky. FeedUnfurl
NotesAll this to say: the Bluesky team seems like theyāre earnestly working toward a decentralized platform, but they have a lot of work ahead of them. Years of effort, in my estimation. In the meantime, Bluesky is slightly more decentralized than, say, Facebook ā but not by much. Yes, you can host your own data. Yes, you can scrape all of the content on the network. But you canāt do anything with it unless youāre attached to the Bluesky service. I believe this will change with time, but it will be prohibitively expensive and weāre not there yet.FeedUnfurl
NotesApple uses the āIMG_XXXXā naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, where XXXX is a unique sequence number. The first image you take is named āIMG_0001ā, the second is āIMG_0002ā and so on. During the Send to YouTube era of 2009 and 2012, the title of oneās YouTube video was defaulted to this naming convention. Unwitting content creators would then upload their videos on a public site with a barely-searchable name. To this day, there are millions of these videos.FeedUnfurl
NotesI don't know why Bluesky hasn't added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they've created so far. Frankly, it doesn't matter. So long as Bluesky can be a trap, I won't let myself be tempted. My rule ā I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs ā is my Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesI want things to be sociable, to be friendly, to be fun. I don't mean to try to avoid conflict entirely, which is neither possible nor truly desirable. But to envision a sociable web is to envision a place where interactions that make your world richer are easy to realize, and those that make your life worse easy to curtail. I want to be able to chat in public without the world overhearing, to meet new people and be able to block creeps, and to have conversations without being drowned in a sea of bad faith. FeedUnfurl
NotesMany users prefer to use an RSS feed reader to stay up to date with the content on the websites they visit. But if you've enabled Cloudflare on your website, you're likely blocking these RSS users from accessing your website content without realizing it.FeedUnfurl
NotesRSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThe company says it will restrict any image, video, or text post that āidentifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others,ā which is an incredibly wide swath of content. If you speak about these things on Meta, your reach will be limited and your account will be surfaced to fewer people.FeedUnfurl
NotesThe reason I think these problems are worth solving is because one of most valuable gifts of the fediverse as it currently exists is the ability to experience the fediverse from within a home server that is good for youāthat cares about your experience, that moderates (locally and remotely) in ways that meet your needs and protect you from the things you actually want protection from, that is built to last.FeedUnfurl
NotesOn Saturday 8 July 2023, user accounts started disappearing from the Vivaldi Social Mastodon instance. What was going on, how did this happen, and what were the consequences?FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesRelay List is a site that indexes and tracks various ActivityPub relays that have been shared with the public or with the creator. Each relay is checked every 30 minutes, updating the number of participating servers, the registration status, and if the relay is online. This information is useful for server administrators when considering adding a relay to their instance.Unfurl
NotesWe need an alternative to Twitter. I donāt know what that looks like, but I have a feeling itāll involve tight control of micro-communities where users have the ability to ban people for bad behavior. Whatever it is, I hope it surfaces soon and gets enough traction to pull my friends (and some third-party app developers) away from Twitter for good.Unfurl
NotesLet's create a page where a user can update their avatar with as little friction as possible: they just drop an image anywhere on the page and it's done. FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesIt's for all these reasons that I hope Twitter genuinely ceases to be. I want a product that enables me to build and participate in communities, that encourages discussions and expressing meaningful ideas. Not one that systemically encourages harassment, abuse, and shouting as loud as you can, and which on its best day, is a glorified link aggregator. And not a very good one.FeedUnfurl
Tildes
Social Objects: What is a Social Object? - GapingVoid
FOSDEM 2025 - Build your own timeline algorithm
Bridges & scruples
Bluesky has launched RSS feeds - Open RSS
Dan McKinley :: On Misery
Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
Lens - Check your meta tags, icons, and rss feeds
You don't actually have to stay on Twitter. - Laura Olin
How Iām trying to use BlueSky without getting burned again - Welcome
Donāt build your castle in other peopleās kingdoms ā How To Market A Game
Webmentions / ArtLung Lab
Never Forgive Them
against the dark forest
Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web
"Never Build Your House On Someone Else's Land" - ErosBlog
Elon Musk Admits X is Throttling Link Out from the Platform
down in the posting mines / poking at ghosts
Michael Crichton - Wikipedia
On self-hosting being a patch ~ jutty.dev
Introducing Sill | Tyler Fisher
Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media | New Scientist
IMG_0001
Is Bluesky the New Twitter? - The Atlantic
The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet
Maybe Bluesky has āwonā | anderegg.ca
IMG_0416 - ben-mini
Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) ā Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
House of Nettles ā¢ A Sociable Web
Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users - Open RSS
Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) ā Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Democracy dies on Instagram - by Taylor Lorenz - User Mag
how to buy shoes in the fediverse
What happened to Vivaldi Social? | Thomas Pikeās other blog
Evolving Mastodonās Trust & Safety Features ā¢ Renaud Chaput
Relay List - Connecting the Fediverse
The best of the indie web | ~mathowie