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461 points GavinAnderegg | 9 comments | | HN request time: 0.255s | source | bottom
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llm_nerd ◴[] No.42150659[source]
Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.

A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.

Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

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1. kccqzy ◴[] No.42151778[source]
Mastodon is not a bloated sloppy mess. Have you even used it? I use it every day and it's enjoyable. It felt like 2010s Twitter. It both makes me feel good and is also educational (because I have chosen to follow accounts that provide educational value, not just empty rhetoric).
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2. TylerE ◴[] No.42151877[source]
Yes. And it was a bloated sloppy mess I ran from screaming. It SUCKED, and STILL sucks.
3. fragmede ◴[] No.42151910[source]
Have you ever tried to stand one up?
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4. kccqzy ◴[] No.42153484[source]
Why would I need to? That's like saying before you can blog you must first write a static site generator.
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5. fragmede ◴[] No.42153972{3}[source]
The bloated sloppy mess is on the backend so if you've not set one up it means you haven't looked in the places a bloated sloppy mess would be in.

For consumers that just want to write posts and get comments, there are many platforms out there. http://threads.net is an example of one.

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6. kccqzy ◴[] No.42158156{4}[source]
Why would I need to know that? Do you know that the Threads backend isn't also a bloated sloppy mess?

Again as I have already said, it's like requiring a blogger to write an elegant static site generator. Who cares that the Wordpress backend is messy and bloated? Only on HN will you find this fetish about an elegant backend when you are merely a user.

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7. fragmede ◴[] No.42169001{5}[source]
because it makes you unqualified to say that it's not a bloated sloppy mess. Because it is.

If the blogger just wants to write a blog and doesn't care about anything else, they can just use threads, or keep on using twitter, for that matter. But for some reason, this hypothetical blogger has decided that they don't want to use Twitter. They don't have to write their own static site generator, but in moving off Twitter, they're going to be exposed to some of the details behind the scene. If they're not an anti-intellectual, this hypothetical blogger can do some light reading to get up to speed.

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8. kccqzy ◴[] No.42183866{6}[source]
You seem to think that the core of a microblogging platform is its software. Absolutely no. It's the community.
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9. fragmede ◴[] No.42184125{7}[source]
You seem to disagree with the statement "mastodon is a bloated sloppy mess" as if it describes the community, not the software.