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Maybe Bluesky has "won"

(anderegg.ca)
461 points GavinAnderegg | 7 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 1.324s | source | bottom
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llm_nerd ◴[15 Nov 24 20:33 UTC] 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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jtbayly ◴[15 Nov 24 20:51 UTC] No.42150873[source]▶
One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above?

I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

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palata ◴[15 Nov 24 20:57 UTC] No.42150938[source]▶
> I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?

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_aavaa_ ◴[15 Nov 24 21:09 UTC] No.42151091[source]▶
Interactivity from the part of the reader
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johnnyanmac ◴[16 Nov 24 01:29 UTC] No.42153349[source]▶
I know RSS is basically old tech by now, but I'm a bit surprised how many seem to misunderstand how this works.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's goal is not to be "the" hub. It is a middleman that takes you to other websites that implement it. Be it twitter (on shakey ground), Your own website, or a game server (in theory). Anything that implements it and sends out messages can be caught by any number of clients made on top of RSS.

Asking for interactivity from an RSS Feed is like asking for interactivity from an email. The goal is to point you towards other content that may or may not be interactable. The RSS is simply there to consolidate all your feeds into one view.

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_aavaa_ ◴[16 Nov 24 18:04 UTC] No.42157857[source]▶
I'm not misunderstanding anything. The original discussion was about why wouldn't RSS itself be a good backbone for replacing current types of social media. And my answer is because it's not interactive.

Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed. And they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.

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1. johnnyanmac ◴[16 Nov 24 19:13 UTC] No.42158468[source]▶
>And my answer is because it's not interactive.

And I explained why that response is a bit nonsensical. Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.

>they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.

1. Thars overly presumptuous. Social media didn't give them a real choice.

2. You don't need an account for every blog. Not even for interacting. I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing. If you really want to like stuff sure. But that's not anything different from today.

>Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed.

Sure, Bluesky shows they don't have to but the service can still be successful. As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.

How's thst different from using something like Feedly? It's juet a different app view.

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2. _aavaa_ ◴[17 Nov 24 16:06 UTC] No.42164885[source]▶
> Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.

It does take it away. The current status quo has (1) a feed of content and (2) two-way interaction between poster and commenter in the same place. Switching to just RSS inherently takes away (2)

> Social media didn't give them a real choice.

Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.

> I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing.

People didn't but I doubt most people running blogs want to deal with anonymous comments. You already get so much spam and unhinged content when you require a signup.

> As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.

Part of it sure, but it also involved other layers to compensate for the parts that are lacking in RSS that users have come to expect.

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3. palata ◴[17 Nov 24 18:27 UTC] No.42165866[source]▶
> Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.

Can we say that people choose to get addicted to addictive stuff?

4. johnnyanmac ◴[17 Nov 24 19:44 UTC] No.42166516[source]▶
How is one extra click taking away Twitter? This is like saying older apps (taken down because centralized services didn't like this) took away interactivity because they werre managing multiple feeds for you. That's all RSS is. Did Reddit/HN or any other link aggregator take away news sites? That's all RSS is.

And using other non RSS parts is fine again, RSS isn't a social media. It's a way to help aggregate content. You keep claiming to know how RSS works but demonstrate that you feel it's some competitor instead of a commodity.

And yes, the powers that be "won" becsuse they were at war with the idea of people not having all their time dedicated to their feed. Users "chose". to be manipulated becsuse their choices were taken down, weakened, or taken hostage. Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.

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5. _aavaa_ ◴[17 Nov 24 20:01 UTC] No.42166668{3}[source]▶
> Did Reddit/HN or any other link aggregator take away news sites? That's all RSS is.

Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them. Further, it's a known problem for both of those sites that people will not read the article and instead riff of the title. I'd wager the final 50% of every article could be removed and it wouldn't significantly change the comment sections here.

> Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.

Yes they did, they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour. The alternatives just aren't good enough.

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6. johnnyanmac ◴[17 Nov 24 20:09 UTC] No.42166743{4}[source]▶
>Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them.

Yes. And you can use RSS feed to do the same thing, either liking to a reddit comment section or actually reading the article and not bothering. Same structure except you're not limited to Reddit's servers.

>they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour

They lost choice and decided using the worst choice was better than moving off of Reddit. I guess if enshiftification is "choice", They did indeed choose. I chose to walk away.

And it's why I hate centralizafion. Because it reduces you down to two choices per owner. Their way or the highway. If you instead managed an RSS feed of a dozen websites and Reddit removed its API, your daily feed may be smaller but your browsing habits would not change. I can still interact with the other 11 sites as much as I want and not need extra time trying to figure out what's out there.

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7. _aavaa_ ◴[18 Nov 24 12:24 UTC] No.42171763{5}[source]▶
I’m not disagreeing with you about the issues of centralization. I too walked away from Reddit and paid that cost.

My point is that (a) many people have not despite the cess pit Reddit and other sites have become, and (b) RSS is inherently incapable of replacing the experience because it’s a pull only mechanism.

Mastadon based itself on ActivityPub, not RSS.

We’ll see if the long term forces that consolidated and entities Twitter and it’s ilk will do the same to Mastadon instances. Cause I’m still not convinced that the general public is willing to or ready to run their own servers