What a great idea, scaring companies probing bluesky. That surely won't backfire and will cement bluesky as a Xitter alternative.
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I actually enjoy Bsky as a replacement for Twitter mostly to keep on top of news (tech and otherwise, the tech often coming from the source), along with a small selection of high profile figures. So I follow those sources and venues.
It is absolutely pathetic that a small mob attacked Adobe -- primarily a super aggressive anti-AI contingent that runs around like a sad torch mob on bsky -- and I hope Adobe return to the platform. It would be nice for people like me, who chose to follow these brands, to see the news from Adobe, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc, and my choice shouldn't be limited by those people.
Its a fools errand to go on a "free" platform and complain about corporate presence. If you are not paying, then those corporate bodies are.
And you can always subscribe to Adobe's email list.
It wasn't "their customers" that brigaded. It is the clowns who have decided that Bluesky is their own. They are the ones that will keep it from hitting mainstream, and hopefully the service crushes their obnoxious activism.
I have (and I imagine most people over 25 have) used plenty of forums, wikis, and other social medias that are free as in beer, hosted by some guy with a computer in his garage, with technology from decades ago
The better ones of them asked you to pay if you wanted to be able to post video/large images. In most of those spaces, corporate was nowhere to be seen. Sometimes they used banner ads, but often, nothing at all but a single person's internet bill was the entire cost of the site. Such places still exist, and are good.
The internet is getting worse by the day. It's been getting worse for so long, that people are starting to wax lyrical about how it can't possibly work any other way, this is just the natural state of things.
Of course, if you absolutely must mindlessly go to the dopamine trough and get your fix of algorithmic profit engagement, then yes, you will end up in places that relentlessly seek profit via one form of another. But if you filter even a little bit for quality, you'll end up somewhere else.
Post on an open forum, get open forum results.
They could host a web page. That's a thing still. What's that? They want an audience? A megaphone into someone else's auditorium?
There's a cost to that.
Was it worth it? Was it really free? Or would we have done it knowing we would all eventually pay a terrible price?
All a business cares about is maximum reach, so they will ignore the small sites in favour of the biggest aggregator for the lowest cost.
If somebody on a smaller site behaved in the disingenuous and spammy way brands do on social, they'd be banned. Bluesky is not doing that, so this should be an opportunity to genuinely engage with the audience instead of copy/pasting the cynical tactics they apply everywhere else.
Adobe could have sincerely communicated while blocking any abusive stuff or if they couldn't be arsed, turned off comments. They have PR people to handle this stuff, or at least they did until it was probably left up to some underpain intern who doesn't give a shit.
But that's because they've chosen something else for their personal use and only make Adobe part of their workflow when required to by their workplace.
The point I was raising here specifically was the people who are feigning outrage to Adobe's benign Bluesky post are unlikely to be Adobe customers, and unlikely even creative professionals at all.
Outrage and hate is a sport to these people.
It's delusional.
The world is not better when everyone is exactly the same, it's better when everyone has a place they feel welcome. For some people they enjoy reddit or discord, others don't. There's nothing wrong with someone preferring something made out of passion, rather than something made to make more money.
Yes, the problem is that the overwhelming majority of people using sites like Reddit or Discord are not choosing it. They are there because it has become their only alternative.
And it has become their only alternative because all these hobbyist forums can only exist when they are serving some tiny, exclusive priviledge few. If they grow too much, they either will crumble or will find themselves becoming a "professional" service with people on payroll and revenue targets.
I'm not sure I agree with this, but it does fit the pattern. Auto forums are an example of this working. But I wouldn't call that a privileged few, would you?
I'm not crying crocodile tears for Adobe. They shouldn't have deleted their post, and ultimately they just shrugged and decided that bsky didn't matter yet and just abandoned it for now.
Which serves no one, but it's what you get when a small number of twats who think they're the bully squad ruin a platform.
Corporations and brands aren't people.