I think that the clear preference people have for Bluesky over the Fediverse shows that maybe it's as decentralised as people as willing to accept.
Fedi is an amazing piece of software but so too people were/are bouncing off of it. I'm not one that shared the same frustration but it was very clearly a problem for many people.
Bluesky doesn't have that issue and has been easy for people to migrate to. At the end of the day, we can't let good be the enemy of perfect.
Bluesky has been popular for like a month. I think it would be very weird to evaluate "clear preference" for Bluesky vs. Mastodon based on the fact one is kinda trendy to post about today.
In a lot of ways Mastodon has reached normal daily productivity while Bluesky is on the peak of inflated expectations. A lot of problems Mastodon has or has dealt with are problems Bluesky hasn't meaningfully had to deal with yet.
My justification for stating that is that we're seeing people come back to Bluesky whereas people would try to create an account on a Mastodon service, their first post would be confusion and terror, and they'd leave after a few days of trying.
There are daily users of Mastodon (myself being one), it's just that the range of people is much smaller than Bluesky and Twitter due to the comparatively higher barrier of entry.
I don't know who these "people" are you are referring to, and these days the barrier to entry is quite low. I've helped people join a Mastodon instance and set up their profile and follow a few people in a matter of minutes. Whether they have any interest in continuing after that point is entirely up to them and their particular interests.
We haven't even begun to see the total possible size of ActivityPub-based social networking. The social web is in its infancy. Let's revisit this conversation in 10-20 years.
I mean I registered in 2018 and then apart from some initial experimentation mostly abandoned Mastodon until like 2021. There are people "coming back" to Mastodon all the time, and I’m sure plenty of people (myself included) signed up on Bluesky, went "meh", and then uninstalled the app because their phone didn't have enough free space for OS updates.
Anecdotes are sort of interesting but not necessarily representative. Numbers are also garbage, mostly because bots are a lot of the numbers.
Things need time, and as Bryan pointed out, the goals are pretty different. Maybe both are destined to win in their specific niches of global vs. nonglobal interaction. Maybe Bluesky kills Twitter (which is mostly global chat) and Mastodon kills Facebook (which is mostly friends chat).
Having to 'pick a server' is a huge barrier for regular folks joining Mastodon. You don't need that for Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, etc. If there were a huge well-funded and well-run default that people could optionally pick something different from, that would be another story.
Bluesky has telephone verification. That is often an disqualifier and common for tech affine people. Not that many other networks did not make the same mistake.
I am not sure if Bluesky can have long term success to be honest.
Where did you see this? I've used the platform for 1.5 years or something, + created a new bot account just yesterday, and haven't been asked for a phone number for either accounts.
Given the amount of people blindly trusting the output, I think that a case could be made that guardrails are a necessity for LLMs.
The example in the article is medical diagnostics. Could you imagine if it started hallucinating and someone went with whatever insane advice it gave? Remember Google AI suggesting glue to keep cheese on pizza?
That'd be a convincing argument if the internet wasn't brainwashing a significant portion of adults into believing weird things about the political elite, vaccines, 5G, etc.
We recently soft launched the new https://feetr.io website as well as our stock market AI, and are knocking our pan in to fix the little bugs that have been uncovered in addition to migrating more of our existing code to the new system.
Over the weekend, we trialled the AI on Reddit[0] and got 300 comments more than expected, so we're doing the above while there are a lot more eyeballs on us.
I am, however, continually surprised that SLY doesn’t have more mindshare. Similarly jonathan. I guess cl-json and SLIME are _good enough_ for most people.
Sly is a derivative of Slime. I shy away from derivatives unless I understand exactly why the derivative is better than the original. In my view, derivatives often have poor documentation: they just copy the original docs, and I can’t tell when to do things the original way versus a special derivative way.
Thus I used Debian and not Ubuntu, Vim and not Neovim, Emacs and not Spacemacs (though that’s not exactly a derivative), etc.
I do use SBCL rather than CMUCL, as I do understand why SBCL is better for me: CMUCL won’t run on my platform.
I look at the Sly page and I have no idea why I would want any of the stuff it does, so I stick with Slime.
Maybe TRY USING it and then you might understand. This mindset is the same reason people rarely try lisp because it is quite difficult to see somethings without actually using them.
Zulu-Inuoe's jzon blew everything else out of the water imho. It's a superlative example of a robust and comprehensive library to do a single job very well.
"I agree in that IH is not a Ponzi scheme however it is a really big marketing channel for a lot of people and that means that this place is not full of advice so much as it is advertisements. And I think that is some peoples main complaint. I came here with the idea that this was creators giving advice and sharing experiences but the more I'm here the less I believe that to be the case.
I could be really mean and say something like "people who can't do, teach" but I don't know that I believe that. I think it's people starting companies, hitting road blocks and then trying to monetize their solution to those road blocks. Or people who want to be their own boss but then not having a clear idea for a business, so they try to solve the problems that they're seeing here. I don't know. Could be any of the above or a million different other reasons. End result is the same. And none of them are bad, I should clarify.
I think I may come across as more negative than I actually am. I think it's fine for people to come here and try to advertise their businesses. It's a good place to get initial feedback from people who (hopefully) have experience going from 0 to 1. And it certainly helped me get off the ground with my company, and the response here gave me a massive confidence boost as this was the first place I told about it.
It's just that when you aren't a beginner any more, when you've actually started, this place becomes a bit less relevant and that's a shame."
Fedi is an amazing piece of software but so too people were/are bouncing off of it. I'm not one that shared the same frustration but it was very clearly a problem for many people.
Bluesky doesn't have that issue and has been easy for people to migrate to. At the end of the day, we can't let good be the enemy of perfect.