this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Bluesky is spreading like wildfire in academia at least.
And much like wildfire, it's going to be a fucking disaster. I don't understand why people who are paid to be critical thinkers would jump to another platform owned by a centralised actor. It'll be the same shit all over again.
Because centralization is safe and the majority of users really don’t care about using services owned by major corps.
The fediverse is extremely uninviting if you’re a non-technical user. Not impossible, but it’s not a great experience. Centralized social media removes a lot of choices users need to make, which counterintuitively is what tends to make a better UX for the average user. It comes at the expense of the power user, but the power users aren’t the target audience most of the time.
Yeah, it's an unfortunate reality that the ecosystem just isn't very mature yet. Like technically it's got all the power to run a social media site, but all the onboarding processes and little conveniences that would make it a pleasant move aren't there.
One thing activitypub is missing right now is a built-in way to discover the network, discover instances and understand the shape of the network in terms of federation status. Right now there are outside tools you can discover and peer in from the outside, but they're clunky, break intermittently, and they're not easy to find.
Activitypub only does one half of its job right now: making posts happen. Because it is built on federation it needs to also intrinsically allow users to discover and learn about that process of federation. That's not something any other social media platform has ever had to do, so it's understandable that it was missed, but I think it's key to both differentiating itself from those other networks and becoming more legible.
With centralisation, the posts, networks, onboarding, discovery, all of it is handled by one actor, so they can do all of that however they want.
I honestly think a lot is solved with the new onboarding experience in Mastodon, even though it's controversial in the fediverse.
If the twitter exodus to Mastodon happened today I suspect the main problem, except the servers having to deal with millions of people trying to sign up all at once, would be the lack of quote posts. Which is at least on the roadmap.