@dos @bnewbold @cwebber There would not be a mass-exodus from Bluesky if they turned off reading from 3rd-party PDSes. Even if the platform became really bad.

None of the artist communities I'm a part of know what these words are or what they mean - on purpose!

And there's legitimacy to building a network that Just Works, but the community I see is not going to become suddenly amiable to learning what those words mean if something goes wrong. They'll either stay or use another centralized app

@dos @bnewbold @cwebber this is also a lesson Mastodon needs to learn, it's part of why non-technical users prefer Bluesky.

But it's an unsolved problem how to build credible exits without ignoring that really fundamental part of human nature and hoping that it just won't be an issue.

@foxyoreos @bnewbold @cwebber Yeah, I mean, if mastodon.social decides to lock their users up, people there will lose access to about 70% of the current network - that's disruptive enough to stir things up. If Bluesky does it, it will be day as usual, aside of some nerds like us getting somewhat angry for a while. You get permissionless backup of the old network, but all the people you used to follow are now closed in a silo anyway and they'll stay there until they get other reasons to leave.

@dos @bnewbold @cwebber Part of the reason why I'm critical of .social (despite breaking and eventually making a secondary account there) is that decentralizing an already centralized userbase is extremely hard. It's why it's important to get users to use diverse instances from the start.

I will be thrilled if Bluesky proves me wrong, but I don't know how you decentralize almost all of your users after the fact.

@dos @bnewbold @cwebber Bluesky could come out with a perfect decentralized tech stack with zero silos that fulfills every promise of credible exit, but I am skeptical that even they could get their users now to use it.

What could they do? Force users to self-host? Their network wouldn't survive.

But again, I don't know if that's necessarily worth arguing about because.. I don't know, it's a more fundamental complaint than figuring out what design decisions they're making about the tech.

@foxyoreos @dos @bnewbold @cwebber i'm actually happy with non tech users preferring twitter 2.

@f4grx @dos @bnewbold @cwebber I'm not sure it's that simple. I've got a lot of non-tech users that I care about: family members, friends, communities. I'm happy for them to be in whatever network works for them, I don't think it's bad that they're on Bluesky.

But I care about their outcomes as much as I care about the outcomes of Mastodon, so when I critique or ask questions about Bluesky it's not really me being against Bluesky, I want Bluesky to be as good as possible for them.

@f4grx @dos @bnewbold @cwebber I feel the same way about Mastodon, I don't have any kind of allegiance or anything to the Fediverse, I want Mastodon (and the Fediverse) to be more accessible because I want them to be on the same networks as me and because I think Mastodon's outcomes are less uncertain than Bluesky.

What I'm describing here isn't as much a value judgement as much as just an observation about how humans in general act when that encounter friction.

@f4grx @dos @bnewbold @cwebber I do think Mastodon feels cozy and I wouldn't want to lose that feeling, but what's great about Mastodon (and the Fediverse more broadly) is that growing doesn't have to mean losing that. Because Mastodon is actually decentralized it can grow horizontally with new instances rather than just getting saturated.

I want knitting instances and baseball instances and all kinds of stuff. I don't think that would hurt the network at all.

@foxyoreos @dos @bnewbold @cwebber it depends on which conditions. I dont want threads for example. But I agree, a large network of small instances is the best possible structure, and the tentacular nature means that in theory, saturation is less likely, the full system is more resilient, and different communities have space to exist separately. But it need members to accept differences from previous centralized systems, and every difference cannot be erased. An adaptation effort is needed.

@foxyoreos @dos @bnewbold @cwebber we all want different things, we cannot have everything. What matters is having options, and I think the fediverse is the best option in this regard. So, I'm not neutral, the platform matters, bluesky and the fediverse are not two sides of the same coin. I prefer the fediverse, and I expect people joining it to do like the fediversians, at least a bit. The same is expected on all other platforms.

@f4grx @dos @bnewbold @cwebber Yeah, I agree with this - it's complicated because it's a problem I don't think can be solved technologically.

It's good to reduce friction as much as it's possible, but the friction isn't going to be zero even on Bluesky. There has to be an outreach effort.

@f4grx @dos @bnewbold @cwebber I didn't think this is what you meant, at all, but I saw a furry post a while back that said essentially, "it's good that most users use Bluesky because they can deal with the trolls or mass-social media elements and we can stay here, protected from it", and I remember thinking, "wait a minute, that's a community I care about, 'lets use them as a shield' isn't the outcome I want, I want them to be protected too."

@f4grx @dos @bnewbold @cwebber In my mind it's also kind of a dismissal of the Fediverse's strengths, because while Mastodon has some awful problems with abuse that need to be addressed, some at the architectural level, I do believe the model is capable of mass-scale without enabling Twitter's most toxic elements. "We need a mass social network to absorb abuse" (again, not that you're saying that) is another way of saying that Mastodon can't fight those elements itself.

@foxyoreos @dos @bnewbold @cwebber I'm not a native english speaker and I think as I write, so sorry for imprevisions and inconsistencies.

@f4grx @dos @bnewbold @cwebber No problem <3

@foxyoreos @dos @bnewbold @cwebber of course its not simple