kouhai

cat kouhai*.txt

@kouhai

✨ magical girls ✨

the lightly-fictionalized account of a club of magical girl kouhais… and the sparkling senpais they chase

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activitypub? mastodon? what?
social.treehouse.systems/@kouhai
kouhai
@kouhai
mary
@mary
nex3
@nex3

since Mastodon already exists, one can assume the users who make Bluesky a primary posting location will specifically select for people who are some combination of:

  • ambivalent about platform mismanagement
  • terrible at judging platform mismanagement
  • particularly susceptible to advertising campaigns

all of which seem like they will contribute to a particularly awful user culture in addition to the flaws in the platform and its government

kouhai
@kouhai

as an active fork developer and instance mod…

I have some amount of empathy for people who don't want to deal with the "your instance admin said something vaguely questionable and now some-large-instance (and others) are defederating you, and now you can't talk with your friends". 1

I don't think that the solution is bluesky though. just look at the terms of service! it is literally just another VC-funded social media startup, that absolutely hates the mere concepts of user control, user consent, and user privacy.

regardless, Mastodon, and its forks2, are a pain to maintain and operate. community's hard, and the software's unfortunately very complicated. there's no good answer, other than "idk, someone needs to put in time"

  1. this happened this week! while I cannot provide judgement, nor do I care enough to dig up details so that I can judge, I will say that I think that communication's a better solution than defederation. if you can delay, such that you can make the right decision for all of the users affected, I think that you should.3

  2. side note: forks are inherently incompatible with the letter of the Mastodon™ trademark use policy. the existence of such a policy's silly, but I don't have objections against its existence, just the implementation.

  3. it's always ethical to punt a nazi off of your server.

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in reply to @nex3's post:

bcj
@bcj

literally the only thing i will say in bluesky's favour is that its undeserved clout and lack of moderation has resulted in seeing screenshots of people I hate getting clowned on

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lydia
@lydia

this is extremely ungenerous and ignores a lot of the motivations, you're bordering on constructing a strawman.

at bare minimum one of the things that bounced me off mastodon was the lack of a supported first party mobile app when I first got on. then finding someone who isn't on your local genuinely sucked. some of these things may have been fixed since but I'm tech savvy and I really did try and these points of friction just stopped me from going back...

but honestly I think people are going because famous people are going. whatever your feelings are on that as a motivator aside, that's literally the thing that makes like half of the cool shit that happened on twitter when it wasn't like peak neo-nazi days work. hell this is a backing premise of SwiftOnSecurity's account; you post mostly thoughtfully and knowledgeably about a thing, people who are big in your domain will notice, follow, and then interesting conversations happen as a result and you don't have to research every claim people in your mentions make because the fucking former director of JPL is in the thread

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daboross
@daboross

I think there's another big cohort you're potentially missing: people who literally just want twitter.

as much as mastodon is twitter, the decentralization makes some things significantly different. and as much as bluesky is supporting decentralization, everyone who's joining it right now is treating it as a single platform, from what I can tell. and the people I see leaving would never have left for mastodon because of the decentralization.

i mean, fair enough that their moderation story is really, really lacking, but even among people who know it's going to be badly managed, i think you've missed that there's a significant group of people who know that, and also value a unified, twitter-like platform more than they value that platform's management.

I guess you could say that falls under "ambivalent about platform mismanagement", but I think that saying it that way completely discounts the other reasons that one might want to use it. platform management is not the only variable here.

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