Microblogging Blues

[grayestofghosts]

I am not sure if anyone is aware of the drama ongoing at BlueSky, but uh... essentially, Jay has been dismissive and making fun of users who do not want Jesse Singal on the platform, and moderation has gone on a spree of banning people who criticize her, including permabanning original long-time users. So naturally people are talking about alternatives.

And it's very disconcerting because the lifecycle of these sites are getting shorter and shorter, and people are pointing out how BlueSky is meant to be a protocol that can be used by other servers (? I am still not quite sure how this works and how it's different from Mastodon in that respect, but we will see) but lots of people are talking about jumping ship and going to Tumblr or even DreamWidth and the thing is these people seem to want microblogging and yet microblogging platforms continue to prove themselves to be terrible, and it's like... maybe there's a reason why microblogging platforms, specifically, tend to be terrible.

There was at least one user recommending microblogging from Dreamwidth (I guess several short posts per day on DW?) which I guess is possible but I'm not sure how that wouldn't drive people nuts. I do follow one person who does this, which I appreciate, but if everyone on my feed posted that way I think it would become unusable. I haven't been using my bearblog but I'm wondering how much it could be used for microblogging... as in, I am wondering if it would be worth it to test the character limits of the titles, and maybe it could be done. It definitely wouldn't be the same as BlueSky or even Dreamwidth at all but it could possibly be something?

I don't know, microblogging has created a unique niche in the ecosystem that I'm not sure can be replaced, and it's easy to question whether it should be replaced and even if I hate it I'm really not sure it should be.

Comments

[axolotls]

Re: Bluesky vs Mastodon (or rather, ATprotocol vs ActivityPub), the main difference is that the former splits the infrastructure up into several pieces that can be mixed and matched, while the latter just works with single servers talking to each other + clients for users to view stuff through. ATproto also has the benefit of decentralised user IDs, so actual migration to another server that hosts a user's data (in this case known as a PDS) without any disruption is possible. This recent post goes into it a bit more if you're curious.

[grayestofghosts]

I'm going to have to do some reading on it in case everything goes kaput again, but honestly though given that people thought Mastodon was 'too complicated' (rather than servers being able to run things like petty fiefdoms and disappear on a moment's notice like back in forum times might actually be bad) my hopes are not especially high. I don't really want to call it "dumbing down" because computers are horrible and having to know how they work is a curse but keeping the barrier of entry low enough that people who don't make Good At Computer a full-time job can be adequately connected and have broad reach while not having to deal with horrible providers might just not be possible in the current environment given profit motive etc.

[axolotls]

Maybe, yeah. From what I gather a lot of the backend stuff (which bits of the infrastructure are used and how) wouldn't be visible to end users at least, so all they'd have to care about would be where their data is hosted (the PDS), and which client apps they use (e.g. Bluesky through the official website, etc.). So hopefully things can be made user-friendly enough that folks just don't have to think about it much, not more than email (which server and address you're using, and which client (Gmail, Thunderbird, Outlook) you use to access it).