MudMan

Kinda? It’s just that once you start putting random toppings in there it crosses a conceptual line. If you thought pineapple on pizza was controversial, you should have seen that menu.

I hadn’t considered this possibility and I hate that I am now considering this possibility.

At one point I lived near a place that served pizzas with schnitzels for a crust.

Also would twist them around and do pizza cone type things.

It was less bad than you’d think, unfortunately.

Yeah, that’s what the word “proxy” means up there. I don’t need to get any of this data from Twitter directly to know which direction the number is going and where it is relative to previous years. It’s not moving the way you think it’s moving. And the numbers work with any number of bots because the size differences are so big that even going with the larger estimates where 3/4 of all of the damn thing is all bots it’s still several times larger than either BS or Masto, or even both put together.

Look, it’s okay to live in a vibes-driven world, I suppose. I can’t force you out of it. But maaaan, does it get in the way of having a normal conversation with someone else about a real thing that happens in the real world where we both need to agree on some semblance of reality.

I’m not even that angry that you are in denial about it, weirdly, but it’s mildly alarming and it makes this entire conversation retroactively feel like a massive waste of time.

I mean… yeah, I do have ways to verify them. For one thing I can get more than one source, which I did. For another this is not data pulled out of thin air, there are multiple proxies for web traffic. It’s not like we’ve built a entire worldwide economy of advertising and attention without any tools to get at least some notion of how may people are putting that attention where.

Is the Twitter brand damaged? Certainly. I wouldn’t touch it with a very long stick, myself.

So is Meta and Google and Apple. And yet, for as much as we are all aware that Meta actively participated in genocide and spied most of the planet illegally you know how their social media performs? Facebook is up to 3 billion users, Whatsapp is the default form of communications of big chunks of the planet, their social brands dominate social networking worldwide.

So hey, if you have some semblance of a timeline for when this social damage does anything practical I would appreciate a hint, because from down here in the real world it’s not looking particularly likely any time soon.

See, you don’t get to forecast the downfall of your political rivals on a limitless timeline. I am in agreement that Elon Musk will die sometime before the sun expands and engulfs the inner planets of the solar system, but that’s not much of a realistic prediction of Twitter’s performance in practical terms.

How is it a dreamscape? I don’t like it. I don’t want it to be that way. It’s just… what reality seems to be based on every piece of information we can get from it. Time is moving things in the opposite direction you’re hoping for.

That’s… entirely delusional. Every stat I can find shows Twitter running pretty much flat since the whole mess started. It’s an order of magnitude larger than Bluesky (which itself seems to be down 15-25% this year) and two orders of magnitude larger than Masto, which is also flat YoY.

There is zero indication that Twitter is declining further and certainly if it is at all those users aren’t going to Fedi, BS or any other federated networks. Even if you believe that most of it is bots now it’s still bigger even discounting that, by most estimations, and it’s not shedding either users or bots towards decentralized networks.

At some point wishful thinking stops being optimism, you know?

I mean, it’s not, though. Things either happen or they don’t. You made a prediction that does not match reality.

Hah. That is a shockingly… optimistic? take in a world where even Twitter didn’t crash and burn. I would ask how resilient that level of delusion is to observable reality, but refer to my earlier comments about social media and squishy brains.

Did I ever claim to be trying to do that? I mean, it’s starting to get convoluted, but my initial point was that people attribute effects to decentralization it doesn’t have by itself, so the differences between the more consolidated Bluesky ecosystem and the less consolidated Masto ecosystem in particular aren’t as meaningful as the graph in the OP suggests.

You were the one who popped up to claim that decentralization prevents monocultures. I just disagreed with that statement and pointed out that… yeah, that’s one of the magic effects people claim that don’t seem to really happen.

Whether that’s a problem or how big of one is entirely up for debate. All I’m saying is it’s not much of a real advantage, as far as I can tell. I’m both here and in BS, so I clearly don’t find either that effect or the lack of that effect to be a dealbreaker, if it exists at all. I’m claiming it doesn’t exist in the first place.

My educated guess is that what would meaningfully change how this conversation is playing out is me unequivocally siding with the home team and bashing the away team. The fact that I’m not necessarily bashing either (or at times I’m bashing both) is perceived as hostility or siding with the away team, because people have squishy brains and that’s how the Internet works and all social media was a mistake.

“Our”?

What “our” is that? Who’s “we”?

I mean, I’ve been around a while, so it can’t be “us Fedi dwellers”, since… you know, I’m pat of that, so I would be part of the “we”, so surely you meant something else, right?

Because man, would it be some weird self-defeating irony to imply that in a thread where one is defending a mostly vibes-based argument that the culture in “our” place is actually uniquely diverse and free-form due to the way the thing is designed. That’d be a remarkable self-own.

So I’m sure it’s not what you meant.

Look, deal with it however you need, I don’t particularly mind, but it’s one of many self-serving, semi-deliberate misaprehensions people around here like to lean on to dismiss the current limitations of Fedi’s setup, and that habit does bum me out. Because, you know, being part of this community, despite your implications, I would like for it to be more popular than it is. Not fully mainstream, perhaps, because I do like the weird, cozy mid-90s forum feel of the thing, but… yeah, a bit.

And definitely I would have liked to see Masto put up more of a fight instead of being steamrolled by Elon. That was a legitimate bummer.

This is demonstrably untrue. Those things are fundamentally no different than blocklists. Like I said, a very blunt moderation tool, not a cultural diversity tool.

This isn’t a problem of awareness. Like I mentioned above, I am well aware of all the endless circular arguments about federation and defederation happening all the time all over Fedi. They are pointless purity tests, in most cases, but they’re unsurprising, because the core culture of the place is fundamentally about this design choice of making big moderation blocks be handled at the instance-to-instace level (very much at the cost of moderation tools for and towards individuals, since blocking is basically nonexistent, instance managers don’t have a ton of bandwidth or resources for granular moderation and don’t have control over moderation in other instances).

That’s a good example of how the design impacts the culture: putting defederation in the way it is and weakening blocking to barely a mute does affect the culture across the system, but it does nothing to tweak that culture beyond moderation in other applications, in the same way that blocking every nazi you meet on Twitter does nothing to change the culture of Twitter. The patters of behavior are still what they are, you’re just cherry picking content generated via those patterns.

So no, no lack of awareness, just a different understanding of how this works.

I have. I’ve been in various instances on Mastodon. I am not in Lemmy right now, in fact. I keep forgetting because it impacts nothing.

There are two things instance interactions seem to drive: self-referential arguments about defederation and defederation.

Defederation is not a culture-building tool, though, it’s a moderation tool. A very unsubtle cluster bomb of a moderation tool, but a moderation tool. The entire point of interoperability, in fact, is that content is instance-agnosting. That’s the entire point of the feature. If the content was fundamentally different across instances then federation would be fundamentally broken.

I genuinely don’t know how people argue with a straight face that “fedi is like email, it doesn’t matter what you run, everything speaks to everything else” but also “what instance you pick is super important and completely defines the culture”. Those two statements are clearly mutually exclusive.

The truth is closer to the former than the latter, by design.

There are a lot of assumptions to unpack in that and this may not be the right place for it, but I’m not convinced that centralizing servers implies locking down the culture of the space. Or, perhaps more accurately, that having multiple servers does anything to prevent the culture from consolidating. I don’t think Fedi gets accused of being particularly culturally diverse, honestly.

I think it prevents that culture from being built from the top down (or overmonetized from the top down) through unpopular or unilateral choices. That’s a thing. But becoming less culturally unified? Haven’t seen evidence about it.

I do get that people believe that. They’ll spend ages arguing about what service or instance to join and whatnot. The end result tends to be fairly similar. I’ll say that the main differences are dictated by design, rather than intent or moderation, and that’s been an interesting thing to see play out.

I mean, if you’re just gonna say the quiet part out loud… yeah, people just don’t like that Bluesky implemented a different version of AP in a corporate site and are desperately seeking ways to differentiate it and find exceptions to the rule because the whole “everything should be interoperable with everything” thing was always kinda bullshit and what people meant was “everybody should be in our playground where everything is interoperable among the things we like inside our playground”.

I find both of those versions of interoperability more appealing than everything being siloed and consolidated, but it was a disappointment to come to that realization. Which, granted, happened with the whole Threads federation debacle. Fedi fans going through that loop a second time and being impotently angry at Bluesky from a distance is relatively benign in comparison, except for the part where both should have integrated much more closely by now and both are being harmed to at least some extent by being slow at moving that forward.

I just would have liked for everybody involved to have been less dumb about this and maybe to have killed Twitter instead of letting its ambling zombie eat their lunch all over again. But here we are.

No, I have not backpedalled my argument. You can’t claim I said a thing I didn’t say and then accuse me of changing my position for restating my point. I mean, you can, but it’s some bullshit and it’s not gonna fly. That’s why I don’t like calling out these things in public, it really brings the Google out of people.

I claimed there is no indication that it will happen the first time, you claimed that I was saying it would definitely not happen and I restated that no, what I said is there was no indication that it would go one way or the other. So no, there is no indication that it will happen.

You can keep pushing your hypothetical all you want, it won’t get any or more likely. You’ve decided to make up that scenario in reverse, because you have chosen a football team to support and are now imagining ways to justify that selection. The exact same scenario could be played out in reverse. If you’re building a doomsday scenario out of whole cloth you can get as convoluted as you want and say it seems likely to you. I could poke holes on it, and there are plenty to be poked, but that’d require accepting the premise and arguing about the hypothetical instead of reality. That’s why it’s a frequent fallacious argument in the first place. So we’re not doing that.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the argument you’re doing mental gymnastics to bypass is still that interoperability and decentralization only actualize when people need to move. The amount of concentration prior to people moving is, and remains, irrelevant, at least in relation to the importance of the feature existing in the first place.

No, that’s not what I’m arguing. We’ve gone from slippery slopes to straw men, apparently, much as I hate calling out the play.

I’m not arguing that because they haven’t enshittified they won’t enshittify. I’m arguing that because they haven’t enshittified, they haven’t enshittified and there is no indication to make it more or less likely that they will, how or when.

Big difference. You are implying, if not arguing, that there is a slippery slope towards a specific hypothetical scenario, but there’s no indication of it and even in that hypothetical there is no indication that the situation would be any worse than in the alternative you present. It’s just fallacious through and through. I don’t need to argue that they won’t ever enshittify for that to be a bad argument.

And by the way, you keep doing it. You immediately go back to a scenario in which BS defederates from itself and from a protocol they built, designed and presented as a USP in the first place. It remains obviously fallacious. I have no need to argue about a version of reality you made up, or to defend the inexistent version of players or events playing out solely in your head.

That last paragraph is a lot more valuable, though, but it is just restating the point I already addressed earlier. My point is that how many people are using third-party AT providers is entirely irrelevant, just like the number of fedi people not on mastodon.social is entirely irrelevant. The point of having a standing protocol is that people could move in the future. If BS did make very fundamentally bad choices people could conceivably move over then. The benefits of decentralization don’t exist until you have to move instances. There is nothing in your interaction with the service that is better because it is decentralized. In fact, decentralization makes a number of things harder to implement. But the presence of the possibility of defederation or migration fundamentally changes how service and instance owners can act by removing a BIG chunk of their leverage over the userbase’s data, relationships and content.

People here don’t like to hear it, but in that sense AT is actually more robust than AP. Account migration including follows and messages is a major part of that flexibility and it impacts that stickiness more than whatever the current distribution of users happens to be in a scenario where nobody is doing anything particularly shitty.

I would argue that even that flexibility is overstated. Once thing that we learned the hard way when people got weird about federating with Threads is that being decentralized does not mean you’re endlessly resilient and forks or disagreements that split the collective management down the middle can do really bad damage.

I am not ignoring that. Why would you assume I’m ignoring that?

I am aware of that and I am, look at me in the eye, 100% meaning what I’m saying.

There is by any and all framings around this case, zero reason anybody should be on Twitter anymore. It was a perfect death spiral. And there were competitors coming at it ranging from a TON of funding and closed ecosystems (hi there, Threads, someone remembered you exist) to fully open standards.

Also, spare me the back strain of limboing under the increasingly low bar. I was there on Masto when the Twitter implosion happened and nobody was out there lowering expectations and saying it was disingenuous or unrealistic to expect fedi would capitalize. It was a feeding frenzy and a massive party and people were drawing up plans for how to host 200 million people because scalability was a concern. And then that same hype came to Threads theoretically having hundreds of millions of people who happened to have an Instagram account, and then to Bluesky actually building some stable userbase in the old school web 2.0 startup fashion.

And they all stalled. It is not disingenuous to observe that. It is revisionist to pretend that people expected them, and Masto specifically to stall. That was not what happened. Until people started infighting about whether the tone of the place supported activists or minorities or whether federating with Threads was convenient or starting a blood feud with Bluesky because that’s more fun than losing a fight to Twitter, I suppose.

I hate the navel gazing and the excuses and the patting oneself in the back for a good failure. I am so tired of people choosing ineffectual self-righteousness over genuine impact.

Not as tired as I am of normies refusing to drop their bad online habits, for the record. Twitter continuing to exist at all, even if no competition was available, would be a travesty. But the self-serving arguments about why it’s cool for fedi to be unpopular or the endless purity tests in the relationships with Threads and Bluesky are exhausting and depressing as hell.

That makes no sense. How is that any different from forking out of Fedi apps? This has happened a ton of times.

Look, I don’t mean to dump specifically on you, but I do hate this slippery slope fallacy crap, and you hear it a ton in these circles. What if Bluesky decides to defederate from itself or stop using an open protocol? Well then that’s bad. Also it hasn’t happened, there’s no indication that will happen and it would make no sense for it to happen considering Bluesky made AT willingly and could have just… not done that in the first place.

I mean, what if Mastodon.social defederates and stops using AP? What then? Huh? Well, nothing because it hasn’t happened it’s unlikely to happen and if it did the rest of the space would have to reconfigure around it.

I swear, we need to stop this. The small fish infighting is such a great way to keep the big fish in place. If you want to get depressed at the ability of more open alternatives to be functional in general, the insane fact that only BS managed to sorta capitalize on Twitter and then Twitter managed to keep itself in place and recover is a massive failure. We should all be doing a lot of soul-searching about how badly we suck at organizing and pushing a cohesive message because man, did they try hard to fail and we just wouldn’t let them.

That’s the part where we disagree and I disagree with the group.

I think the argument that spinning up a full Bluesky replacement is too expensive is valid. I think the argument that the central Bluesky service being the majority of the landscape is a bad thing is not.

If someone can spin up a replacement, even at great cost, it means that if and when the service gets bad in the main instance people can create a different big replacement. Whatever made the original viable remains in place, so the incentives should be the same.

That is the big difference between two being possible or not. Especially if, like AT does, you have proper account migration (still a glaring gap in Fedi services).

You don’t need a lot of decentralization for that to be true. Way I see it, the obsession with this particular metric is a purity test used as a marketing tool between competitor more than anything else. That pisses me off quite a bit because, frankly, I’m very tired of all the endless infighting in all the progessive spaces, from Linux development to FOSS in general to alternate social media to straight up left-wing politics. It sucks a lot and I don’t particularly respect anyone who engages with it.