Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I agree that Bluesky’s attempts to not look monolithic have a certain flavor of opendetergent to them. However, I think their situation is a little more complex and quite a bit funnier. When the Bluesky people claim that their main thing is the protocol and the app was meant to be just a proof of concept, I’m inclined to believe them.
Bluesky is extremely popular among leftists and queer people and the company hates that. The right wingers seem content to stay on X the everything app and have little reason to switch even if Bluesky were to smoke the woke out and decimate its core userbase. The app needs to be popular for the protocol to stay even a little bit relevant.
Meanwhile Mastodon exists. It’s much more decentralized and a lot of people hate that. Bluesky users like having a single website with a single moderation authority, even if that moderation authority resents the demographics of that website.
If another twitter clone on AT Protocol somehow manages to gain enough of a critical mass to make Bluesky meaningfully not a monolith, that might well spell quick doom for the entire site. If AT makes migrating your account as easy as the developers are making it sound, I expect a big chunk of the users to jump ship as soon as an instance run by someone less transphobic gains enough traction.
I’ve mentioned before that I believe that Elon turning Twitter into a Nazi bar cut Bluesky’s business model off at its knees. They’re founded by Dorsey, weirdly (or cunningly) absent from the current techfash scene. I’ve always felt the vibe to be coiners and libertarians and “they can’t cancel you here”. Then they got a totally unearned user base because of X, and they’re simply not ready to handle it.
AFAIK there’s no revenue model, Jack or another VC is still footing the bill, and if there’s too much trans stuff on there the funding will dry up.
Good observation. I’d like to add that it’s not very straightforward to monetize a social networking site. The usual method would be ads, but the profit margins on those are thin, competition is rough and the audience does not like them. Otherwise you could probably derive monetary value from the soft power that comes with controlling a large communications platform of any kind, but it’s a lot harder to put a firm price tag on something like that and not everyone has the finesse and strategy to tap into that power.
Both of those monetization strategies work a hell of a lot better with a highly centralized and walled platform. Desperately trying to get people to pay more attention to the protocol that’s supposed to let them build competing sites with a low friction of migrating between them is the exact opposite of what you would do if you wanted your business model to be running a social networking site.
I would need someone with a big business brain to explain to me why a company focused on building the tools for competition against it and giving them away for free would ever seem like a sound investment. If I could give people VC money to publish telecommunications protocol specifications, I’d probably just sponsor IETF instead.