It’s owned by a billionaire. I don’t think enshittification is far away
Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media
Submitted 3 weeks ago by remington@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/blueskys-quest-to-build-nontoxic-social-media
Comments
marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
cotlovan@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Bsky is just Twitter, 10 years ago.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Capitalist media is always toxic.
Gaywallet@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
I’m glad to see a lot of different people trying different models. I don’t think microblogging really has the capability of being nontoxic, but who knows? Maybe they’ll succeed where everyone else has failed. I certainly know we’re trying to have nontoxic social media around here, and we have plenty of issues at a much smaller scale.
remington@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
We must have better moderation tools if we ever want this instance to grow.
SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Maybe, but social problems cannot entirely be solved with technology.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
we have plenty of issues
I would venture to say that despite those issues, thanks to y’all’s moderation this space is non-toxic on the whole. It may be that size is a de-facto limit on maintaining a space like Beehaw, or it may be that we (as in, internet users) just haven’t figured out the best format/ structure for scaling up safely.
I think a microblogging platform that allows moderated, invite-only sub-groups (and which doesn’t show you any posts by users or groups you don’t subscribe to) could be a good step towards that. Sort of a combination of BlueSky feed + Beehaw communities/ FB groups. That could give you a Beehaw-like moderation experience in a microblog platform.
I think most microblogging platforms’ failure in this area likely stems from them being ad and engagement-driven, and their corporate “need” for users to be more and more active across “interest domains”, clashing with their users’ need to stay isolated from users who are toxic to them.
SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
clashing with their users’ need to stay isolated from users who are toxic to them.
Sadly Lemmy does not solve this problem as the creators think like a corporation or do not want to be fully cut off from other users and thus do not have proper blocking (which is something built into ActivityPub mind you), for now it is only one way blocking which does not solve being isolated from toxic users as it still allows for some toxic behaviour etc.
If Lemmy ever gets that feature it would actually prove that it is dedicated to user safety, but a lot of people in the open source social media world seem to be ‘concerned’ with not being able to see everything due to entitlement, as others unrelated to Lemmy also are lacking the same or similar features.
RejZoR@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Remember when Twitter tried that? And look at it now. A festering pool of feces and maggots…
remington@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Did you read the article? Do you understand, technically, how Bluesky differs from Twitter (X)?
knightly@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
I did, I do, and I’m calling this article bullshit for not pointing out that while the protocol might be open-source, they have yet to share the server software that’s required to operate it.
BlueSky “lets” people host their own profile data because it reduces how much data they have to host. It does not allow them to login and browse the network without going through their centralized servers to do so.
So, it’s not really decentralized, not really open source, and remains under corporate control until such time as they decide to let anyone compete with them on their own network.
RejZoR@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I know that BlueSky has investors and soon enough every company has turned into shit when investors are involved.
luciole@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Also Google’s now retired motto: “Don’t Be Evil”.
thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 3 weeks ago
Enshitification commencing in 10… 9…
StenSaksTapir@feddit.dk 3 weeks ago
And that’s fine. Bluesky is in its last phase of proving the important point. Once all the regular journalists move away from Twitter, it will have been proven, that migration away from a defacto “standard” platform can happen, even though it’s a pain in the ass.
Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Honestly I think they already hit critical mass.
kiwii4k@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
ain’t gonna happen
need no anonymity and a complete reversal of human nature to achieve this.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Toxicity isn’t as much about who comes into your environment as it is about who you allow to remain. There are plenty of low- and non-toxic spaces online, they’re just heavily moderated.
SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Corporations cannot create nontoxic social media, the incentives will always be there to make it toxic.
The only way to do it is something like mastodon where actual people run it and thus can deal with people who are being toxic either by blocking etc because the fear of losing money, or the likelihood of the entire site/platform disappearing etc just isn’t there (obvioiusly individuals sites go down sometimes but the entire network is unlikely to disappear).
realitista@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Oh I think they can do it for a while… But then they need to start bumping up the profits.
SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Yes, I meant more long term but didn’t express that fully. So you are correct.
AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
I don’t know that’s true. The incentives to make it toxic come from engagement being the goal, which is a function of advertising being the income. I’m not advocating for it, but if there were a flat subscription and no ads, I don’t think they’d have any economic pressures for toxicity.
Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Social media requires free users to function on to fundamental of a level for that to really work tbh
SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
We think Minds tried something like this (though it might be different tiers) and it didn’t exactly go well, forcing users to pay one way or the other always leads to economic pressures to keep users around, even if they are being toxic at least from what we have observed.