After seeing all those social media CEOs suck up to #Trump, something has become obvious. This medium matters to democracy, and only #ActivityPub lets journalists set up their own servers and give the people total say over what stories go viral. Nobody can shut down hashtags or links, remove an account, shadowban or modify what shows up as trending. Even #bluesky retains these powers with their relay.
@mmasnick.bsky.social said we need to find our killer app. We have. #SocialWeb
@wjmaggos except #ActivityPub DOESN'T give the people total say over what stories go viral.
We see so much consternation over instance owners censoring what people can see, and that's one of the huge criticisms of this platform that needs to be emphasized.
YES, people can shut down hashtags and links here, and I think that's problematic.
We can't address it by denying that it exists, though.
#Bluesky doesn't just retain that resistance to being shut down. With its relays it does a better job of having the features you're promoting here.
BlueSky comes much closer to giving the people total control over what stories go viral. #Fediverse falls short, empowering instances over people.
@volkris @wjmaggos @mmasnick.bsky.social Bluesky is a corporation. I want nothing to do with a corporation.
@Beachbum BlueSky is not a corporation.
It's a project that frees people from having to deal with corporations or other centralized administrative setups.
BlueSky is fundamentally anti-corporate.
@volkris @Beachbum It’s my understanding that Bluesky is a “beneficial corporation” which is what OpenAI until Altman diverted its mission. It simply redefined itself as a for-profit corporation. Bluesky has been accumulating investment funds. That’s good and necessary for continued feature development and system capacity. But the investors expect a return on their funds. This suggests a move to for profit. I’m done when that happens.
@wdjorth when people say BlueSky is a corporation of any sort, it's akin to when people say Mastodon when they really mean Fediverse or ActivityPub.
What most people see as BlueSky is a distributed platform not owned by anyone and able to operate completely independently of any one owner, corporation or otherwise.
It's a system that is specifically developed to avoid such control.
You can set up your own BlueSky system today if you wanted to.
@Beachbum
