BlueSky has been knocked offline by an exodus from Twitter

hedge@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 248 points –
BlueSky has been knocked offline by an exodus from Twitter
independent.co.uk
66

“One of the biggest functions of blocking is giving women the ability to stop weird men from constantly making them uncomfortable and scared,” one user wrote. “So of course Elon had to change that.”

They buried the lede a bit there, but that's pretty much it.

Hope some of them go to Mastadon.

I know Imani Gandy is now posting on mastodon. She had an enormous following on Twitter.

Yeah it really actually only takes a couple of big users moving to Mastodon to cause a domino effect of a mass migration. I hope more people with tons of followers start moving over.

The problem is that people won’t move until their audience there and their audience won’t move until they are there.

And mastodon is a bit less straightforward compared to old Twitter.

Mastodon is also somewhat hostile towards new users. Significant swaths of it treat this shared public network as a small private chatroom, and get cranky when September stretches on too long.

Of course this is anecdotal but I haven’t seen that - most of the disdain I’ve seen is towards new instance admins who don’t take proper steps to moderate stuff or prevent spammy signups.

I still remember being constantly berated for not using alt tags and not using their special language.

You can't get pissy about your little static/stagnant/(software)beta community changing if your goal is to gain mass adoption.

Yeah, but some people are more willing to move onto a smaller platform. Like us. In practice, as long as more than one person becomes willing per person who makes the change, it works out to compounding percentage growth, which is good because the internet itself would never have taken off otherwise (or cities and railways, for that matter).

Does Mastodon have the blocking features that Bluesky has (like lists, blocks stopping quote reply chains, etc)?

Other than on Blahaj, I’ve never found a place more chill to be queer online once you apply a couple of well maintained block lists.

If you need the feature set of Bluesky and can’t use Mastodon, please also follow https://fed.brid.gy/ if you can. This will allow Mastodon users to follow you from the Fediverse.

As far as I'm aware, Mastodon blocks work the same way they'll work on Twitter now - The person you blocked can see your posts, but can't interact with you

Edit: Actually, I was wrong the person you blocked can't see your posts on Mastodon

If they don’t, please also follow https://fed.brid.gy/ so your BlueSky account is federated to Mastodon. If you move to Threads, please turn on Fediverse integration.

It’s so frustrating, between Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads almost every person I used to follow on Twitter exists somewhere else. But only about half of them are accessible in any one platform.

IOCX has a noticeable increase in new user signups since a day or two back.

“One of the biggest functions of blocking is giving women the ability to stop weird men from constantly making them uncomfortable and scared,” one user wrote. “So of course Elon had to change that.”

Given how he constantly tries to insert himself and his opinions into everything he sees, it's clear he has no idea about how consent works, nor why people don't want him in their lives.

I honestly don't think it's a matter of him not understanding how consent works and more of a matter that he sees consent as something that gets in his way.

Or maybe just refuses to fathom that other people could not want to talk to him. If he has a psych file I'm sure it's darkly fascinating.

Rather people have no idea how blocking on 𝕏 worked/works. You were ALWAYS able to see tweets from people that blocked you by simply logging out or using an alt account.

I don’t understand all this fuss about this simple change. He only removes a useless feature that was never more than a minor inconvenience for those that got blocked.

If you don’t want people to see your tweets, lock your profile. This worked before and this still works just fine.

You were ALWAYS able to see tweets from people that blocked you by simply logging out or using an alt account.

Well, yeah. It's a different account. That's how accounts work. Do you think one account blocking someone should result in every account blocking them too?

Having a public (i.e. not locked) Twit𝕏 account and believing you can block single people is a bit stupid to begin with.

When screaming on a market square, you can’t demand for single people to “please not listen” to what you’re screaming.

Well, I don't use Twitter. So that's all you.
But blocking accounts have been a thing for decades. It's not a new concept.

In closed systems like messengers, where you don’t see any content unless logged in, yes. There, it works brilliantly. But on Twitter, this is like cutting out something from a newspaper when there’s a news stand right next door.

Twitter has DMs, plus it helps by not allowing that person to reply unless they create a new account.

And it’s exactly like this now, if I understand the change correctly. They only removed the “you can’t see this post because the owner limits who can see it” thing. Blocked people still can’t reply.

Yeah. It works like a Discord block basically. (Ignoring that Discord doesn't block users in group voice settings.)

You do realize it's the same thing here, right?

Yep, that’s why I don’t get all this panicking about the Twitter change…

I don't think anyone is panicking.
Most people point and laugh at Twitter.

Locking your front door won't keep someone out who really wants to get in.

Is that stupid, too?

Of course, not. But closing and locking the door doesn’t prevent the person on the other side to still listen in on your conversations…

When I block someone I do not care if they see what I post. I just do not want them to be able to interact with it. I don't want to see them. I don't want their opinion. But it's fine if they want to spend their energy fuming about whatever I post. Or more likely, simply who I am.

simply logging out or using an alt account

It is increasingly difficult to use X without an account. Not sure what the signup process is like nowadays. IIRC it used to require phone number verification in the Twitter days, but perhaps Musk relaxed the requirements in order to better pad the usage stats with spambots?

@mbirth@lemmy.ml And yet that minor inconvenience is enough of a hurdle that Musk thinks he has to get rid of it. Following a profile logged-out is impossible now, and alt-accounts are a pain to maintain. I'd wager that in way over half of the cases where someone is blocked, they do in fact then never see the blocker's posts because they don't run alts or view logged out.

Following a profile logged-out is impossible now

What do you mean? I can just open an Incognito tab and go to x.com/ and see all posts (without replies, though).

because they don't run alts

I think you underestimate the dedication of some of those trolls. Also, most apps allow to easily switch between profiles with like 2 taps.

@mbirth@lemmy.ml "Some of them", sure.

Which is not 90% of them. It's the exceptions.

If a block-button stopping read-ability works in 80% of the cases, it's better than one that works in zero percent of the cases.

Look at twitter.com/@elonmusk in a private tab.

Most of the posts you see are from 2022!?

The block button on Twitter has gone from 80% effective to 0% effective.

Well done Musk. Well done.

If anything, this stops giving people the illusion of privacy when they block people.

Anyone who still uses Twitter either condones what Musk has done and is doing, or is completely oblivious.

I long for the day it dies the death it deserves and Musk is left holding the bag having to pay all the debt. If only he’d be forced to do that, but like all rich assholes, he’ll get out of it somehow.

Like Reddit, the only reason I'm still on Twitter from time to time is niche hobbies that don't have critical mass on the fediverse yet.

You could try starting those niche communities here instead of giving free content for Spez to monetize.

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who knew that removing the block feature and "Twitter's new ToS says all disputes will be heard in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas located in Tarrant County (Tesla investor Reed O'Connor's court)" were not going to be winners among the remaining userbase

@alyaza @hedge Funny side note: This rule with the disputes is not valid for residents of the EU due to their regulations. There an Irish court is responsible.

changing how its “block” button works. That option previously allowed users to hide their profile from certain accounts – but will no longer do so.

So I guess all that stuff they did to lock down the ability to see things on Xitter without an account was strictly for evil then

@hedge BTW: There is an update to the terms of service as well that implies that you cannot opt out of providing training data to their AI.

Lol, good that you pointed it out. The only real way is apparently only self hosting foss

i think everything everywhere in the internet will be put to training AI at this point. Lemmy and other FOSS will be used too, but at least our data is public and accessible to everyone equally (including to some FOSS AI that i hope emerges), not a private property of someone.

NOSTR Y’ALL !!

oh yah nostr still exists.

i stopped using it when all of my shitcoin filters did nothing.

Yeah, I love drowning in a sea of Nazis, Pedophiles, and Crypto bros with no redeemable content.

Well it's "allegedly" decentralized, which should solve this by design...

@hedge @moon Bluesky has got only one central component, the directory. The web interface at bsky.app is only one of multiple web interfaces. The data itself is hosted in several distributed personal data servers and you can setup and host your own as well.

This "Bluesky is offline" message is similar to some "Mastodon is offline", when only mastodon.social is offline and all other servers are running.

WTH is bluesky?

Twitter 2

Lemmy should be advertised as Twitter alternative. Lol bluesky sounds like a beverage company.

Nah. Lemmy can be as extremist as Twitter, but it certainly doesn't works like one. I would like if there was a mix between the two, though.