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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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why is always Bluesky on top of these lists, better marketing?
It's Twitter 2.0. It's what the average person wants. It's popular because it has algorithms and all the other addictive things from corporate social media.
Mastodon and others don't have these things and are harder to get started with. Picking a server is weird and scary. After that, getting your home feed started is difficult if you don't know to just follow some hashtags.
Its better than nothing though. The fediverse wasn't catching on. We're lucky a worse alternative didn't gain traction instead.
Even then like, I don't know. I don't want my feed to be strictly chronological. For stuff like Twitter-likes and TikTok-likes I want an algorithm. I don't want to be on there all the time, and I don't want it to be my only form of social media. But when I do go on there I want an algorithm to serve me some slop that I don't even know that I want but actually do.
Then you're the target audience for Bluesky and similar. Mastodon and other fediverse sites don't have that and that's what most of the people here prefer.
I forgot about Lemmy for a few days just because it's not so addictive and I like that. It's actually refreshing when you realise you've been gone for a few days without missing it.
Yes! I used to open reddit instinctivly when I was bored.
I do find lemmy more entertaining, just less addictive.
Until recommendation algorithms are transparent and auditable, choosing to use a private service with a recommendation algorithm is giving some random social media owner the control of the attention of millions of people.
Curate your own feed, subscribe to people that you find interesting, go and find content through your social contacts.
Don't fall into the trap of letting someone (ex: Elon Musk) choose 95% of what you see and hear.
Algorithmic recommendations CAN be good. But when they're privately owned and closed to public inspection, then there is no guarantee that they're working in your best interest.
They're good at predicting what people want to see, yes. But that isn't the real problem.
The problem isn't that they predict what you want to see, it is that they use that information to give you results that are 90% what you want to see and 10% of results that the owner of the algorithm wants you to see.
X uses that to mix in alt-right feeds. Google uses it to mix in messages from the highest bidder on their ad network and Amazon uses it to mix in product recommendations for their own products.
You can't know what they're adding to the feed or how much is real recommendations that are based on your needs and wants and how much is artificially boosted content based on the needs and wants of the owner of the algorithm.
Is your next TikTok really the next highest piece of recommended content or is it something that's being boosted on the behalf of someone else? You can't know.
This has become an incredibly important topic since people are now using these systems to drive political outcomes which have real effects on society.
I'm carrying on multiple conversations in this thread, so I'll just copy what I said in a different thread:
I understand that the vast majority of people are simply going to follow the herd and use the thing that is most like Twitter, recommendation feed and all. However, I also believe that it is a bad decision on their part and that the companies that are intaking all of these people into their alternative social networks are just going to be part of the problem in the future.
We, as the people who are actively thinking about this topic (as opposed to the people just moving to the blue Twitter because it's the current popular meme in the algorithm), should be considering the difference between good recommendation algorithm use and abusive use.
Having social media be controlled by private entities which use black box recommendation algorithms should be seen as unacceptable, even if people like it. Bluesky's user growth is fundamentally due to people recognizing that Twitter's systems are being used to push content that they disagree with. Except they're simply moving to another private social media network that's one sale away from being the next X.
It'd be like living under a dictatorship and deciding that you've had enough so you're going to move to the dictatorship next door. It may be a short-term improvement, but it doesn't quite address the fundamental problem that you're choosing to live in a dictatorship.