Andrew's Blfog

Just recently thought I'd try out Bluesky due to whatever recent Twitter drama is going on (I don't seriously use any microblogging platform beyond messing around) and I found it quite nice, so I've recorded my initial thoughts here for SEO (and also to test the new blog updates).

Additionally, I've stuck a link to my Bluesky profile in the header for the time being.

Twitter

The OG platform-turned-garbage-heap. It was OK back in the day and its main value was introducing people to the concept of "microblogging", made more fun by the fact that, at the time, you only had 140 characters to work with per message, encouraging clever word usage.

Nowadays, the platform has been enshittified - you must have an account to see anything other than one message at a time, and it aggressively suggests you should register on every page you're on. You can pay for a subscription that does... something. Might give you a little kickback for reach/interaction? Unsure, but it's a microblogging website. Why is that even necessary?

Your "handle" (or, the "username" as some people call it, the part after the @) is globally unique, and is how users refer to you. It's formatted like . The opportunity for vanity handles is slim, but there are some nice examples out there.

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A while back, Reddit made some controversial changes to their API pricing scheme (going from "free" to "outrageously expensive and clearly meant to just kill competition") resulting in almost all third-party Reddit browsers to have to close up shop. This included Apollo, my personal favorite.

The fallout from this change blew fresh wind into the sails of the maintainers of Lemmy, and brought a surge of users to all federated platforms. (Elon's acquisition of Twitter and subsequent rename to X also had this same effect, but for Mastodon and other micro-blog software). The promise of a decentralized and federated system that otherwise feels the same as the walled garden of Reddit is tantalizing, after all.

"decentralization" and "federation"

I'm not going to waste much time on explaining these - I'm definitely not the right person to explain it correctly so take these definitions with a grain of salt.

Decentralization: where a service isn't hosted by one person or corporation, but instead hosted by many. Torrents, for example, are decentralized.

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