Not really disagreeing but how do we stop bots and fake accounts then? Bots/shill accounts have destroyed social media.
I think about this all the time.
I would love a community of specific aged people.
Like I hate browsing the internet and suddenly it’s “Am I (M19) overreacting because my mom (F38) hates my new girlfriend (F41) and their husband (V289)?”
Bro, I don’t have those problems as a M40 with scope.
Human moderators.
Cuz that worked so well for reddit
@TheKMAP @homesweethomeMrL common sense?
Doesn’t work in practice.
who could have forseen this?
This is literally what all of us who opposed the id verification for porn sites warned people about (not that most of lemmy doesn’t agree). This was always going to happen. Foot in the door, passed legal hurdles, now the floodgates open.
You can bet your ass this is going to be standard for browsing most of the “major” internet sites by the end of the decade. What a mess.
Keep telling people about Mastodon. Don’t push them. Just explain that this is a result of BlueSky being VC funded and more will follow just like it did with Twitter, Facebook and so on. Add that Mastodon is open source run by multiple non-profits around the world so if one fails, the rest would pickup the slack. Conclude with - if they want to stop having to uproot their network every so often, Mastodon is their best bet for microblogging.
Any social media that wants my ID becomes history, you got no business with it and i don’t trust you with it either.
As of late i’ve been leaning towards things like: “i really wish we didn’t have mobile phones” employers have been overstepping boundaries imo ever since we have them and i don’t want any of that. I’m yours for 40 hours, everything else is mine.
Along with how every device now comes with ads with some bullshit excuse, i really don’t need ads in my home i’m already bombarded with them everywhere i go.
I’m still one of those: “i love seeing peoples interests through well taken photos” instagram users, before every post was an “influencer”. Now instagram is: ad, actual ad, ad, ad, ad, actual ad. How the hell did we let that happen and why are people still looking at it…at least i wish it was just looking, with all the goddamn loud music and nonsense audio jumbled into one big mess to raoe your ears even though it isn’t even you looking at it but some brainrotten child in a mcdonalds.
I’m getting older and grumpier i guess. I should just learn to live with it.
Libsky is also enforcing the genocider censorship.
But it’s no surprise, never trusted it to begin with.
It’s to Blue MAGA what Twitter is to Red MAGALibsky - X
Blue MAGA - X
crazypeopleonline - trifecta
ohh bloomcole left lemmy.ml because they were blocked by too many people, time for a new block.
Mastodon.social the “main” instance also enforces genocide censorship according to multiple Lemmy users.
Luckily there is…
Twitter….…
And luckily I can do without all of them most of the time.
Sometimes unfortunately people post an X link and I can’t see it.
Can’t even make an account anymore, I’m on the (black)list.Kind of ridiculous to suggest it’s impossible to make an account. If you really wanted to, there are plenty of ways. How do you think people make sock puppets?
It doesn’t let me.
I have to do endless caphtas, when/if I get past it I get the spinning wait cursor that never finishes.
Even the time before this started when I could make one after 2 days it would say there was an anomaly with my account and block it that way.Then you aren’t trying hard enough friend, and it makes you seem like you’ve got an agenda.
LOL ‘agenda’ bcs of not getting to make an X account.
What in your paranoid mind would that agenda be?
I’m just going to leave this here…
They always have the same excuse for authoritarianism measures don’t they?
Think of the children, safety or terrorismIt has always been so really - it’s a clever strategy really. It ensures you can be easily branded if you opposed it “don’t you care about online safety for children”, and ensures it remains in place as “government removes online safety for children” is a powerful piece of propaganda.
I keep meaning to team up with a sociologist and write a piece on this particular tactic; alas time gets away from me!
Terrorism in the UK is now when you oppose genocide so the mask has gone fully off
Not true; here is an active group legally protesting the war in Palestine: https://palestinecampaign.org/
I’ve been telling people that Bluesky is just another Twitter, even started by a lot of the same people.
Skip the drama and use Mastodon.
They are all drama. “Guess what I ate today? A hotdog! Isn’t that exciting?” We can use none of this.
How dare people share thoughts and emotions, we should all strive to be more efficient like you are.
Nobody argued you can’t share emotions, just that “skip the drama” is not a good characterization of Mastodon.
is there a link to the onlyfans account? I just spent 15 minutes looking for it.
Mastodon launching quote toots at just the right time.
Toots is such a cute word
Bluesky is the reason I’m pretty much over with the idea of ever convincing people to worry about privacy, digital freedom or societal issues at large.
Twitter was bad, became even worse, people wanted to migrate - sure. We had Mastodon, which worked perfectly, was Federated, was open for subscriptions, it was free, had working third party apps and a community already. Barely anybody migrated.
Then Bluesky shows up, and it’s the exact same technology, only more limited and with lesser freedoms… but because it’s a commercial company behind it, people immediately chose it. The argument that people don’t understand federation doesn’t even work, because the promise that Bluesky was going to participate in the Fediverse was even part of the marketing material.
People CRAVE big tech. They’re not victims of abuse or ignorance, they’re willing participants that would rather be enslaved by a corporation than use any collaborative effort.
People CRAVE big tech. They’re not victims of abuse or ignorance, they’re willing participants that would rather be enslaved by a corporation than use any collaborative effort.
I don’t disagree, but this is why I find it so exasperating how so much of the tech world, including the open source community in general, refuses to understand this in terms other than a nihilistic distaste for human beings in general.
What you are saying is that the tech specs that bluesky defenders listed in my face from the beginning, all along the continuum of bluesky diehards to people on the fence considering the tech… all of that was NONSENSE from the perspective of evaluating the impact that the technology would have because the problem is political not technological.
I need to emphasize, that from the beginning most of the Bluesky support I saw was from technology minded people who are VERY smart at engineering systems and software but have the political awareness of an overconfident baby and refused to at the time look squarely in the eyes of what makes silicon such a globally hurtful force.
Now I am left wondering, as I thought I would from the beginning, why we wasted all that time on handwringing about how maybe this abusive relationship could work out with Bluesky. This time it will be different I swear I changed I won’t abuse you for profits now I promise…
Look I am glad y’all learned your lessons… hopefully you did? This isn’t just about useful idiots learning way too late into the game that Bluesky was always going to turn out like Twitter, this is about why the tech community at large refuses to address political questions in an adult and mature manner that doesn’t sweep anything that can’t be easily categorized in digital, binary terms under the rug because it is uncomfortable to talk about in a professional environment.
Your nihilism is part of the same coin that has allowed companies like Microsoft to profit off genocide in Gaza while only a meager handful of Microsoft employees speak up and are thrown out and ostracized for their unprofessional behavior.
Stand up for your beliefs, stand up for humanity, don’t cede a narrative that this universe is cynical to them without contesting it and demanding more evidence. I will not be convinced people are as generally bad as the ruling class wants me to believe, it is always a lie. Part of that for me is not letting them convince me people want this suffering because you can twist people’s intentions, fears and motivations so easily into destructive ends… evidence you hold in front of me of people behaving in evil ways only illuminates the capacity of violence to spread like a contagion, it doesn’t convince me humanity at large desires the state it is being subjected to.
Your comment is extremely weird because I did not defend, expect anything or debated Bluesky tech. To the contrary, I’m specifically pointing out that Bluesky was obviously bad and Mastodon should’ve been chosen instead.
My nihilism wasn’t challenged, it was confirmed. People chose the bad option, they chose it again, and will choose another bad option in the future.
the issue with Bluesky is primarily the userbase. the vast majority of them want something that “just works” and if you provide them with alternatives they scream and reeee and all that. it’s annoying. also annoying the constant unoriginal posts of “Mastodon is the Linux of social media” like it’s some gotcha moment for them.
We had Mastodon, which worked perfectly
tbh several of my colleagues complained that they found discovering new content and/or content outside of their servers really hard, and the whole federation is just too complicated for not-technologically-minded people 🤷
(no personal experience because I don’t use any microblogging platforms)
I constantly get downvoted for “blaming the victim” when I say that, but its true! If you have the power to do something, and choose not to, youre partially to blame…
I dont get how people can pont fingers then go buy the same product from the same asshole and act surprised…
You blame Humanity’s nature, and thus devalue the truly big difference, just one of these social networks has millions and millions invested in marketing.
It’s clear that advertising has a lot of power to influence people’s choices, otherwise oligarchs wouldn’t burn so much money on it.
It’s clear that advertising has a lot of power to influence people’s choices, otherwise oligarchs wouldn’t burn so much money on it.
Marketing, advertising, etc. It’s a science, a field of study. What is the goal? To make people buy things, ostensibly. How do they chose to do achieve that goal? Deep analysis of the human psyche and studying methods to manipulate them into taking intended actions.
Advertising is the science of psychological warfare.
Bluesky barely had any effective marketing at all. Their main push was word of mouth and the “exclusivity” of launching under a invite-only system. That’s it.
But “oh, this big tech wants my data and not yours” was enough.
In a world full of bots where machines can pass the Turing test, how do you know if this word of mouth wasn’t actually a marketing campaign? And not to mention the tons of influencers creating content that is often nothing more than advertising.
The “exclusivity” thing was surely one.
I wouldn’t immediately chalk up the success of private commercial operations over open non-profit ones to a slavish misanthropic outlook on humanity. Consider that with millions in investment capital comes millions in marketing budget, too. There’s an information war and we’re outgunned.
The average person is a fucking moron man ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
average person uses x and when you tell them that x stands for everything wrong with the world they just say something like “yeah but Joe Schlimblio posts on x and I follow them”
Average *Japanese person.
The usage of twitter was never as high as other social medias in Europe (and I presume other parts of the globe too).
Looking at statista; it seems the main perpetrators are the US and Japan, (30% and 56% of the relative populations).
From what I can tell (or be bothered to check); Japan is the only country with over half the population on X. Therefore making the sentence 'the average Japanese person uses X, to be true.
On a tangent, I wonder what Japanese X is like; is it just a sea of hand drawn tentacle based erotica, and is the source of the countries porn? Or does it see the same types of nationalism drives that western X does? Is Grok rewriting Japanese empire war crimes?.. There’s a whole world on there we’re not privvy too.
Here in Japan, I used to use it to follow up and coming Japanese illustrators and webcomic artists, most of who tweeted fun, non-political, wholesome things. I got live updates whenever we had typhoons and earthquakes.
Obviously there’s toxicity if you look for it, but I didn’t really see it. Which is why I honestly didn’t understand why so many people shit in Twitter especially on “tech/bologicallysocially-aware” circles like Reddit calling it toxic. The reason why I stopped was because Musk bought it, not because of the content I was seeing. Maybe I was just lucky.
Note: This is just a single old man’s anecdote, so please take it with a huge grain of salt.
Grain of salt or not, your Insight into this is both valuable and appreciated; thank you for sharing.
It’s interesting that even back then JP twitter wasn’t very political. On the English areas of the site a lot of political rhetoric definitely still found it’s home. Granted nowhere near as much as current levels; but I think that’s more of a statement on just how much musk has tried to turn X into a political weapon more than anything else.
Not even just average people. Exceptional people who absolutely know better still fall for this shit. The “marketplace of ideas” is a failure.
If people want real ideas they need to grow them and care for them and that shit is hard and it will cost you time and money.
Fucking Moron Man! Defender of the average Joe, protector of the woefully mediocre! Without a thought in his head, but a spring in his step, he fights on with the conviction of a total idiot!
People don’t crave big tech, big tech just has more money and willingness to advertise and astroturf. When a newspaper or tv show or influencer mentions BlueSky in a story, it’s a 50:50 chance that an expensive marketing agency fed them it.
Exactly. You cannot grow without expending money. You cannot expend money if you are not generating money.
These services will not work until they have an economical purpose.
I think this is true. Billionaires and their corporations are obviously morally bankrupt and have been manipulating all of us for long years. But at the same time, it seems to me that there is also some ‘consent’ on our part. There’s a lot of people who will still choose to be oppressed, even after having everything explained to them and seemingly having understood.
Perhaps thay’s how deep all the decades of social engineering go. Or maybe we just really like convenience, to the point where we’re willing to become slaves if it means our lives are convenient.
I wonder how much the adoption of newer platforms has a lot to do with having money to advertise. I feel like I lucked out a bit finding lemmy when reddit had the 3rd party apps shut down, just stumbling on a comment before it was deleted. Whereas if the commenter had paid for it to be an advertisement it may have stayed up
This is simple. Age verify because Bluesky is filled with porn. Soon, almost every state or the nation will require age verification if you host porn.
You can thank the religious GOP trash
In this case it’s the fault of the UK government and a Tory era policy labour has kept
won’t somebody please think of the children!!1!
The children aren’t fucking right, they need to be shown.
Hell you don’t even have to be funny on mastodon.
What we ARE picky about is posting images without descriptive text or asking for a volunteer caption.
some of the alt text is straight fire tbh.
for example:
a bloated orange corpse has been posed by a taxidermist to shake hands with a castrated old man who has confused the corpse for an ice cream cone. (c 2025 whitehouse oval mausoleum)
Thats a shit alt text tho. Alt text is used by vision impaired people, it’s not a joke field or a witty remark field.
Agreed.
Thanks for the exemplary embodiment of mastodon’s attitude toward alt text.
Christ in Valhala that jacket on the left looks like it is trying so damn hard to keep the flood of flesh horror at bay for the sake of all living souls.
I saw this from the moment BlueSky was trying to advertise itself as Twitter 2. Single point of ownership means it will definitely come to be locked down over time because server cost and administration will always be a problem.
The company is a company just like the company used to fund Activitypub and Mastodon development.
The protocol is still federated. Content addressing even makes mirrors more reliable!
(besides the current DM implementation, when encrypted messaging is ready it’s meant to get federated too)
Also, reminder that this is a UK law applying to all social websites there, even your average Lemmy instance. You could get blocked if you don’t comply.
well yeah… twitter 2?
Applies only to the UK, which is requiring it for apps that host adult content: https://www.theverge.com/news/704468/bluesky-age-verification-uk-online-safety-act
From your helpful link:
“If users don’t want to verify their age, or if they’re under 18, they will still be able to have an account with certain features limited. Bluesky will block “adult-appropriate content” and turn off certain features, such as direct messaging.”
So you can still use Bluesky without age/identity verification, including being able to post.
As always to do with Bluesky, Lemmy way overreacting to news exagerrated so much its essentially false.
Yeah, I get pushing for Mastodon over Bluesky, but Bluesky is being forced to do this by the UK government for UK citizens so this is just exaggerated rage bait.
Rage bait, or a line being drawn? The excuse that it’s just for certain type content, only some features will be limited, etc. sounds like “it’s just a little bit of Orwell, why you so mad bro?” Let the free market sort it out, if most people are fine with limitations (and future additions to those) then so be it. There are alternatives right now, so make a choice.
The UK government is forcing them and all other web services to do the same. UK-hosted Mastodon servers may coast under the radar for awhile, but they’ll come for them eventually.
Rather than getting mad at Bluesky for implementing government-mandated age verification, how about actually getting mad at the UK government?
A lot of us are and have protested for years. The previous gvmt didn’t care and the current one don’t either because its not really about kids, its about control and surveillance. The ruling political class want to know what its citizens are up to and/or want us to know they can id us any time, especially those of us who are noisy about political issues.
Our right to protest is just about gone, including the right to wear masks. We are legally obliged to provide pins to our phones when detained and we can be arrested if a protest is deemed obstructive - which includes being too noisy. We can even be arrested just for discussing holding a protest of some kind.
At the same time, we are told that vocally supporting non-violent groups is now terrorism and can be punishable with prison time.
And the vast majority of the UK population sit on their collective arses moaning about immigrants and watching Love Island. They don’t care - genuinely, they absolutely do not care their rights are disappearing one by one.
Required to use our fingerprints/faces, and PINs at border, but not PINs at e.g. protests right? Or is this a thing where within 1000(?) miles of the border is close enough?
Mad at your government, but still leave Bluesky, just don’t leave angry.
Also, it’s just a matter of time for other governments to do the same. They’re already working on it in the U.S.
How about both? And while doing so, use applications that aren’t yet subjected to those rules.
Others are tho. For example lemmy.zip blocks UK users from signing up for this reason.
Why do you think Mastodon is exempt from those rules? The law applies to all sites/services with a significant UK audience - some of the Mastodon .uk instances will definitely be subject to this, and because of how badly the law is written, it can apply to many more.
People can have their hardon for hating Bluesky, but they’re literally just trying to avoid being fined by the UK govt here - this wasn’t their idea.
Mastodon might not be legally exempt, but depending on how much effort the UK government puts into enforcing this, large swaths of it might be functionally so. Most instances presumably arent hosted in the UK, and while some of those outside that country might block traffic there or be big enough for the UK government to order ISPs there to block them for noncompliance, theres a decent chance that some smaller, foreign run instances might simply ignore whatever the UK is doing, and if a UK user signs up to one of these, or uses a VPN to use one that does block the UK, and can still get the content from the rest of the network due to federation anyway, then the platform as a whole could potentially get away with ignoring those rules in a way that a single large site couldnt.
It’s absolutely Orwellian, and people should be angry at the UK for forcing this onto any website their citizens access.
But there won’t be alternatives for long cause you’re placing the blame on the whip and not the person cracking it.
A) I’m just commenting on it being labeled as rage bait and not a call for action(s)
B) Absolutely go after the root cause as well as find alternatives
C) There are always alternatives
Beware USA :(((
Supreme Court’s ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online (July 4, 2025)
its a good thing I never write and have sex at the same time
which is requiring it for apps
The simple solution is not making everything a fucking app…
It’s always hilarious to watch people act like they care about security and privacy but download 27 different apps instead of just using a web interface…
It’s like the iPad generation can’t figure out a bookmark list
I said apps but I probably should have said websites and apps, because websites aren’t exempt. I hear you on how frustrating it is when they’re making everything an app, though.
Generally, enough to be always, the “protect the children” argument is used by the worst warmongering authoritarian neocons to ensure enslavement.
I have never understood why people have ever thought or said that bluesky is better than reddit, or decentralized, or somehow not going to be abused as the company takes a very large amount of VC funds.
Pretty sure this is about the new EU legislation afftecting anything from porn sites, through nexusmods, and apparently even shit like bsky.
Not EU, UK. The EU, for now, does not require age verification. They are currently working on a system where your age can be verified using a secure token where Bsky would not get any more info than “this person is over 18”, at which point, they will most likely mandate its use.
I’ve actually wanted such a system to exist and to be available for general use so that one could made social communities for, e.g. (real) people over the 30. Make it work similar to oauth. I think that sounds great honestly. Of course, if you wanted to be strict about it your community would only be from places that have this verification system in place.
And how would one obtain such a token?
Your ID and associated government software.
The government will know who you are, but not what you are requesting the token for. The site will know what the token is for, but will not know who is presenting it.
Imagine it like buying an old fashioned paper bus ticket, in places where tickets are anonymous and interchangeable. The ticket vending machine will get your card info, but will not know what you’ll do with the ticket. Maybe you’ll board a bus, maybe you’ll trade it to a vagrant for a blowie. The ticket machine won’t judge or connect the blowie to your payment info.
Then the vagrant or the bus driver will not get your card payment info either, they’ll only get the ticket, which you could have gotten anywhere, including by blowing someone for it. The bus ticket is the token, it only confirms payment, not identity.
The government will know who you are, but not what you are requesting the token for.
Unfortunately, things don’t work like that. There are a nearly infinite number of ways for the identity provider to figure that out.
The site will know what the token is for, but will not know who is presenting it.
Same as above.
Wherever you go, whatever you do, there are many entities already tracking you that know precisely who you are and what you are doing. All such legislation would do is add governments to the list. There is no safe or anonymous version version of an identity provider.
There are a nearly infinite number of ways for the identity provider to figure that out.
Name one.
What is there to stop the government from later issuing a request to the service owner/operator, by court order, for a list of those verified and the tokens used to verify them (thus linking the accounts and their data to the individuals and their identities)?
No u - go learn.
Would that essentially kick all non EU users out?
Not from a Jedi.
The smart card in your id.
🌈 magic 🌈
