The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy
Bluesky is very intentionally about public posting. It's a bit weird to say people "don't care about privacy" when speaking of a platform designed to amplify and distribute posts as widely and effectively as possible.
There is a lot of weirdness around Mastodon, particularly some people can’t seem to make up their minds if they want the stuff they post to be visible or not.
Exactly. And I'm willing to be that Bluesky folk might be somewhat similar because they haven't figured it out yet.
Except that the design of Bluesky severely increases the possibility of your data getting out of your control. And I can hear the immediate responses of "oh if you didn't want it public, don't post it," but as should be frightfully obvious -- not everyone thinks like that.
Mastodon doesn’t give you any real privacy. If I’m posting on something twitter like I want as much reach as possible. Sorry bud, we’re not actually all dumb naive people who haven’t seen the light.
Unfair characterization. You can make informed prediction about these 2nd order effects without thinking they are dumb. I don't think people who send nudes with Snapchat behaving as if they will be definitely deleted are dumb either because, you know, the heart wants what it wants.
That doesn't mean that there is no danger of people having "buyer's" regret later, or more importantly that there are issues beyond the individuals.
I 100% agree, I always thought that even Private Messages were a bad idea.
But no, we're way past "if you don't want it public don't post it." and then wiping our hands and being done. We need to think in a policy kind of way on this.
And again, things are already dangerous -- but ATProto makes them more dangerous. It's something like a chain-of-custody thing. I think the world is collectively safer where the gathering of data like this is less reliable and less verifiable.
ATProto's model makes the building of the proverbial evil Big Brother panopticon thing a LOT easier.
I'd rather say Twitter and Threads are the current winners if we're talking about userbase. Bluesky is basically in the same league with Mastodon while those two are so far above that you can't even see them without a telescope.
If a social network stays comparatively small but still active, I see that as a huge win. Half the people I follow are happily on Mastodon. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
As someone who was once an avid twitter user, my sense is that Mastodon--after a somewhat hopeful start just never gained the network momentum. Bluesky came closest to Twitter's old reach but is still something of a shadow of the old Twitter (as Twitter/X is these days as well).
Bluesky is not just a shadow, it's on a pretty steady decline. Their DAU numbers are dropping every month. Which probably tells you something about the unspoken reason for this change.
Ah, I didn't realize the link I shared was Jaz's (it was shared in another comment), but they look similarly sideways over the past 6 months, with a noticeable bump in Dec / Jan.
Without researching actual numbers, it feels like that whole category of social media is pretty much uninteresting at this point. Not sure what really replaces it given that Facebook seems increasingly infested with AI slop and sponsored posts.
I mostly don't like this take because it presumes a precise definition of privacy that we all agree on. And it's not even remotely close to that, which is why I think the Bluesky model is perhaps insidious.
