Whenever I see how they keep getting brought up, I'm always reminded of that Dilbert ep about how people just fall for blue logos that are easy on the eyes. They don't even have to know what it is... just the fact that the stupid logo is blue is enough. lol
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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Mastodon has around 1 million active users³ Bluesky has around 3.5 million active users²
Bluesky doesn't have a decent way to see active user count, but it is likely higher than 3 million
Mastodon retains 10%, Bluesky retains 10% also, but I can't confirm it
Edit: Using unique likes, it shows about 2 million active users on each day¹
Source:
I looked at the terms of service and noticed that they bind you into arbitration, limit your terms to $100, mandate you to travel to Delaware for dispute, and force you into mass arbitration if your dispute is similar to others.
Pass
While I understand that, I'm in America. My first priority has to be getting people off of Twitter.
Would I prefer open source, non-profit software? 100%. It's the smarter and better choice for so many reasons.
But if Bluesky is going to gain critical mass, I'm not going to fight it. I'm having a hard enough time getting people off Twitter. I've written the media address of environments I'm familiar with asking them to organize a move, and I mentioned both Bluesky and Mastodon.
Unfortunately that's standard for pretty much every service in existence until the government determines otherwise or the users demand it en masse. No company is going to willingly expose themselves to any more risk than they absolutely have to. There's zero benefit to them.
I don't think forced arbitration has really been tried in court. I remember Disney kind of trying, but it was completely unrelated (e.g. argued that arbitration agreement from Disney+ applied to issues on physical Disney properties).
In order to hold up in court, the contract needs to reasonably benefit both parties instead of only the contract issuer. So there's a very good chance a court will dismiss the forced arbitration clause, especially if it's just in a EULA and not a bidirectional contract negotiation.
That said, I tend to avoid services with binding arbitration statements in their EULA, and if I can't, I avoid companies that force acceptance of EULA changes to continue use of the service.
And we should just accept that?
Doesn't matter if you should or not. Point is you accept it or you don't use any service whatsoever.
Looks like there's a viable alternative here.
Really? Who are you going to sue here? And how much money do you think you can sue them for?
Oh no, there's no money or profit motive here. I guess that's terrible.
Let's not call disabling the right to sue a "business risk". That's like calling the right to stop paying for the service a "risk" - it's riskdiculous.
By "business risk", they just mean bad for the business, ethics aside
Let's not call disabling the right to sue a "business risk".
...and why not?
That's like calling the right to stop paying for the service a "risk"
But...that's what it is? I promise if they could remove that risk with a few words in the TOS, and it was legal, they'd all be doing that too.
The right to take legal action for harm done is imperative. It's importance is diminished if conflated with a legitimate business risk (like research and development). It should be illegal to deny it.
I agree. But we weren't discussing hypotheticals, we were discussing reality.
Arbitration of what? It's a free service. What money could they possibly owe you?
You're not thinking evil enough, honestly. Two examples off the top of my head, each being fairly innocent mistakes: If you enter your phone number for 2FA, it's not going to be public-facing. It's their responsibility to keep that information private from internal and external threats. Ok, so what if it leaks... right? Oh, it turns out the hacker SIM swapped your phone number for the 2FA, and did a password reset on your account via support chat. Still no big deal, its just social media... Except you've been giving updates to all your patreon backers on your project that's shipping soon. It suddenly vanishes off the internet, replaced with a crypto scheme, and all your supporters just flooded your bank with chargebacks. Your attempts at getting your account back are met with silence and your supporters are now furious. Was any of that your fault? No. You get $100.
Let's try another example: Bounty programs are used by companies to collect bugs and other possibly exploits so they can be fixed. "Too expensive, nobody will know if there's a bug anyway." So the app on Google Play store gets installed by 30 million users with a critical flaw... if a very specific image is opened in it, the phone bricks. All the news sites cover the bug, pushing the image to the front page. You open the app and... Your expensive phone just died. Were you at fault for that? No. You get to join the arbitration group and get an individual settlement of $12.
Think more evil. Don't stick with the "I have nothing to lose" because you almost always have something to lose. The fact these terms were even thought of and written means you do have a financial investment in the platform.
That's why 2FA via phone number shouldn't be a thing
You have nothing to hide. Just sign away all your rights.
If the mods or admin do something that causes you injury, such as ignoring requests that will prevent harassment.
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During signup, they make it sound like it's a federated service. It is not. Dumped it when it was explained to me.
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Nice. Glad to see people leaving xitter en mass.
I feel like we're going to have a similar issue a couple of years or decades down the line with Bluesky. People would be better off on the Fediverse instead.
Love an app that defaults me to people I actually follow and doesn't bombard me with endless reams of ads or engagement bait.
We'll see how long that lasts. But for now, its a blast from the past to be on a social media app I don't hate.
Another corporate social media platform, what could go wrong?
I can't wait for them to bring in ex CIA/IDF types to "clamp down on disinformation".
What do you think the closed beta was for? It was so they can get in and get on the moderator roster
Sorry to hear that, but at least some of them are not on Xitter.
I never trust meta statistics anymore because you know they're filling out their "numbers" with bots to try and keep their stock prices up.
In terms of real users I bet bluesky has already surpassed them.
I find it odd that people follow Jack Dorsey into another sewer in troves. They seem to like the previous Twitter experiment, while I find it repugnant.
The lesson today is that I don't get the social media phenomenon. My bad. I hope they have a ton of fun.
Jack Dorsey is not part of Bluesky, maybe you don't get things because you don't pay attention.
Jack Dorsey has no involvement in Bluesky. He doesnt even have a Bluesky account.
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Tried it last night for a hockey game. I still think I'm not using it correctly but people were nice.
There’s no right or wrong way. For it to be fun for an event like that you need to follow lots of people in that space. Like journalist, reporters, beat writers and analysts. However if you don’t want that content in your feed full time you could try searching one of the teams hashtags and use the latest tab to follow along. You can also take all those suggested follows and make a list to pin to your BlueSky front page without following them and just goto that feed during games.
Oh interesting, thanks! I figured out the hashtaga bit but a lot of fun popped up without the hashtaga etc.
I suppose I'll just keep muddling along and figure something that works for me while trying to be a net positive influence!
30 million users and still nobody likes my posts
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