Capitalist media is always toxic.
Corporations cannot create nontoxic social media, the incentives will always be there to make it toxic.
The only way to do it is something like mastodon where actual people run it and thus can deal with people who are being toxic either by blocking etc because the fear of losing money, or the likelihood of the entire site/platform disappearing etc just isn’t there (obvioiusly individuals sites go down sometimes but the entire network is unlikely to disappear), or by the use of people explaining why what they did was wrong and the toxic people listen.
Edit: If Bluesky actually ever becomes decentralised as in users can run their own servers and federate or block other servers then perhaps it might become good, but until such a time then I do not trust them.
They should also make a non-profit foundation if they want to be seen as trustworthy, so that they can’t ever be sold off.
Those are the only way we and many others will ever trust them.
Corporations cannot create nontoxic social media, the incentives will always be there to make it toxic.
I don’t know that’s true. The incentives to make it toxic come from engagement being the goal, which is a function of advertising being the income. I’m not advocating for it, but if there were a flat subscription and no ads, I don’t think they’d have any economic pressures for toxicity.
Social media requires free users to function on to fundamental of a level for that to really work tbh
We think Minds tried something like this (though it might be different tiers) and it didn’t exactly go well, forcing users to pay one way or the other always leads to economic pressures to keep users around, even if they are being toxic at least from what we have observed.
Oh I think they can do it for a while… But then they need to start bumping up the profits.
Yes, I meant more long term but didn’t express that fully. So you are correct, corporate social media will go that way eventually unless they do the things we recommended.
If they never go IPO… I think they can do it. I think people can make money and not be cunts at the same time.
Even if they go IPO… they have the choice.
Enshitification commencing in 10… 9…
It’s owned by a billionaire. I don’t think enshittification is far away
Bsky is just Twitter, 10 years ago.
Remember when Twitter tried that? And look at it now. A festering pool of feces and maggots…
Did you read the article? Do you understand, technically, how Bluesky differs from Twitter (X)?
I know that BlueSky has investors and soon enough every company has turned into shit when investors are involved.
Also Google’s now retired motto: “Don’t Be Evil”.
I’m glad to see a lot of different people trying different models. I don’t think microblogging really has the capability of being nontoxic, but who knows? Maybe they’ll succeed where everyone else has failed. I certainly know we’re trying to have nontoxic social media around here, and we have plenty of issues at a much smaller scale.
We must have better moderation tools if we ever want this instance to grow.
Maybe, but social problems cannot entirely be solved with technology.
we have plenty of issues
I would venture to say that despite those issues, thanks to y’all’s moderation this space is non-toxic on the whole. It may be that size is a de-facto limit on maintaining a space like Beehaw, or it may be that we (as in, internet users) just haven’t figured out the best format/ structure for scaling up safely.
I think a microblogging platform that allows moderated, invite-only sub-groups (and which doesn’t show you any posts by users or groups you don’t subscribe to) could be a good step towards that. Sort of a combination of BlueSky feed + Beehaw communities/ FB groups. That could give you a Beehaw-like moderation experience in a microblog platform.
I think most microblogging platforms’ failure in this area likely stems from them being ad and engagement-driven, and their corporate “need” for users to be more and more active across “interest domains”, clashing with their users’ need to stay isolated from users who are toxic to them.
clashing with their users’ need to stay isolated from users who are toxic to them.
Sadly Lemmy does not solve this problem as the creators think like a corporation or do not want to be fully cut off from other users and thus do not have proper blocking (which is something built into ActivityPub mind you), for now it is only one way blocking which does not solve being isolated from toxic users as it still allows for some toxic behaviour etc.
If Lemmy ever gets that feature it would actually prove that it is dedicated to user safety, but a lot of people in the open source social media world seem to be ‘concerned’ with not being able to see everything due to entitlement, as others unrelated to Lemmy also are lacking the same or similar features.
