Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

(For those that know them, this is PhotographOtter and Hiyu. Not sure if they intersect with circles here, but they're both wonderful folks.)

Unrelated to the previous, two friends just got the story of their kidney donation into the Sundance Film Festival: https://bsky.app/profile/joeahunting.bsky.social/post/3ldgvku5e6s2x

Honestly I'm most happy that the operation has worked out for both of them, but this is the second best news I've heard out of the whole thing, and am looking forward to watching it with them.

This article explains the situation better than I ever can, especially the parts about growing up online (my community being therian- and furry-adjacent, and their own journey resonates): https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

Postscript: an alternate hypothesis being floated for why Bsky is doing this: they're scared of the orange and X shitlords burying Bsky in expensive litigation and/or hostile government action (eg, requires login: https://bsky.app/profile/insortediaboli.bsky.social/post/3ldb23jr4vs2f ). In that scenario, they're trying to make themselves less of a target in the short term, to kick this down the road until a more favorable legal or political reality.

IMO, if Bsky or AtProto can't navigate that, they have a huge problem. And if they're afraid of a reality in which social media sites are litigated or regulated out of existence outside of sites sanctioned by rightwing billionaires, well.

One: decentralized solutions will survive. Folks will find a way to keep hosting and posting, even in a regressive and repressive US.

Two: that tells us the problem isn't engineering or Bsky, it's rightwing billionaires and their ability to buy power.

Anyway, to kind of summarize here: I think engagement is a terrible metric.

It's central to this idea that, from a website's perspective, people are monetizable eyeballs whose only useful output is growth and, eventually, buying product (and generating derivative revenue getting there, like ads).

And I'm... sort of relieved that there are still plenty of places to go that still care about the qualities of the website and community instead.

Contrast this with some of the observations made here (and to some degree, its followup) about Google Search: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

When your goal condition isn't giving people results, it's keeping them on the website as long as possible, your incentive becomes maximizing search time and making it hard to leave. Except for ad clickstreams, of course.

This is core to why sites choose to platform bad actors. Conflict keeps people on the site.

Person on the blue site gets it: "moderation only has limits when engagement starts looking like dollar signs": https://bsky.app/profile/brentosaur.bsky.social/post/3ld7je2uhi226

So much of this is sourced from the ads industry having power, where keeping people on a single website _is_ the revenue model. It's how these sites carve out power where relevance (eg, distribution) was once the metric, and you see it everywhere now.

It also signals Bsky wants to make people the product again.

Anyway, this and my general discomfort over running my online presence like a content mill means I'm staying with Masto for the long term, I think.

Goddamn, if they're already splitting hairs over platforming anti-trans voices, their site really is speedrunning the downfall of Twitter.

Trust and Safety my ass. The whole reason people are there is because Twitter chose to platform nazis and became a nazi bar. You don't immediately screw this up by equivocating about personal responsibility and block tools. You ban the nazis so they don't get a foothold in the first place.

It's still absolutely wild to me that I can kitbash something together in Blender in less than a day, put it on a little wafer of Flash memory, and have a tiny robot 3D print it for me in a matter of hours.

Being able to make and print tiny 3D dragons and costume parts from my own designs is the future I actually want.

So I wrote a long post about my thoughts on Bsky being where the party atmosphere is right now, then stowed it because it condenses to this:

Modeling your entire online existence around a single website is terrible, no matter how good the vibes are today. While the vibes in a new places are high, we should carry them with us to smaller communities. And when they sour, we should become comfortable with being digital nomads. That way, when Bsky follows the trajectory of Twitter (or certain Masto instances go dark, etc etc), we can continue to exist and thrive.

Also, let's never repeat the era in which Twitter was too big to fail but no alternatives readily existed. That really fucking sucked.

Folks at the time specifically harped on Nintendo for its online perspective being naive and outdated, and to be fair, it was!

But in a world in which an always-on internet connection with vendor software updates means ever more elaborate ways to sneak in ads, rent you your own data, and exfiltrate your data to soulless content farms, a device with community updates, simple tools, the ability to post, and the ability to stay fully offline is the absolute best thing.

So far, my antidote to commercial software trying to sell me on increasingly more dubious AI has been to go back to creative software I enjoyed a decade ago. Which specifically means I've been spending a lot more time on my 2DS XL messing around with Colors! 3D and Pokemon Art Academy again. (I also plan to mess with Flipnote again at some point.)

I'm also very amused that Pretendo Miiverse is absolutely thriving, including and especially around the community for Splatoon 1.