Mark Zuckerberg has a problem with your friends: they're the reason you signed up to use his platform, but they stubbornly refuse to organize your socialization to "maximize engagement." Every time you and your friends wrap up a social interaction and log off, Zuckerberg loses revenue.
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Pluralistic: Social media without socializing (19 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.
Aral Balkan (@aral@mastodon.ar.al)
Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are… So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that – cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is). Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social. That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.) The account, Identity Verified™ by EU X – sorry, W Social, was a spam account and immediately labelled as such by BlueSky moderators. (Don’t you love a “decentralised” system where a post on an EU server, accessed from another EU server, is moderated by our benevolent Big Brother in Trumpland, by the way? I know it just warms the cockles of my heart. So much sovereignty! But I digress…) So @_elena@mastodon.social calls them out (someone has to while @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu is busy preparing for their honeymoon after expressing their undying devotion to W Social recently on every social platform¹): https://mu.social/profile/elenarossini.com/post/3mqob7shxks2t Anna Zeiter – W CEO, Stanford’s own, and ex-eBay executive (such sovereignty) – replies with this absolute zinger: > “We are just verifying if some [sic] is a human and at least 18 years old. Users are then free to choose their own user name. This (human) user apparently chose the name TikTok.“ (https://mu.social/profile/anna.wsocial.eu/post/3mqoepm7m2k2z) Read that as many times as you like until it really sinks in. These incompetent clowns (dangerous competent clowns but incompetent clowns nevertheless) make people go through a ridiculous 13-step identity verification stage² and then… umm… you get to choose whatever identity you want. 🤡🤡🤡 Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re incompetent. It would be worse if they were competent, given they’re a closed-source venture-capital-funded startup determined to prove your identity. > “Yes we have a business model, it’s not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money.” – Anna Zeiter³ But, what I want to know is this: Why has @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu embraced a proprietary, closed-source, corporate ghost town with 14,300 accounts, 90% of which have not posted even once (in other words, with only 1,259 accounts that have ever posted)⁴ when there is a thriving non-corporate fediverse with millions of active people on it. Could it have anything to do with identity verification, surveillance, and control? And if so, why can’t they even get that right? Looking forward to seeing how long @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu can drag the corpse of W Social around before people realise it’s dead. Oh, and how does this make the whole “European alternatives” thing look? Not good. Not because there aren’t excellent European alternatives but because the folks at the commission are either too clueless or too corrupt to recognise and support them. So, yeah, how’s your Monday going? ¹ e.g., https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116770333053823108, etc. ² https://aseachange.com/@elena/statuses/01KVD55YBYVM3B46ACQTECDMT2 ³ https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-social-unconventional-beginnings-strategic-pitches-conflicting-signals/ (from the YouTube video that they since deleted. Nice transparency there, clowns.) ⁴ Run this script in Node 18+ to reproduce the numbers from their PDS yourself: https://codeberg.org/aral/gists/src/branch/main/wsocial-pds-stats.js Also see https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/ and https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/ #WSocial #EU #sovereignty #socialMedia #socialNetworking #mastodon #fediverse #activityPub #ATProto #startups #EUCommission
Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media
X and Facebook are governed by the policies of mercurial billionaires. Bluesky’s C.E.O., Jay Graber, says that she wants to give power back to the user.
Decentralized Social Media for 40 Million+ Users (with Bluesky’s Jay Graber)
FR#151 – TikTok Won’t Be Another Twitter
The conditions that made 'leaving Twitter' a meaningful part of the open social web's identity don't exist for TikTok. What happens when people can't see each other leave?
How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Explosive Growth (Published 2024)
The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users since the election. It hasn’t all been easy.
BlueSky - The Future of Social Media
Watch BlueSky's user base grow in real-time. Innovative, decentralized social networking is here!
Guide to Bluesky: Getting Started and Best Practices
With over 20 million users and growing, Bluesky offers transparency, control, and a breath of fresh air in the social media world. Are you ready to escape the toxicity and censorship of other platforms? Sign up now! #Bluesky 🚀🌐
Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.
Mark Zuckerberg Sure Sounds Eager to Get Young People Hooked on Online Gambling
The Meta CEO is developing a social network betting market app—and wants help from Polymarket and Kalshi.
Universal profiles on the open social web
One of the discussions we had during the community day ahead of Eurosky was about this notion of interchangeable user profiles in the Atmosphere / Open Social Web. @laurenshof.online even recorded the entire conversation so maybe there’s a transcript I could clean up for us? Anyhow, here’s the gist of it. Deferred profile Right now on roomy.space if you sign up with your existing Bluesky account, we will defer to that Bluesky profile for your profile in Roomy as well, essentially recognizing t...
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.
How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Explosive Growth
<blockquote><br /><strong><em>The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users since the election. It hasn’t all been easy.</em></strong></b...
Bluesky is not a social network or a product or a service, it is fundamentally a promise - a promise that you can decide — with others in your social geography — where you want to be in the digital world, and you don’t have to lose all of the bits that represent you in the process.
Aaron Ross Powell
Is Bluesky dying? Is it the community's fault? Should people here refrain from criticizing journalists who think J. K. Rowling might have a point? The thing is, it doesn't matter. Because the answer isn't to make Bluesky change. It's to take advantage of Bluesky's tech to build something else.
