I tried Bluesky a year or so ago, before this public opening. It felt like a mirror-universe version of what I imagine Truth Social is like: the vast majority of the posts were people approving each others' American left-leaning politics.
Even having gotten used to Mastodon - where every post has a chance of turning into a culture war and a good chunk of the posts are rants about politics that people don't agree with - I found it excessive as a non-American.
I have no issues with that kind of a site, I just didn't find anything there that would make the site interesting or worth returning to, for me. Spending some time on finding the "right" feeds and trying to curate my timeline didn't really help much either. Maybe the surge in popularity has helped with this issue though, with people actually posting stuff in other, non-political feeds.
It's plausible that the English vs Japanese toxicity difference also comes from this: political posts tend to be rant-y and negative even when people are agreeing with each other, and the English community developed from such a nucleus. Maybe the Japanese community didn't have any such initial influencing factors, and maybe developed more diverse, less toxic community overall.
> English content tends to have higher toxicity scores [...] on average, the toxicity of English content is three times higher than that of Japanese content
This is remarkable especially since section 4.3 says there are more Japanese posts compared to English posts after the public opening.
This is unsurprising, Japanese and English culture are incredibly different, with the former being far more (outwardly) respectful of each other and of the belief that you don’t rock the boat.
I would rather have toxic nonsense than a culture where you don't rock the boat.
Maybe it's just because I'm American, but I think most people have some amount of rebellion in them. It's necessary to look at other viewpoints if for no other reason than to know what alternatives exist.
But it's a false dichotomy. It's entirely possible to question authority while not engaging with and spreading "toxic nonsense." It really doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Yes, and we never said it’s “all or nothing”, you misunderstood that we said that when we said we would prefer an asshole who questioned authority compared to someone who did not question authority.
As someone who has been living in Japan for the last 6 years, I kind of agree with you. It might look like a very respectful culture at first, but you will soon realize that it is quite oppressive and has led to cultural stagnation. It is a country that doesn't deal with its problems, it just tries to hide them.
However, the toxicity and polarization that some Western countries have been evolving to is not good either. There should be a middle ground.
We already have decentralized social media. Make your own website with an RSS feed. It will be yours forever. You can post whatever you want. It is decentralized in that it can be shared anywhere else but you own the content.
> It will be yours forever. You can post whatever you want. It is decentralized in that it can be shared anywhere else but you own the content.
Unfortunately this is not the case. The current structure of the Internet is surprisingly fragile, and a dedicated attacker going after your website’s various network dependencies can cause a lot of headache. It’s rare, but it is still something important to note, especially if you have beliefs that are unsavory to those in power.
If your beliefs are merely that rich people should be eaten, you will have little problem finding a host. Even if you believe that all Jews should be immediately gassed, you will have little problem finding a host. The difficult hosting problems appear to come when your speech is immediately getting people killed, such as on Kiwifarms, but even they have managed to find a host.
They’re still having problems with Hurricane Electric and other telecoms, problems no legal website should be having. The fact that they could even have these problems is itself a big deal, considering this has never happened before in the history of the Internet.
And it was never that their speech was “immediately getting people killed” (which is an exaggeration given even their most liberal “kill count” isn’t even in the double digits), but that certain people with tech connections (who have been redacted on HN) don’t want their “consent accidents” on public websites.
I'm fine with websites that kill people having trouble finding an ISP. I see nothing wrong with that. That is not the result of sliding down any slope. In fact, there should be more penalties. Usually when people are killed we put the perpetrators in prison for life.
Generally for me, there's something amazing about having conversations available online for the world. Email really is more like a modernized mail system; yes it's about, but it misses the core strength of the internet & the web to be broadly available.
It again feels like a very ineffective way to socially network. It feels narrow cast. No one else is going to show up one day and contribute something to your email thread. It's again not very social, to me.
I like the fact that Bluesky is topic-agnostic, unlike a lot of the Mastodon instances which are organized by community (except some large ones such as mastodon.social). I always felt awkward of having to commit to a specific community upfront when signing up.
Some might argue that Mastodon lets you follow users on other instances, but my experience is that the federation depends on agreement between the instance operators, and it didn't work for the two instances I was using (mastodon.social and doll.social). It's also unclear if posting things that are off-topic to a particular instance is good etiquette.
when will people realize that most consumers don't care about the infrastructure of the product they're using. they don't care if it's on a single server, blockchain, yada yada. they really only care about the experience of using the product.
The decentralized social media drum has been going before this, but nobody is flocking to it. Nobody really seems to care. Facebook and X will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future.
This time it might be different. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are all terminally enshittified with no hope for reversal. A social media service that makes enshittification a technical impossibility has a lot of appeal in this context.
Hacker News is still a centralized forum, owned by a single company and run on a single server. Being niche doesn't make it decentralized, it's just as centralized as Reddit.
I'm not aware of an actually decentralized equivalent of what Hacker News is (basic threaded text forums) but that might be an interesting project for someone to build on an existing protocol.
the second link goes directly to the largest instance. It has all the same federated interoperability features that Mastodon or Bluesky have, but with a thread/topic format instead of a microblog format.
Decentralized means there are many centers and if you don't like one center you can go to another one - the system as a whole has no center. You are here on the non-reddit forum system, which has no single center, but rather one or more separate centers for each discussion topic, unlike the reddit system, which has one center.
You may be thinking of distributed systems, like blockchains, which have no centers at all. Nobody is using those for social media yet.
If your thesis is that simply having separate threads with different topics counts as being decentralized, then Reddit is decentralized because it has different subreddits for different discussion topics as well as different threads. And literally every other social media platform counts as well, for similar reasons.
The "center" that matters in this context is the server and owning entity, not the taxonomy of the content. Decentralized platforms aren't owned and operated by a single entity, centralized platforms are. You can't just spin up a new instance of Hacker News with different moderators and just federate with it, because "Hacker News" as a network is entirely owned and controlled by YCombinator. Not so with, say, "Mastodon."
Also yes unfortunately there are already multiple blockchain-based social media platforms.
No, you are on a separate SITE with different topics. One or more sites exist for each topic, run by different people. They all compete, with no obvious single center. You are on Hacker News to talk about technology, mostly software. To talk about mostly networking, you could go to #networking on Libera. To talk about raising fish, you could go to I don't know where. Let's stick to those two examples I do know - why do you think that Hacker News is "the center" of the non-Reddit forum ecosystem, and #networking on Libera is not "the center"?
He goes over everything else required to be truly distributed... The multiple PDS's isn't everything. But it's been a lot of progress. Decentralization & walking away remains a focus. And there's a fairly strong 3rd party developer community that's very promising.
(Personal note, your post in my view contains reprehensible & gross mud-sling & slant. Holier than thou left-leaning academics itself sounds like a really judgemental case of projection.)
I have no issues with that kind of a site, I just didn't find anything there that would make the site interesting or worth returning to, for me. Spending some time on finding the "right" feeds and trying to curate my timeline didn't really help much either. Maybe the surge in popularity has helped with this issue though, with people actually posting stuff in other, non-political feeds.
It's plausible that the English vs Japanese toxicity difference also comes from this: political posts tend to be rant-y and negative even when people are agreeing with each other, and the English community developed from such a nucleus. Maybe the Japanese community didn't have any such initial influencing factors, and maybe developed more diverse, less toxic community overall.