This is pretty standard online though - even regular Google has settings like “Safe Search:On” that you can toggle to moderate your search results.
It really just depends on what the default settings are when you arrive at a service before you start using it, and how obvious and discoverable you make those settings controls.
Well, that’s the whole point of the whole thing. Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, which will be federated early this year. https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-15-2023-toward-federation
I know everyone likes to shit on all Social Media that isn’t called Mastodon, but that doesn’t mean Mastodon is the only option. I am on both (and Twitter a bit still too) but Bluesky is where I spend most of my time.
I like it over there. Of all the Twitter alternatives I think it ticks the right boxes.
If they can bridge their AT Protocol with ActivityPub then I don’t see why it can’t take off.
It’s more that it pops up in Image Searches all the time and it’s almost always a useless example of what you’re searching for.
It’s like the text version of Pinterest.
Honestly, I’m so jaded with this government that I just assume anything they announce is either just a disraction away from whatever ghastly thing they’re really doing or it’s some culturewar bait to stir up trouble.
Mastodon is great if you want a social media site that’ll have people shout at you for not putting a Content Warning on a post about you eating a ham sandwich.
I guess that advertising has been around for 100s of years. For the vast majority of history it’s been something people accept - nobody could avoid posters on the street, adverts in store windows and later it was adverts on the radio, in the cinema, then ads on TV… It’s only incredibly recently that people have had even the possibility of blocking ads, and even then it’s only a small subset of online adverts that can be blocked. Most ads (TV, radio, billboards, print…) are just as unavoidable and unblockqble as before.
Which basically means advertising has been part of people’s lives since the day all of us were born. Mostly folks just accept it, like we accept we have to spent 2 minutes every single morning brushing our teeth even though we wish there was a better way.
It’s just one of those tradeoffs. You can avoid that 2min every day but your life would be massively inconvenienced as a result (people would avoid you and you’d be in pain every day), and you can avoid ads by not using the internet, but life is inconvenienced as a result.
Facebook are an advertising platform. They only offer a paid tier because they now legally have to. They don’t really want you to take the paid tier, they want you to explicitly opt in to the ad-supported ‘free’ one. - because by specifically agreeing to "I want the free Facebook with ads’ option it means you’re actively choosing to be served ads, which is what all the recent lawsuits have been about - users giving explicit consent to be targeted for advertising.
Your default timeline view on Bluesky is just ‘posts from the people you’ve chosen to follow, in date/time order’. That’s the algorithm.
Everything else is optional and you can choose whatever other timelines or views you also want to see. If you only want to see the posts from people you follow then you don’t need to subscribe to any other feeds / algorithms.