181 points

I looked at the terms of service and noticed that they bind you into arbitration, limit your terms to $100, mandate you to travel to Delaware for dispute, and force you into mass arbitration if your dispute is similar to others.

Pass

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53 points

Unfortunately that’s standard for pretty much every service in existence until the government determines otherwise or the users demand it en masse. No company is going to willingly expose themselves to any more risk than they absolutely have to. There’s zero benefit to them.

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30 points

Let’s not call disabling the right to sue a “business risk”. That’s like calling the right to stop paying for the service a “risk” - it’s riskdiculous.

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17 points

Let’s not call disabling the right to sue a “business risk”.

…and why not?

That’s like calling the right to stop paying for the service a “risk”

But…that’s what it is? I promise if they could remove that risk with a few words in the TOS, and it was legal, they’d all be doing that too.

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10 points

By “business risk”, they just mean bad for the business, ethics aside

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12 points

And we should just accept that?

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10 points

Doesn’t matter if you should or not. Point is you accept it or you don’t use any service whatsoever.

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5 points

I don’t think forced arbitration has really been tried in court. I remember Disney kind of trying, but it was completely unrelated (e.g. argued that arbitration agreement from Disney+ applied to issues on physical Disney properties).

In order to hold up in court, the contract needs to reasonably benefit both parties instead of only the contract issuer. So there’s a very good chance a court will dismiss the forced arbitration clause, especially if it’s just in a EULA and not a bidirectional contract negotiation.

That said, I tend to avoid services with binding arbitration statements in their EULA, and if I can’t, I avoid companies that force acceptance of EULA changes to continue use of the service.

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5 points

Well I know someone tried it against Valve and they ended up removing the requirement.

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30 points

While I understand that, I’m in America. My first priority has to be getting people off of Twitter.

Would I prefer open source, non-profit software? 100%. It’s the smarter and better choice for so many reasons.

But if Bluesky is going to gain critical mass, I’m not going to fight it. I’m having a hard enough time getting people off Twitter. I’ve written the media address of environments I’m familiar with asking them to organize a move, and I mentioned both Bluesky and Mastodon.

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2 points

Good take. Bluesky is a good stop-gap.

I’ve also been thinking, if Bluesky never federates and enshittifies in a similar way to Twitter (which it will do much faster, just cause it’s a different era), then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important…

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2 points

then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important…

or people will have lost the ability to imagine alternative and better places…

…which is where we come in to make sure they don’t forget!

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18 points

Arbitration of what? It’s a free service. What money could they possibly owe you?

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36 points

If the mods or admin do something that causes you injury, such as ignoring requests that will prevent harassment.

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-7 points

…how would them ignoring requests cause injury??? We’re still talking about bluedky, right? The online twitter clone without musk as it’s main selling point?

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23 points

You’re not thinking evil enough, honestly. Two examples off the top of my head, each being fairly innocent mistakes: If you enter your phone number for 2FA, it’s not going to be public-facing. It’s their responsibility to keep that information private from internal and external threats. Ok, so what if it leaks… right? Oh, it turns out the hacker SIM swapped your phone number for the 2FA, and did a password reset on your account via support chat. Still no big deal, its just social media… Except you’ve been giving updates to all your patreon backers on your project that’s shipping soon. It suddenly vanishes off the internet, replaced with a crypto scheme, and all your supporters just flooded your bank with chargebacks. Your attempts at getting your account back are met with silence and your supporters are now furious. Was any of that your fault? No. You get $100.

Let’s try another example: Bounty programs are used by companies to collect bugs and other possibly exploits so they can be fixed. “Too expensive, nobody will know if there’s a bug anyway.” So the app on Google Play store gets installed by 30 million users with a critical flaw… if a very specific image is opened in it, the phone bricks. All the news sites cover the bug, pushing the image to the front page. You open the app and… Your expensive phone just died. Were you at fault for that? No. You get to join the arbitration group and get an individual settlement of $12.

Think more evil. Don’t stick with the “I have nothing to lose” because you almost always have something to lose. The fact these terms were even thought of and written means you do have a financial investment in the platform.

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8 points
*

That’s why 2FA via phone number shouldn’t be a thing

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9 points

You have nothing to hide. Just sign away all your rights.

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7 points

They can break data protection laws and stuff…

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-7 points

Ok…and why would they pay YOU that money? Wouldn’t it be companies and governments they pay?

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16 points

During signup, they make it sound like it’s a federated service. It is not. Dumped it when it was explained to me.

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5 points

Off topic, but I pointing this out reminded me of visiting some ancap circles to see the crazy stuff they discuss. At one point there was a question about how externalities would be handled in their system of private courts and such. When ever I do read some terms and conditions there is almost always something in regard to arbitration. Predictably they were not happy about someone pointing that out and explaining that it is for the benefit of corporations not the customers.

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4 points

Funny, someone shared an article in another post about all corporate money going to Delaware, https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2022/06/delaware-is-everywhere-how-a-little-known-tax-haven-made-the-rules-for-corporate-america/

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70 points
*

Mastodon has around 1 million active users³ Bluesky has around 3.5 million active users²

Bluesky doesn’t have a decent way to see active user count, but it is likely higher than 3 million

Mastodon retains 10%, Bluesky retains 10% also, but I can’t confirm it

Edit: Using unique likes, it shows about 2 million active users on each day¹

Source:

Bsky Analytics¹ • Bsky Stats² • Mastodon Analytics³

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68 points

What annoys me is that people are buying the idea that BlueSky is federated.

Not only is it not federated, the very architecture they designed means that it’s probably not federateable, at least not by normal users.

The way they designed it, a relay is required to collect and forward every single BlueSky post. That means, as the service grows, it becomes more and more impossible for anybody but a company to run a relay. Someone did some calculations back in November when it was a significantly smaller network, and they calculated that at a minimum it costs a few hundred dollars, possibly as much as 1000 bucks a month just to handle the disk storage needs for a relay on a leased server. The more the network grows, the more those costs skyrocket.

What good does it do to have a network that theoretically can be federated, but practically costs so much to run a single node that nobody except a for-profit company can manage it?

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11 points

Sounds like the protocol equivalent of regulatory capture.

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10 points

I’m not familiar with Blue sky, do they advertise as federated or how exactly do they claim to differ from a regular platform like original Twitter?

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14 points

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture

And reading an article from TechCrunch,

“The social network has a Twitter-like user interface with algorithmic choice, a federated design and community-specific moderation.”

“Is Bluesky decentralized? Yes. Bluesky’s team is developing the decentralized AT Protocol, which Bluesky was built atop.”

“However, the launch of federation will make it work more similarly to Mastodon in that users can pick and choose which servers to join and move their accounts around at will.”


So it definitely is pitching that is it decentralized and federated. Maybe the argument is that it “will be”, but at the moment it is not and at the moment it does not look like it will be an actual possibility.

Now people leaving Twitter is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s possibly just kicking the can down the road. In a few years we’ll likely have articles complaining about missing “Old Bluesky” and how “new Bluesky” has the exact same problems that “Old Twitter” had.

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2 points

Thanks for you detailed and cited response. Very clear!

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2 points
*

Maybe the argument is that it “will be”, but at the moment it is not

Hey, I have a couch you should buy, it isn’t comfy right now but trust me, im a random stranger and I promise you on my word that after you buy it one day soon I will come back and fix it up so it is the comfiest couch ever!

Also maybe like somebody could make a non-profit to add features to the couch my business already sold customers on with marketing hype!

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9 points
*

Weird, I had a bluesky add-on on my experimental friendica installation and have not noticed any messages other than the ones people I followed participated in.

I have since deleted it, so cannot figure out what they have done differently.

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2 points

And that’s the kicker. Bluesky can never be meaningfully decentralized.

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1 point

I guess it could allow multiple funding models. Instance A is ad supported, instance B is a paid service. Not exciting for us self hosters, but there is possibility there.

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65 points

Nice. Glad to see people leaving xitter en mass.

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20 points

I feel like we’re going to have a similar issue a couple of years or decades down the line with Bluesky. People would be better off on the Fediverse instead.

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20 points

No, this time will be different, I swear!

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13 points

And that’s fine. What the exodus to Bluesky is doing is making it easier for people to stomach switching to similar platforms, so if Bluesky also went to shit, the inertia is much lower for people to abandon it.

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12 points
*

People are atleast getting used to the @username@instance thing through bluesky… That would make mass exodus to fediverse in future easier (if that ever happens)

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7 points

the issue with that is the fediverse isn’t the easiest thing to sign up for. and the fediverse needs explaining pre-sign up for most people.

listen I have both bluesky and mastodon so I get you. but for now, bluesky is at least not the platform of an angry nazi man child. (at least not yet).

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62 points

Another corporate social media platform, what could go wrong?

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11 points

I can’t wait for them to bring in ex CIA/IDF types to “clamp down on disinformation”.

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4 points

What do you think the closed beta was for? It was so they can get in and get on the moderator roster

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8 points

It is less than ideal.
I only hope that it gets people used to the idea that you can leave a platform and the sky wont fall down. Sooner or later these guys will try a federated service and learn that protocols > platforms (in this case activitypub).

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