Just around 24 hours after Musk made his comments, more than 42,000 new users joined Bluesky, making it the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year.
Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19. The new users gained in that single day make up 5 percent of the platform’s entire user base of 1,125,499 total accounts.
The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website “Bluesky Stats.” Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.
It’s impossible to know whether Musk’s comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.
Great another social media platform from the same fart huffing dumb asses that sold Twitter… it’s like people don’t learn lessons.
Americans be like “I like fascism I just don’t like THIS fascism”
FYI jack isn’t in control of the site and in fact even deleted his account after the userbase mocked him hard enough, he’s all in on nostr now
Also it has federation in testing in a sandbox environment open to external developers, it will work similarly to Mastodon in that regard
“Mr Dorsey, ypur new platform is picking up, people are starting to use it”
“… I’m bored”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want to have a social platform. I just want to make them” *Starts to leave*
“Mr. dorsey? Where are you going? Jack!?”
“Federation”, yeah…
it will work similarly to Mastodon in that regard
Nope, it works more similar to MTProto for Telegram.
Uhm no not at all, 3rd party servers already exists and people can talk across them, telegram has no relevance here
I love that I mentioned fart huffing and you automatically assumed I meant Jack.
I learned today that you’d have to be confined in a small room with approximately a year’s worth of farts before you risk asphyxiation.
Not my farts, that’d only take about a month
TIL
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Cheer up, mastodon also gained 30000+ new users in the last two days
Edit: Source: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
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masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.
And? Servers are inter-operable.
Until your home instance defederates from another instance. Sure, you can always make another account, but your average user wants a lower friction experience.
I’m reasonably active in the fediverse, but I recognize that the more explaining it takes to the average user the less likely they’re going to want to join in.
The old old top gear cool wall tried to hit on this concept. You could have a very technically excellent car classified as uncool because if you had to explain why it was cool to a normie you had already lost them.
It will be hard for the fediverse to get over this hump, which is probably why you see so many Linux users here and so few say woodworkers or other (somewhat) more niche communities.
Most average people would never notice defederation unless you told them. It’s pretty frictionless and drama free.
The niche communities are always the last to come. It’s why they’re niche. That techie people are the first is nothing damming. It’s always been that way for every service.
That’s a good point. Branding is done for a reason. When I buy a car, I don’t need to know which companies made each and every component, it’s enough for me to know that “Audi” made it.
I guess if someone made an easy entry-point for users to sign up, that became the defacto way to start with Lemmy, then it would have a lower barrier to entry. Maybe it asks them some likes/dislikes, and then it would route them to the most appropriate instance to sign up.
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Honestly I think Mastodon needs a third party app that makes it feel more like Twitter, similar to how reddit apps are switching to lemmy. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there were any third party Twitter apps that had the name recognition of the reddit ones.
THere were a few but they got bought (eg. tweetdeck).
There are also 3rd party apps for mastodon that a lot of people like, and they try. But for many people, mimicking the parts of Twitter they value is difficult to do without proper backend support for supporting algorithms, and even then the way activitypub works it still makes it difficult to support for most developers.
Two of the key features are discovering new or related content, which is hard to do in mastodon as it needs to calculate similarity across all of the profiles and their content in order to make recommendations – or collect data like your cell contacts to help you connect with people you already know. Most people don’t want contact sharing, and indexing all of the recommended profiles, especially across federated servers is challenging.
The second is engagement based recommendations. Many social media users aren’t incredibly active. They want to open the app in specific moments to quickly catch up with everything since they last opened the app. To do this well, you need to know what they’ve engaged with and look back at content since they last logged on and rank it based on that. People may follow 1000 people, but really care about maybe 30-40 accounts the most. Friends, family, specific journalists or famous people. Mastodon just gives you like a sample of the last 50 or so items. If you follow anyone super active, you may just get a lot of noise in those updates.
Obviously, there are times when everyone wants a linear timeline, but it depends upon their daily use.
Literally. The android app is superb. It has come a long way with Material You theming, smoothness, and stuff. Compare that to the crap you would call twitter, X or whatever.
Mastodon is for mentally ill people :/ bsky ftw
It’s also controlled by another crypto shill, so it has that in common with Twitter too.
isn’t bluesky invite only?
Each current member usually get at least one invite to share biweekly. That’s how they have been growing it.
Google+ did the same thing when it rolled out, then they tried to force people to use it before they cancelled the project.
In fairness, Gmail had a similar invite system when it launched and that’s been way more successful than G+
Gmail was also both “federated” and an insanely good product compared to its contemporaries. G+ had a couple of interesting innovations, but it wasn’t all that special and invite-only on a closed ecosystem is very iffy.
Gmail was literally the best. 1GB space at launch when you’d get a dozen MB in Hotmail and others, slick fast UI in a browser.
And you got more space the longer you had the account! Then everyone got the same no matter what. I was sad to loose all that free space.
“Never delete an email”. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
IIRC, that was rolled out as a surprise after a few years. People were just like, “WTF, my capacity is getting bigger?”. For a while there, Goggle could do no wrong from a marketing standpoint. That, uhh, changed.
Hotmail was 2mb.
It was ad free which was amazing for a social media site at that time. No banners, no pop ups, just content.
Gmail was invite only at first probably because Google didn’t want it to grow faster than they could buy hard drives. It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge. I’m certain they did that for technical reasons.
It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge.
You’re right, but for those who may not know the details or the impact at the time, Google was offering 500x more storage - at the free tier - than some of the competition - hotmail - who were charging people for just 10 MB of storage. This forced hotmail to increase its free tier to 250 MB and 2 GB for customers paying $20 USD/year.
It’s hard to explain what an absolute paradigm shift Gmail was. It was about as drastic a difference as you could have with personal email without altering the core service. Orders of magnitude more storage, completely free to the end user, a responsive and usable web interface, a single unobtrusive 1-line text ad when we were used to at least half a dozen that were often full-size banners or even popups, and a good search tool.
My wife (then fiancee) got us invites, and it was like Christmas. And all from the company that was way less creepy than Microsoft! I’m sure that part would never change.
Might Bluesky be doing the same?
Slow roll until the infrastructure can handle it and a little bit of that “exclusive” feel to it since not everyone can just join immediately.
So more Gmail than G+
Yeah they’re working hard on scaling, they’ve had recurring performance issues but have managed to get it stable again even with higher load now
It’s also easier to find and fix bugs with smaller numbers of people, especially performance bugs which can be amplified at scale. So it gives them a lot of time to work through issues over the beta. It also gives them time to build teams around the expanding infrastructure and build processes for monitoring and handling issues as a larger team.
Plus, these invite only periods start with more tech savy early adopters who more willing to put up with issues, and willing to provide decent bug reports to fix them.
“i am the choosen one!” As if…
Boy, our servers are ducktaped!
So, in the shape of a pyramid? Sounds like a good business model. I wonder if anyone has ever done that before? (yes, it’s a joke)
Yup. I have a bunch of invites (for sane people only)
Uhh… I can’t prove I’m sane, but a DM would be nice…!
This guy is crazy! Don’t listen to him!
Welp. Was worth a shot…
I would love one if you have a spare.
I would love an invite if you have any left
I’d love an invite if it’s still available (:
If I could have one, I’m waiting for months now. :(
I requested an invite a couple of months ago when I downloaded the app. Wish someone would invite me!
It says that in the first sentence
lol they didn’t even bother reading the lemmy description. 😂
Yes, that’s part of what’s surprising about the number.
Yes but I’m sure many recorded invites and didn’t bother. Musk musking TSFKAT ( the-site-formerly-known-as-twitter) was the needed motivation to accept it.
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I would prefer not to use the letter in any form.
Fuck Ruskie Muskie
Xitter (pronounced shitter)
I didn’t bother and was gonna give it a walk around. Downloaded but can’t access without an invite.
I’ve been trying to get an invite since June.
Apparently if you ask, you’re not good enough or some shit.
You’re not missing anything. I eventually got an invite, found that 40% of the content was furry and I deleted my account.
Invite only is a fascinating choice for a social network that requires network effect to succeed.
Gmail is the most famous/successful example but interesting to note that email is a federated network that can interoperate with every other email address too.
What about this bluesky network?
I wonder why people aren’t going for mastodon.
Mastadon (and the Fediverse in general, to some extent) has problems with discoverability and the average user finds federation confusing. People tend to either use microblogging to see what’s going on with people they’re interested in or to broadcast their activities to a large group of people, and Mastadon currently doesn’t fit that niche very well.
Pretty much this. It’s why I love it for my use case (microblogging journal that only I can see), but it’s definitely not for everyone else.
It’s why if your average influencer or news consumer wants a Twitter alternative, it’s likely Threads or perhaps BlueSky, not Mastodon.
The same reason people aren’t going for Lemmy.
Aside from the fact that the Fediverse is an incredibly confusing concept to the average user, those same users are entrenched and connected to everyone they already want to be connected to on the same platform. Until they are essentially forced to move, they’ll stay on Twitter. The people on Lemmy and Mastodon right now are a tiny but vocal minority compared to the massive userbases of the platforms they abandoned.
Yeah there really needs to be a rethink of how the Fediverse works.
I don’t want to have to subscribe to 8 different “Games” subs each with under 3000 users.
It really should be like “topics” more than “sublemmys” (or whatever) where every post on the Fediverse tagged “games” will appear on your feed when you subscribe to the topic.
The topics still get moderated by the local instance topic moderators and instances can defederate from troubled instances, but discoverability would improve exponentially.
Maybe how it could work is sublemmies could agree to link up and share posts so for example the posts from one games sub would appear in the other games sub and vice versa.
It seems the limitation with the topics idea is who would decide what the topics are? Would there just be a list of like 20 topics baked into Lemmy and people that create sublemmies would tag their sub with a topic? I think the only limitation with that is there would be so many niche subs that don’t fit cleanly into one topic, or will be drowned out by the big subs in there maybe. Maybe it could work though if anybody could create new topics, then there could be a Fallout for example with the Fallout subs being in that rather than having to be in the games topic and being drowned out
Yeah it sorta needs to be back to hashtags to tag content so that it can all be in a community despite being in different instances and subs. It’s really disjointed and currently the fediverse feels like we went back to AOL chat rooms where it’s a lot of people waiting in their own room for someone to come in and talk to them.
It doesn’t work and it doesn’t really inspire conversation anymore.
Yeah it is like that unfortunately. I mean the larger subs are fine but the niche ones just aren’t working on Lemmy atm and some way of addressing the sub splintering would help a lot. And yeah hashtags would probably be a solid way of addressing it.
Aside from the fact that the Fediverse is an incredibly confusing concept to the average user
How did the average user ever figure out email?
Was a open source platform run on donations entirely ever be a competition for something huge like Twitter? This is a first afaik.
I’d say Bitcoin is a bigger example.
yeah but like yesn’t. bitcoin isn’t a good example imo
How so? A decentralized open source platform with no owner which has a 500B market cap and 220 millions users.
I feel like that’s exactly what we are talking about. I understand the negative sentiment over crypto, but this is a fact.
Or maybe the difference is that it hasn’t stifled some competitor platform yet. I can agree with that because it’s not a parallel in that it’s competing with nothing.
Do people either make money or think they’ll make money simply by using the Fediverse? One can certainly advertise via guerrilla marketing on a Fediverse platform but it’s far more lucrative to advertise on mainstream social media.
Are you saying brands don’t want to come to the fediverse to market their products? I mean if that’s true that seems like a good thing, and even if it wasn’t I’m sure they would once Lemmy/Mastadon are big enough
I’m on there, but I use Twitter and mastodon as a follower, I don’t post. So until most of the 40ish people I follow move I’m stuck with Twitter if I want to see their posts. And I do.
depending on how popular the user is on Twitter, you may be able to follow them on Mastodon via https://bird.makeup/. I use it to follow things like larger content creators, NHL teams, stuff like that.
Oh interesting. I was unaware.
different features and scalability
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Congratulations of joining mastodon today. 😆
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Not only is it open, but you can check it out yourself and install right from source if you really want to get under the hood.
I’ve seen folks out there running a 1-person masto instance, just so they can partake in the fedi from their own fully sovereign platform. Bit extreme for me, but cool that it’s an option. Definitely not just another FB in other words
EDIT: Oh dang there’s a one-click app on DO even.
Have you at all attempted to look? It’s open source.
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What is why it is not being “downloaded”? It seems you don’t actually understand how it works. You realize we are talking on a federated network right now, yeah? You must be trolling.
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Since you appear to be talking about a Mastodon mobile app and not the Mastodon network a fair bit of negative reviews are about many of the mobile apps blocking access to Gab. Gab switched to a Mastodon back end back in 2019 or so and several of the apps started to blacklist using that instance at the app level as a consequence. Usually negative reviews about that will refer to “the largest Mastodon instance”, which Gab actually was by sheer numbers.
There was even an issue request to hardcode blacklisting Gab into the backend, though they were basically told no in no uncertain terms.
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Point it out and share it with everyone. That’s what FOSS is all about. I bet you won’t.
Of course they won’t. They’re shilling their own product which is a competitor to Mastodon.
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I was interested in it but at the end of the day Dorsey got Twitter into its initially mediocre state, and he’s endorsed RFK Jr. as well as Musk’s purchase of Twitter. So should I really expect it to be any better? I’ll keep an eye on it but my expectations aren’t terribly high.
and he’s endorsed RFK Jr.
Gross. Yeah Dorsey sucks generally.
as well as Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
But I don’t hold this part against him. If some moron came along and offered to drastically overpay for my house, for example, I’d endorse the fuck out of that even if he’s a shitheel.
“I have never met Elon, and by all accounts he is terrible. However, I have seen the yacht that he paid for, and it is terrific.”
Did you not read the text messages between them? Jack was being a real fan boy
Of course he’s endorsed Musk purchasing Twitter, he made billions off it
I signed up just to see the hype, and it’s the same boring Twitter, with less commitment. People just grabbing namespace.
Excuse me, signups on an INVITE ONLY platform?
I have few invites if anyone needs
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Any chance you have any more? I’d love one
I’d like one if still available, please.
bsky-social-6yprh-qgtd3
I d like one if you can spare one
If you still have any, I’d appreciate one.
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I could make use of one of those invites. Thank you.
Would appreciate one :)
bsky-social-ylgua-e7m7l
I think other miscreants have already swiped it :(
Did you check all 5
Yes
Bad luck then
Ot makes no sense,
I firmly believe Elon is trying to run Twitter out of relevancy, or business entirely.
Lose $42 billion speed run challenge
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I didn’t know a coffee shop owner was so rich.
Who holds WR in EU%? You know, where endgame is getting wrecked by anti-monopoly agency.
I agree but I don’t understand why. What motivated him to sink 1/4th of his net worth into Twitter then kill it?
Knowing this nutter he’s probably doing it so people can’t talk about the crappy Tesla QC.
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The jet tracker
-
Twitter is a huge place where leftists organize
-
Probably wants to pull a reddit and push Trump
- I wouldn’t say that. It was filled with far-right and some people who like others to suffer and bring to suicide indie game developers.
It’s also used by fascists but there have been a lot of genuine leftist organizing going down deep in the cracks of that hellsite.
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The lawsuit he was destined to lose. Why do people here so often act like this was his masterplan all along? He fucked around and tried to back out, then Twitter sued him into buying the company. From what I can tell this is just Musk being Musk, reportedly he has surrounded himself with yes-men.
If that were true, the investors who paid him billions for the take over will want his head on a spike.
If you’d know who these investors are, you’d know running twitter to ground is their goal at this point as well
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Plausible deniability, combined with opportunism. If they brought it, and shut it down, it would be painfully obvious. This could cause significant problems or pushback on them. Musk being an idiot provided an opportunity to them. They back musk, and he makes it non viable, however he wants. All the public outrage gets focused onto musk (who likes the attention).
I still can’t decide between the 2 options. Either musk is just THAT big of an idiot, or if it’s the result of some backroom deal. Both seem feasible.
Ok, but why though? How do you make money when the stock value is falling?
The theory is they’re not trying to make money, but is trying to make it harder to use Twitter for organizing protests or share ideas that threaten their status quo.
Interesting. So are you saying there’s government money behind this?
Biggest investor is Saudi Arabia.
Ok, so this is just a way to prevent another Arab spring from happening. Seems like a smart move until you realize that people have lots of alternative platforms too. It’s a bit more fragmented, so organizing a demonstration on mastodon probably won’t get that big that fast.
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I suspect that might have been their intent but they didn’t tell Musk. They knew him doing his best would be enough to tank it.
Yeah, his ego won’t allow him to fail with grace.
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The biggest funders are the Saudis, who hate Twitter for the way it allowed communication during The Arab Spring. 42 billion is nothing to them. They want Twitter to die, or be run the way the want it.
I think his Saudi funders are pleased.
As Twitter is a big PR tool for Ukraine he’s again doing Putin a favour.
what the fuck is Bluesky
Always good to see more people looking into platforms besides Twitter, plenty of great places out there
Until they sell that platform too and you have to grow your follower base somewhere else yet again.
Bluesky has federation in testing in a sandbox open to external developers, already interoperating with 3rd party implementations
has federation
Hahaha, no. It’s like MTProto in Telegram, but without being honest that it’s centralized.
Every single component have 3rd party implementations or an alternative which doesn’t depend on them (standard account DID lookups go through their servers but web DID is fully independent). The options he says nobody will create ALREADY EXISTS
The protocol literally doesn’t allow them to be gatekeepers.
The protocol literally doesn’t allow them to be gatekeepers.
Authentication is heavily tied to their servers
You can initialize your account with your own DID key using web DID instead of the current (technically placeholder DID) and you won’t be dependent on their servers for authentication. Especially in the federation sandbox that’s available for 3rd parties
From what you say I can approximate how it will go. First perpetual in-dev federation, then once they get enough people, they will say “not enough interest in federation” and stop development or pull the plug completely.
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It’s not even Fediverse either. It’s their own protocol. Can’t even really federate much either.
They have federation on in their sandbox network with 3rd party clients already working, but it’s not going to talk activitypub
Non-activitypub federated protocols? Who is even the 3rd party in this instance? Nostr?
Nostr is a wildly different protocol from atprotocol and activitypub.
Activitypub is very much like email (SMTP) over http, pushing messages between servers. Atprotocol is instead using a model of a repository with profile and posts per user on federated servers along with aggregation servers (CDN-ish) and a pull model for retrieval. Nostr is a P2P protocol with “gossip nodes”
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Everyone should defederate from bluesky
They don’t use AP, so there is no federation to begin with.
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They don’t intend do use open protocol. And it’s more centralized than you expect.
They do have an open protocol (atprotocol) but it’s not compatible with anything existing
Yeah and also Gmail should defederate Skype.
… Wait what’s that it’s different protocols? Oh well
People are so desperate for anything RESEMBLING twitter, that they’ll sign up for a trash service like BS.
Mastodon undoubtedly has more brand recognition at this point.
Honestly, before reading this comment I never noticed that BlueSky shortens to BS, lol
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I wouldn’t hold my breath, 42k out of 528M is nothing
I’m so glad people are calling Bluesky out for the trash service it is. I just mastodon outlasts this crap and we get more people on there than bluesky
What’s wrong with Blue sky?
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Yeah, but they work until someone decides to fuck it up. Federation isn’t the holy grail you think it is.
Admins (often a very very small group if not a single person managing an instance) still make unilateral decisions about federation and content or the very existence of that instance, and if your home instance suddenly defederates or goes poof, too bad, time to start over on a different instance with a new account with the exact same risks or maintain multiple accounts.
If this sounds familiar, it’s awfully similar to what reddit did with their API by cutting off access points to content which is why most of us are here. Same shit, different shade of brown.
Having been active on mastodon.lol and watching it get shuttered because the admin didn’t have teeth in the game shows how dangerously fragile the fediverse can be. My engagement with Mastodon as a whole has been less since mastodon.lol shut down. You can move accounts but you can’t move posts and 301s only work until the instance is gone.
I have to agree. Federation only goes a little way on the path to a proper decentralized social media system. Ideally, defederation should not be possible, and rather, community subscription should be the norm without concern over what instance it exists on.
I’m not saying it should become Usenet, but it should be more similar to Usenet than it is now.
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Oh, but mastodon doesn’t have a good algorithm like Twitter it is hard to switch
The whole point of Mastodon not having an algorithm to show you things is to put the user in control of what kind of content they want to see.
Why do you need an algorithm to tell you what you are interested in? You go on Mastodon and subscribe to what you want to.
Mastodon has algorythms. Otherwise it couldn’t display the posts in the right orders, by example.
You’re right. That word has always been kind of dumbly used as a replacement for something like, “feed manipulation controlled by corporate interests”. Every computer application uses algorithms in some way.
Because it’s hard to find things, the normal person is used to an algorithm
I remeber Facebook before algorithms took over.
You friended and followed things, and then you’d see content from those things only in either chronological order or by recent activity. People loved it and as “the algorithm” took over people complained that they were no longer being served the content they wanted and expected and were also seeing content they did not want to see from stuff they had never followed or shared interest in.
Fuck the magical algorithm that’s tailored to serve me divisive content because that is what drives the most engagement. Or serves me content to sway my political and moral opinions to the benefit of some wannabe oligarch or government entity (looking at you TikTok/CCP).
CEO is a musk toesucker.
And of cource i misread that as “CEO is Mr. mark toesucker”
If you run “Mark Zuckerberg” through google translate a few dozen times I’m sure it’ll spit that out at some point
Who is the target audience for BlueSky?BlueSky’s tech isn’t as open or developed as the alternatives though, is it?Edit:
Not sure why I asked that first question, answer’s obvious, so it was more out of frustration I think. Sort of in a similar way towards people moving to Threads or any other corporate social media again after getting screwed before.it’s invite only, which first makes you think, “oh cool - no spammers!”
but then you realize you just need one spammer to get in and now they only invite spammers, and control their invites… as a form of spam! Flooding the net with “cheap” invite codes (only $10!) and multiplying.
Invite only makes people think no spammers? Have they never been in any space with minimal obstacles to entry like that? Any place people are, there’s going to be someone or some activity you don’t care for.
Makes me think of folks thinking there will be fewer annoying people in online games with sub fees. 😂
Seems pretty easy to control though.
Once spammer is detected, you just ban them and the account that invited, all the way up a down that invite tree.
And in the process nuke every legitimate user who may have used their codes, great way to build trust in a new platform. You can’t even vet users to see if they are spammers or not because you need an account to view the service.
Wellp, Nintendo intentionally breaks their own games if you pirate their stuff. Not allowing bribes is a simmlar looking situation. “This product is defective the last person who had their hands on it mustve screwed it up somehow.”
Nintendo intentionally breaks their own games if you pirate their stuff.
I’m not aware of them doing this all that often. In fact, it’s more something that game developers do from time to time, rather than Nintendo specifically. The classic one being when they introduce a bug that only affects the pirated release, then every time they get a report on that bug they know the user pirated their copy.
Yeah I’m not sure what exactly they’re referring to. if they’re referring to the N64 games that was the developer Rare who did it, not Nintendo, Nintendo is just the publisher. If it’s related to Switch games then it’s possible they’re referring to Online only games or the many many Piracy-related myths as well as disinformation that plagues the Switch Modding scene to this day.
Invite only is a technique that becomes a hinderance and gimmic after about 100k members.
God I hope he gets gaslit into actually making Twitter a subscription. It would be so funny
