(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]
Economics has the “Lump of Labour Fallacy”; tech needs the “Lump of Social Community” fallacy
2023-11-12 08:29:46+00:00
Apparently Bluesky is dead. It’s not, of course, but Anil Dash using Threads points at some apocalyptic “Bluesky would have won if it hadn’t been for you pesky Meta engineers”-type arguments which are trying to establish themselves. Anil is even making wild claims of monopoly being exerted.
This is all (a) premature and (b) groundless; it’s entirely possible that with the decline of Twitter, in another universe where Meta had chosen to not launch Threads, the userbase might simply have evaporated like dew in the morning.
Bluesky has its own community which is definitely growing, but which has also spent most of the past few months attempting to make people feel safe rather than welcome – my experience is that BS user discussion has been more about “how do I block?” rather than “how do I send (e.g.) GIFs”, the latter appearing trivial but actually being a part of richer, phatic communication.
If we are to pretend that this is all about stealing portions of a fixed market share from each other, where is the outcry about the unfairness of Mastodon having to suffer the privations caused by both Bluesky and Threads?
Economists already understand this stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
There is practically an infinite space for free expression, and people use tools in front of them to connect with different communities, differently.
There are many words for those who point at real or hypothetical cohorts of people to claim eminent domain over them, and few of the terms are terribly pleasant.
[END]
[1] URL:
https://alecmuffett.com/article/108282
[2] URL:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
DropSafe Blog via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/alecmuffett/
