Hi guys, I’ve got a Bluesky code to give away, and I figured some of you guys would like it. Just a few requirements:

  • You must have been a member of pawb.social for at least two weeks.
  • You must have commented or posted on something in pawb.social in the past two weeks. Doesn’t matter if you’re doing so after this post either, though hopefully you’ll keep being active.
  • To be entered, you need to reply to this post (which will not count toward the past two weeks’ activity requirement).

I’ll be randomly picking someone after 48 hours, and I’ll likely delete this post after another 24. Best of luck!

Edit: It’s been 48 hours, and of the 3 people who commented, only one actually didn’t have Bluesky already, so DraconicNeo has been sent the code. I have to say the response has been surprising. I offered a free giveaway, and got the post downvoted to hell and nothing but negativity for it. I absolutely won’t be repeating this again. Screw deletion, I’d just as soon leave this up so the next person doesn’t try to make my mistake.

  • SavvyWolf
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    11 months ago

    FWIW, I did downvote, but that was more along the lines of the fact that this is a giveaway and could be seen as karma farming. I know that likely wasn’t your intention, but this could be seen as spam. Perhaps just having “I have Bluesky codes available, PM for details if you’re active!” in your bio might have gone down better. Although I expect most people probably already have accounts at this point (If not, I have like 10 codes I can give away. :P).

    Both Bluesky and Mastodon have problems, and it’s annoying seeing people fight each other rather than push for those problems to be solved. All the constant infighting and power imbalances on the Fediverse has honestly given me more stress than is probably healthy. If I were using social media as a tool for my job rather than as a political statement (I imagine most artists see it as a “necessary evil”), I would not stick with Mastodon.

    Guys, please don’t do the toxic open source thing of claiming that everyone should use your favorite project and sweep any criticisms of it under the rug.

    • KovukonoOP
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      11 months ago

      Sorry you felt the need to downvote. I actually messaged the admin before doing this to see if it’d be fine. For karma farming, I don’t think Lemmy publicly tracks karma totals, at least not in the native web interface, and Lemmy will no longer keep a running count in 0.19. Either way, after the response this has gotten, I already regret doing this.

      • SavvyWolf
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        11 months ago

        Ah, if you checked with the admin team then that’s okay by me, and I apologise for being so critical.

    • KovukonoOP
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      11 months ago

      Yeah, I’m guessing that’s why it’s sitting at -7 and going down for a free giveaway. I know there’s some contention between people invested in specific federation protocols, but I wasn’t expecting this to garner that response.

      • Draconic NEO@pawb.fun
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        11 months ago

        @Kovukono I mean another big reason is that many people here highly value open source and decentralization and while Bluesky promises to deliver that decentralization via AT Proto, currently they haven’t done that. There aren’t really any other instances and the main one doesn’t have AT Proto Federation enabled (so even if you set up your own it’s no use), so at the moment Bluesky is no different from a centralized platform, just with the promise of being decentralized in the future.

        Mastodon on the other hand is decentralized right now, with many many servers to choose from, it’s not a future promise of future decentralization, it is decentralized already. It also doesn’t carry the negative connotation that Invite-only platforms carry, which is promotion by way of FOMO (fear of missing out), yeah some instances are invite-only but there are other instances people can join and still interact with everyone else due to federation.

        • KovukonoOP
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          11 months ago

          I get that people aren’t happy with Bluesky’s invite-only approach, or that they haven’t turned on federation yet. I’m not claiming it’s even a great platform; hell, they don’t even have support for gifs or private messages yet. I just had a code, and was hoping I’d brighten someone’s day by a chance to get it. Just seems Lemmy would rather have it buried.

          • Draconic NEO@pawb.fun
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            11 months ago

            @Kovukono Yeah it actually kind of sucks that people were so hostile towards it, honestly my first comment was more meant to be a joke (especially since I’m replying on Mastodon), but I guess it also wasn’t as much of a joke as I thought considering how many people tried to bury the post.

        • BOLOID
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          11 months ago

          Honestly, not delivering on the promise of decentralization is what makes Bluesky functional. With Mastodon i’m constantly having federation problems.

          IMO Mastodon is more of a long play, in the sense that it will be great five years from now whereas corporate social media like Threads and Bluesky will enshittify. But as of right now, Mastodon is not super usable. I saw a lot of people move to it during the Musk era of Twitter but very few of them are staying, in fact Lemmy isn’t really retaining the users it gained from Reddit either

          • Draconic NEO@pawb.fun
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            11 months ago

            @BOLOID Which instances are you on because I haven’t had very many federation issues on mine. I do know that the gGmbH instances (mastodon.social, mastodon.online, etc.) are generally limited by many other instances on the count of spambots and poor moderation. It’s why it isn’t recommended to choose them (you’ll run into issues following people or fetching content, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature).

  • BOLOID
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    11 months ago

    Wow people are assholes, Bluesky is a nice place to be right now. It’s still corporate social media so odds are it’ll turn bad in the coming years, but right now it’s a nice place with lots of furries.

    Though tbh i think most people who wanted an invite code already have them, even i got a code that’s how you know they’re reaching the bottom of the barrel

    • KovukonoOP
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      11 months ago

      Wow people are assholes

      I wouldn’t jump to that immediately. Yeah, the response sucks, but could just be a bunch of people having a bad day. But yeah, it seems like a lot of people on the waitlist got let in right after Meta announced Threads was opening federation. The furry stuff seems to be pretty active though, especially the feeds provided by FurryList.