Alternate history: Bluesky never happens. Instead, some company opens up a Mastodon instance as a Twitter replacement. So instead of Bluesky with 12M+ users, there's a Mastodon instance with 12M+ users. Now what?

[–] vga@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon? BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon?

The usual way, whatever that is. What would Mastodon do about it? How do you manipulate Bluesky?

BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.

It's the number in OP, so I ran with that. The fediverse number apparently excludes Gab and Truth Social. Makes sense, since those aren't federated with the rest, but that also shows an issue.

[–] vga@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How do you manipulate Bluesky?

The same way you manipulate Twitter, by tweaking the algorithm.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago

That's not how it works.

[–] zaphod@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

It only has to be compatible with Mastodon, not necessarily be an actual Mastodon instance, see Meta's threads.net.