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@xgranade@wandering.shopIt is deeply confusing to me that conventional tech media keeps lavishing praise on Bluesky while making transphobic sneers about the fediverse.
Wait, no, I think I just answered my own question.
Like, shit, there's stuff to actually praise about Bluesky! But it's not transforming the web, it's not taking shit back, it's not yet decentralized. It's another VC-backed corporate service, even if by most accounts a pretty decent one by that standard. I disagree vehemently with them endorsing Jesse Singal, but that's really my biggest complaint with them.
The problem that I'll call out here is that tech media is lionizing Bluesky well past what they actually are.
All the while, the same tech media, on seeing a decade-old flourishing social media *network* that can and *has* transformed the web, falls back to shit like the Verge's infamous and transphobic "boys only club" sneer, the same old tired tropes about how the fediverse is "too complicated" as though depending wholly on a single corporate service was somehow simpler, and so forth.
We need some actual criticality about this shit!
(And yes, I'm *still* hung up on the Verge's transphobic comment. I respect too many people at the Verge for them to just be awful. I wish they'd apologize and take responsibility for that transphobia, rather than just boycotting or shunning them. I have enough respect for them to think they are capable of doing so, and I continue to be both frustrated and disappointed that they don't.)
@xgranade Being involved in Anonymous - and encountering journalists' relentless pursuit to locate a non-existent 'leader', flat-out refusing to believe that one didn't exist - has taught me a lot about *why* the media coverage of federated and decentralized systems is always so utterly garbage.
The vast majority of 'journalists' is completely and hopelessly lost if there's no singular "press representative" with a phone number available during all business hours to talk to.
@joepie91 Right, which gets back to stenography as journalism and access journalism. That will always privilege centralized ownership, as you say.
@xgranade (There were a few journalists which *did* understand the point of the job. Unsurprisingly, they were the ones who got the scoops. They're also the ones still getting the scoops today on more clueful publications like 404 Media...)
@xgranade yeah. Although if you look at the hagiographic coverage of Eugen and Mastodon in late 2022/early 2023 there was the same kind of lionization (as well as transphobia, just in a different form: erasure of trans contributions and critiques). Similarly with positive coverage of corporate fediverse stuff like Threads. It sucks but corporate tech media is fundamentally pro-corporate and anti-trans.