It still doesn't seem to have a public feed though, so you can only view individual posts.
I will say as someone has an invite: you're not missing out on anything. It definitely has far less activity than either Twitter or Threads, but somehow it also just has worse content. You would think they were invite-only to keep the quality high, but everything is either furry porn or hate-filled rage bait, neither of which I am personally a fan of at all. I keep telling trying to tell it as much, but I honestly don't think I've seen one post I truly wanted to see. I tried to do it for like a week hoping it would get better, but honestly it seems like there's just nothing worthwhile on the whole site. Personally, the only way I can see me ever using Bluesky is if they manage to totally invert their userbase. You need to just start over when you somehow get a crowd worse than either version of Twitter, in my opinion.
Being able to view individual posts, even if there is no public feed, is really important if people are going to post things that may get picked up by other media channels.
As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that. It’s a move that reeks of desperation and makes me not want to sign up. I should feel compelled to make an account if I want to follow someone or post something, not just to read a single post. I’m not sure how they expect to grow when they hide what’s inside and word of mouth is largely negative. Walled gardens have their place, but it’s not the “town square” Elon has been taking about. In the town square I can walk through and overhear conversations without identifying myself or joining in.
> As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that.
This has been a real irritant since Elon Musk took it over and started making a lot of terrible decisions. Depending on what platform you’re on, you could rewrite the Twitter link to nitter.net (just replace, manually or through an extension, twitter.com with nitter.net) and you’ll not only avoid those signup/login prompts but also be able to see the complete thread instead of just a single tweet.
I was never into Twitter because of the noise and extreme levels of anger, but this has allowed me to view the minority of tweets and tweet threads that could be interesting and/or useful.
FWIW, this side of Bluesky definitely exists but if you're diligent about curating your follows and avoiding certain custom feeds this type of content is pretty easy to avoid. There is no blackbox algorithm blasting rage bait onto your timeline.
Depending on how you build your social graph, your experience can run the gamut of anything from peak political Twitter to peak pedantic Mastodon. It's up to you.
I just used the normal hot and trending feeds. I tried to tell it by hiding posts, but I literally couldn't find anyone I wanted to follow to really curate it.
I get that this rage bait works on some percent of the population. 20%? 50%? 75%? What that leaves unanswered is, why aren't these platforms smart enough to adapt to what actual individuals react to? Sure, they picked the most successful single formula, but you'd think they'd want to increase the platform's engagement at the margins rather than just milking one approach for all it's worth.
You are just describing a (good) recommendation algorithm. TikTok's is infamously good at figuring out your niches and catering to your taste by looking at your minute interactions with the content it shows you. My TikTok "for you" page has absolutely 0 mainstream politics, rage bait, or any other "normie" topics. It's mostly technically fascinating stuff and good absurd humor that caters to my absurd taste.
Optimizing for engagement is not inherently bad, nor does it necessarily result in socially suboptimal outcomes. My TikTok feed is very engaging without having to resort to triggering my anger.
A recommendation algorithm that only sticks to a handful of given topics (rage bait and furry porn?) is not a very good one.
I suspect these megalithic corpos are actually in it to make a dollar, no matter the cost to reputation or society. You'd think reputation would matter but it turns out once you reach the point of no return ("I keep Facebook so I can share with my grandma"), you'll come back even if there are rats chewing on your toes
It's lost the initial momentum but it's not dead yet. I'm still holding my breath that the critical mass makes the leap eventually; "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" is a compelling proposition
For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for. A few never came back to twitter, but most did mostly for social reasons. But twitter as a platform gets worse each day, and if it ever truly breaks or dies, bsky will be the schelling point for a whole bunch of people
> "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" is a compelling proposition
For the average twitter user this is probably the exact opposite of a compelling position. Tech people want more control and less abstraction. Everyone else is happy with their walled gardens and ten layers of separation from the machine code. Its why things are the way they are and not some technopunk utopia that we all want.
It's a consumer product and it has to compete as one. We've been pretty aware of that from the start.
I think you're under-estimating what's happening with 3rd-party feeds. That's a core pattern where independent services can integrate into the UX as if they're native to the product. This means turning the client into an open platform for third-party applications.
That's been a success with feeds. They're actively adopted and created by users. Most of the feeds are hosted by skyfeed, a 3P app which gives users a GUI to create them. The author of skyfeed submitted this actually. Talented dev afaict but I've not met them, which is kind of the point. (Looking forward to it though, redsolver!)
3P integration operates by a thick client model. We exchange typed JSON that describes content and interfaces. This lets services drive the client through request/response flows. We can bounce out to webviews when we need, but not executing code means better integration into the app, which means users get access to new experiences within the client and providers get users more easily. This being social protocol means that auth and high level verbs (following, liking, commenting) also come along. The Web 1.0 did quite a bit without client scripting, and I suspect this client can too.
I also want to mention: the product experience right now is establishing a UX on a protocol-driven network that feels good to consumers. Our metric for success wasn't whether it was novel; it was whether we could meet consumer expectations. If we can prove out scaling -- which I'm now confident we will -- then we've established the core of the network. After that we use that core as a backbone for 3P devs to build integrated experiences, and it should lead to a notably diverse product, and I think that's the compelling position for us to offer.
Twitter, previously, was the best of both worlds. A first-party app “most” people used, and then a vibrant third party app ecosystem that others, mainly power users, loved.
Open source clients and algorithms could serve as a foundation for more end-user friendly abstractions and UIs, that let average users very plainly express (or not express) what they want to see, and who they want to be seen by.
Imagine a sort of plug in ecosystem with sane defaults
My whole community has moved from twitter to bsky. The first push was for mastodon, but that died out after a few weeks. But all action is on bsky now, not twitter, so I feel most have migrated fully, not just double posting.
The fact that your whole community was insular enough to move to an invite-only app is exactly what worries me about Bluesky. It's just a bunch of cliques. Is that sustainable? We'll see.
I do like the technical vision, a lot. But I haven't been able to try it out because any time I felt the desire to look, nobody could actually link me to a post or a feed. So I never achieved the required activation energy to even look at it, nevermind adding it to my doomscrolling repertoire or signing up to the thing.
Opening up the posts is a good first step to sustainable adoption. Now next time people are mad at Twitter they'll have an outlet instead of being met with a brick wall when they finally get the urge to try something new.
The options this creates are super accessible to non-technical people. You can go on the app store right now and take your pick of bsky clients, and you can browse/search different algos from within the app and keep a list of your favorites and swap between them, it's all very user-friendly
Most of the biggest complaints people have about twitter are client-side problems. So just having an ecosystem of clients (and the competitive pressure that puts on the official client) makes the experience way better
I think Bluesky is legit building toward being a Twitter successor.
The big corporate accounts may have immediately fled for the safety and features of Threads, but I've noticed more and more journalists, radio personalities, columnists etc creating Bluesky accounts as they scale back on their Twitter use.
There is still a waitlist but we're working hard to open things up ASAP. Some people will never believe it, but the waitlist was never intended as a growth hack. It was purely an attempt to keep the network healthy and the servers from catching on fire as we iterated on the app itself.
All my twitter friends got invite codes through other friends pretty quickly (days or weeks), many people now have such a glut of codes that they're throwing them at whoever asks. I've got like 10 myself and nobody left to give them to
Obviously they need to drop the invite system at some point (and I am surprised it's been this long), but it's not the reason a given subcommunity didn't make the jump
Too early to tell about momentum tbh. Getting networks to collectively move takes time. From a protocol level I think Bluesky probably has opportunity for better UX than Mastodon, which is incredibly clunky when taking actions cross-server.
Most of my people seemed to have landed on bsky. Discussions there get shares and likes, unlike mastodon where for me it's just a few void-shouts per day. Threads appears to be 100% mid celebrities who I am sure Facebook is paying to hang around.
Yeah, I haven't even bothered trying Threads (and don't plan to)
Mastodon puts too much onus on the user to pick a home server
Bluesky got it right by saying "we're going to be exactly familiar to people who like twitter, just open and better". The concepts are an almost exact drop-in replacement, for practical purposes, other than which one your friends are active on
I don't use it much right now because most of my people did switch back for now. But I check in periodically, and I'm rooting for it to succeed
I found that most of the "celeb chatter" died off for me on Threads a few months after launch. Anecdotally, there are a lot of gamedevs I follow on there that have migrated from Twitter, and treating it more like an interest-based network (a la Google+) has bumped it up to one of my daily apps.
You've obviously not been to Threads in a while. It has a pretty thriving community, esp now that it's available in EU. There's a reason it's #1 on the app stores in many countries.
I thought I read that BlueSky was envisioned as a migration of all of twitter to a federated platform by Dorsey. Critical mass wouldn’t be a problem if that’s right.
I've tried a few twitter alternatives (including Bluesky) as someone who hardly ever uses twitter anyway. I was a little disappointed how it just felt like ... more twitter. I'm browsing around finding mostly memes or outrage that doesn't have context to me. I fairly quickly get exhausted trying to find / curate content.
I guess I should have expected it, but I hoped that somewhere a different network would have a different style or flavor. However, the content patterns that get engagement and etc seem ingrained in the participants no matter where you go.
Personally I can't help but feel both left out, and not wanting to be a part of whatever these style of social media apps are.
Having said that there's a lot of talk about twitter clones missing features, but for me I wonder if the content is the same, why would a significant number of people move anyway?
I feel much the same way. Facebook tried to sell me on threads by showing me an ad with 2.5 threads visible: one of them was clearly a racist post that I didn't want to see the conclusion of, the other was clearly a liberal outrage thread about how much money Jeff Bezos makes that I ALSO didn't want to see the end of, and the third was a mostly-obscured post by a ceramic artisan I follow. They don't seem to have any idea who they're advertising to if they think these things will get a positive reaction out of me, rather than just closing it and marking it as "show less like this." For that matter, the vaunted algorithm is not very smart if it can't figure out that I only engage with reels and stories about 1% of the time, vs the content I actually like to engage with.
It's like, these social media companies wrote a SINGLE outrage-farming algorithm that they push on everyone's feeds without regard for whether it works on individuals or not.
This all is why, despite it getting worse, I use FB more than the other platforms. Actual content posted by actual humans I actually know with their actual names under them. Not some pseudonym where I can't remember if it's an IRL friend or some internet rando I follow (or why I follow them), a bunch of emojis, contextless junk, and clickbait outrage farming.
This experience always shocks me because it’s not aligned with my own.
Even on Twitter I never saw that junk. I followed almost exclusively tech folk, AWS community heros, NodeJS developers, Architects and Platform Engineers.
I’m not even a developer, but I followed them to be exposed more to that topic.
As a result, my feed was 99.9% technical content and product management content.
I got the same result in under an hour with Threads too - just mute every. Single. Thing. That you don’t want to see for an hour and then kill and re-launch the app. You’ll never see politics again.
Twitter clones thus far have all been cover bands with a different (speaker) stack. Focus seems to be entirely on the backend protocol side - important for decentralization but fixing only part of the problem.
I haven't seen much in the way of innovation on the UX itself, which is what I'm really interested in. I guess its a mix of a) why mess with success, twitter-like design is proven to work, b) a lack of experimental startup product culture that's willing to try new things, c) not having good ideas, and d) just not enough time because they're focused on basics.
Part of the problem is a lot of us don't want "innovation" here. The limitation for the Twitter clones that I've found is none of them (including Twitter these days) have the critical mass of people it used to have.
Yeah, the problem with the wave of Twitter clones is exactly that: they're clones. You don't make a successful social media site by being the same as an existing site but with different people. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Discord, TikTok, Reddit are all very different in how they function and what types of content is shared. Google+ tried to clone Facebook and was a colossal failure despite hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions of dollars being poured into it.
Fundamentally the issue with Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. is that they don't offer anything different to most users. Yes, they run off decentralized protocols, but most people don't care. Yes, there's no Elon, but most people don't care.
So I'd put it firmly in (c). Bluesky and Threads both tried to recapture the lightning in the bottle which is 2008 Twitter by copying it (Bluesky going so far as to copy the early 00s invite-only model!). Both are either failures or marginally successful, depending on who you ask. Certainly neither are a home run.
If you want to get people off Twitter, don't build Twitter-but-different. Build something better.
Whenever I see comments like these, my immediate thought is "How interested are you, if you had to put a dollar figure on it?"
Also, you are missing alternative (e): availability bias. Maybe you haven't seen a lot of innovation around UX not because people are not trying, but because those who tried to experiment with different UX were aiming at such a niche that completely failed as social network?
I mean, there's plenty of UX innovation going on in the fediverse, for example. But for some reason bringing that up is consistently met with "that can't ever work! nobody can understand this! it's too difficult!" and complete bafflement from the peanut gallery.
I think tech companies' lack of interest in experimenting with UX might have something to do with that...
Via heavy use of the ”Hide|Show Less|Not Interested” button I’ve managed to get youtube recommendations surprisingly relevant, and a big surprise was facebook reels, which started as complete junk, and is now an astonishing mix of science (startalk, Tom Scott, Physics Girl, colour theory) and nature videos. It’s arguably the most relevant “tv” I’ve ever seen. I suspect curation on Twitter is solvable, but neither Twitter nor its clones have successfully done it yet.
One really interesting innovation that Bluesky supports right now is custom timelines. You can paste a URL into the app of any webserver hosting a custom timeline and have it available as a tab. This lets people make and share custom timelines using different recommendation and personalization strategies.
I'm hoping some easily-supported competition for timeline algorithms helps people figure out how to make ones that show content we really want instead of click bait and outrage bait.
The Twitter algorithm is especially bad if you're a lurker, because the only feedback you can give it is what posts you view and search for. And it has no way of distinguishing whether you're viewing something because it's outrage bait, or because it confirms your world view, or because it offers you new information that you want more of...
It's interesting that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok are all looking very different. But all the "open social media" seem to be cloning Twitter.
The protocol that the Bluesky app is built on, atproto[1], is designed to support other social modes. The Bluesky app is in some ways "just" a reference implementation of microblogging, created to ensure the protocol actually works for users and developers.
In early 2024, when the production network is federated, it will be possible to build new social apps on atproto that the millions of existing Bluesky users will be able to use (if they choose) without having to create a new account.
I found the mastodon / fediverse space to be somewhat slow paced to start with, but after a while of following interesting people gets to much better interaction space. People and topics you are personally interested in and want to read about.
The only way to truly have a "good" social media experience is to have a small site (a few hundred active people, maybe less who join slowly over a somewhat long period of time) where everyone has at least slightly overlapping interests.
I'm lucky enough to have found a site like this and it's epic. Better than any social media I've ever experienced. People actually care about each other. We have a community.
>why would a significant number of people move anyway?
The reality is it was only a significant minority.
Most people don't care that they /communicate on Mysterious Twitter X/, they just care about communicating and Mysterious Twitter X is just the dominant one of all the social media networks.
Then there's people like me who use Mysterious Twitter X for a very specific purpose. In my case, I use it to follow announcements from my favorite games (FGO, Priconne, etc.) and join their repost campaigns, get info from some game guide makers, follow some Japanese illustrators, and follow a small handful of Japanese celebrities I'm actually interested in. Exactly none of them left Mysterious Twitter X.
For my use case, Musk's takeover was actually amazing because he killed off the political manipulations that Twitter Japan was spewing behind the scenes. Ain't nobody got time for politics when I'm there to be a man of culture.
I got the app but still can’t browse anything without an account. So I don’t use it :| this is user acquisition 101, if you’re behind a login page people won’t use your stuff.
Bluesky's big selling point is that it's an open protocol, but it's their own homegrown protocol that nobody else is using. Meanwhile Threads has working ActivityPub[1]. You can see threads posts on Mastodon.
Their homegrown protocol is meant to solve real problems with Mastodon, like that your home server owns your user name and can destroy or steal your account where you have all your followers. Account portability on Mastodon requires your current home server to be online and cooperate with you if you want to transfer your account to a different server. With Bluesky, you can do it as long as you have an archive of your data. The intention is to make choosing your home server into a minor implementation detail where the user is always in control instead of a hugely consequential upfront decision as it is with Mastodon.
In all fairness, while yes Bluesky so far has not yet lived up to their promise of decentralisation/federation, it’s still under development. It just hasn’t been built yet.
Though, the whole blue sky stack is significantly more complicated than ActivityPub so I’m doubtful as many would actually set up “instances”.
On the upside, atproto "instances" (we often call them "personal data servers") have much less responsibility than the typical Mastodon instance. So folks should find them quite cheap and easy to run. One reason is that they don't need to directly support application features such as timeline construction, search, image optimization, etc: they just host your social data.
We have 10 servers federating in production, each housing around 270,000 users, and it all runs on disk and sqlite, quite affordable! We migrated 2 million users off a single large host onto these 10 smaller ones transparently and without need for much fanfare. We're dedicated to the tech and seeing it work in production has been super heartening.
> it’s still under development. It just hasn’t been built yet.
Someone else was already first to market. Launching as an alternative that is half baked seems like really strange idea to me. Maybe they were trying to gain traction during the surge in Twitter hate, but if the thing you are asking them to jump ship to is a lesser product, only a tiny minority of them are going to stay. Half baked launches into a very well established market just seems like you'd be better off taking your investor's money and having grand ol' time in Vegas.
I'm fine with a new protocol, what I dislike is they marketed it as a main feature and still haven't shipped what was promised. So far Bluesky is just as centralized as Twitter.
ActivityPub has some big flaws. We need something better, but I don't think I trust the Bluesky team to deliver that anymore.
They did recently just federate the core servers. It's no longer a centralized service but blue sky itself is now a proxy for a federation of smaller servers. Users get assigned one at random(?) upon signup and the blue sky api url continues to work and towards to the underlying server.
oh boy. if we're marking "what a time to be alive" by having access to a social media platforms version of another social media platform accessible by a 3rd party wannabe social platform, then sheesh, give me the blue pill. i'd rather be part of the matrix.
It feels like Bluesky missed their chance to be the twitter alternative after how well Threads has been going. I'm sure zuck will find a way to ruin it but its gonna be a long road a head for Bluesky.
As popular as it is among specific groups, I can't help but feel the decentralized push is going to hurt adoption. Maybe not as badly as it hurt Mastodon because they do supply a "default" server to join, but most people in my experience, don't want a decentralized platform and enjoy the benefits of a centralized platform quite a bit.
Bluesky has the advantage that it doesn’t “feel” decentralized. It just feels like Twitter: you make an account (with an additional screen confirming you want to create the account on bsky.app or whatever the main instance is) and it works as smoothly as twitter does with some extra goodies in the backend that come from it being decentralized.
I do like how usernames are domain names, which gives them a portability similar to email.
Threads still doesn’t have a very good search function, which in my opinion was always Twitter’s greatest asset. Your feed always had a ton of randomness, but if you wanted to talk about something specific that was going on at the moment, you searched for it. Threads just gives a bunch of random results, some in the last hour, followed by 5 months ago, and then another from 15 minutes ago.
Readit News
I will say as someone has an invite: you're not missing out on anything. It definitely has far less activity than either Twitter or Threads, but somehow it also just has worse content. You would think they were invite-only to keep the quality high, but everything is either furry porn or hate-filled rage bait, neither of which I am personally a fan of at all. I keep telling trying to tell it as much, but I honestly don't think I've seen one post I truly wanted to see. I tried to do it for like a week hoping it would get better, but honestly it seems like there's just nothing worthwhile on the whole site. Personally, the only way I can see me ever using Bluesky is if they manage to totally invert their userbase. You need to just start over when you somehow get a crowd worse than either version of Twitter, in my opinion.
As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that. It’s a move that reeks of desperation and makes me not want to sign up. I should feel compelled to make an account if I want to follow someone or post something, not just to read a single post. I’m not sure how they expect to grow when they hide what’s inside and word of mouth is largely negative. Walled gardens have their place, but it’s not the “town square” Elon has been taking about. In the town square I can walk through and overhear conversations without identifying myself or joining in.
This has been a real irritant since Elon Musk took it over and started making a lot of terrible decisions. Depending on what platform you’re on, you could rewrite the Twitter link to nitter.net (just replace, manually or through an extension, twitter.com with nitter.net) and you’ll not only avoid those signup/login prompts but also be able to see the complete thread instead of just a single tweet.
I was never into Twitter because of the noise and extreme levels of anger, but this has allowed me to view the minority of tweets and tweet threads that could be interesting and/or useful.
Depending on how you build your social graph, your experience can run the gamut of anything from peak political Twitter to peak pedantic Mastodon. It's up to you.
There is one at https://firesky.tv/
I think it exists as a proof that there is activity on Bluesky. If you were looking for a feed that highlights trending posts, this is not it.
Optimizing for engagement is not inherently bad, nor does it necessarily result in socially suboptimal outcomes. My TikTok feed is very engaging without having to resort to triggering my anger.
A recommendation algorithm that only sticks to a handful of given topics (rage bait and furry porn?) is not a very good one.
For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for. A few never came back to twitter, but most did mostly for social reasons. But twitter as a platform gets worse each day, and if it ever truly breaks or dies, bsky will be the schelling point for a whole bunch of people
For the average twitter user this is probably the exact opposite of a compelling position. Tech people want more control and less abstraction. Everyone else is happy with their walled gardens and ten layers of separation from the machine code. Its why things are the way they are and not some technopunk utopia that we all want.
I think you're under-estimating what's happening with 3rd-party feeds. That's a core pattern where independent services can integrate into the UX as if they're native to the product. This means turning the client into an open platform for third-party applications.
That's been a success with feeds. They're actively adopted and created by users. Most of the feeds are hosted by skyfeed, a 3P app which gives users a GUI to create them. The author of skyfeed submitted this actually. Talented dev afaict but I've not met them, which is kind of the point. (Looking forward to it though, redsolver!)
3P integration operates by a thick client model. We exchange typed JSON that describes content and interfaces. This lets services drive the client through request/response flows. We can bounce out to webviews when we need, but not executing code means better integration into the app, which means users get access to new experiences within the client and providers get users more easily. This being social protocol means that auth and high level verbs (following, liking, commenting) also come along. The Web 1.0 did quite a bit without client scripting, and I suspect this client can too.
I also want to mention: the product experience right now is establishing a UX on a protocol-driven network that feels good to consumers. Our metric for success wasn't whether it was novel; it was whether we could meet consumer expectations. If we can prove out scaling -- which I'm now confident we will -- then we've established the core of the network. After that we use that core as a backbone for 3P devs to build integrated experiences, and it should lead to a notably diverse product, and I think that's the compelling position for us to offer.
Imagine a sort of plug in ecosystem with sane defaults
I do like the technical vision, a lot. But I haven't been able to try it out because any time I felt the desire to look, nobody could actually link me to a post or a feed. So I never achieved the required activation energy to even look at it, nevermind adding it to my doomscrolling repertoire or signing up to the thing.
Opening up the posts is a good first step to sustainable adoption. Now next time people are mad at Twitter they'll have an outlet instead of being met with a brick wall when they finally get the urge to try something new.
Compelling for whom? For developers? I’m not sure anyone else will care.
Most of the biggest complaints people have about twitter are client-side problems. So just having an ecosystem of clients (and the competitive pressure that puts on the official client) makes the experience way better
The big corporate accounts may have immediately fled for the safety and features of Threads, but I've noticed more and more journalists, radio personalities, columnists etc creating Bluesky accounts as they scale back on their Twitter use.
Seems like Bluesky is the grassroots favourite.
I don't know how you can expect people to make the move when they're not even able to sign in
For devs that want to experiment, we've had a special waitlist for a while: https://atproto.com/blog/call-for-developers
Obviously they need to drop the invite system at some point (and I am surprised it's been this long), but it's not the reason a given subcommunity didn't make the jump
Can it get worse? Right now I get ads every 3-4 tweets, and several of them are porn ads.
I also noticed ads that are not marked with the [Ad]-icon.
Can't see how it could get lower than this :(
Twitter was like that once. Just people flocking into the next walled garden...
Mastodon puts too much onus on the user to pick a home server
Bluesky got it right by saying "we're going to be exactly familiar to people who like twitter, just open and better". The concepts are an almost exact drop-in replacement, for practical purposes, other than which one your friends are active on
I don't use it much right now because most of my people did switch back for now. But I check in periodically, and I'm rooting for it to succeed
Well that's just an opinion. I feel that it's better than it ever was. Sorry.
Okay, but I never even signed up for Twitter.
Dead Comment
I guess I should have expected it, but I hoped that somewhere a different network would have a different style or flavor. However, the content patterns that get engagement and etc seem ingrained in the participants no matter where you go.
Personally I can't help but feel both left out, and not wanting to be a part of whatever these style of social media apps are.
Having said that there's a lot of talk about twitter clones missing features, but for me I wonder if the content is the same, why would a significant number of people move anyway?
It's like, these social media companies wrote a SINGLE outrage-farming algorithm that they push on everyone's feeds without regard for whether it works on individuals or not.
This all is why, despite it getting worse, I use FB more than the other platforms. Actual content posted by actual humans I actually know with their actual names under them. Not some pseudonym where I can't remember if it's an IRL friend or some internet rando I follow (or why I follow them), a bunch of emojis, contextless junk, and clickbait outrage farming.
Even on Twitter I never saw that junk. I followed almost exclusively tech folk, AWS community heros, NodeJS developers, Architects and Platform Engineers.
I’m not even a developer, but I followed them to be exposed more to that topic.
As a result, my feed was 99.9% technical content and product management content.
I got the same result in under an hour with Threads too - just mute every. Single. Thing. That you don’t want to see for an hour and then kill and re-launch the app. You’ll never see politics again.
They kind of did. The optimal solution of 'just show rage bait' can't take all that long to discover.
I haven't seen much in the way of innovation on the UX itself, which is what I'm really interested in. I guess its a mix of a) why mess with success, twitter-like design is proven to work, b) a lack of experimental startup product culture that's willing to try new things, c) not having good ideas, and d) just not enough time because they're focused on basics.
Part of the problem is a lot of us don't want "innovation" here. The limitation for the Twitter clones that I've found is none of them (including Twitter these days) have the critical mass of people it used to have.
Fundamentally the issue with Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. is that they don't offer anything different to most users. Yes, they run off decentralized protocols, but most people don't care. Yes, there's no Elon, but most people don't care.
So I'd put it firmly in (c). Bluesky and Threads both tried to recapture the lightning in the bottle which is 2008 Twitter by copying it (Bluesky going so far as to copy the early 00s invite-only model!). Both are either failures or marginally successful, depending on who you ask. Certainly neither are a home run.
If you want to get people off Twitter, don't build Twitter-but-different. Build something better.
Whenever I see comments like these, my immediate thought is "How interested are you, if you had to put a dollar figure on it?"
Also, you are missing alternative (e): availability bias. Maybe you haven't seen a lot of innovation around UX not because people are not trying, but because those who tried to experiment with different UX were aiming at such a niche that completely failed as social network?
I think tech companies' lack of interest in experimenting with UX might have something to do with that...
I'm hoping some easily-supported competition for timeline algorithms helps people figure out how to make ones that show content we really want instead of click bait and outrage bait.
In early 2024, when the production network is federated, it will be possible to build new social apps on atproto that the millions of existing Bluesky users will be able to use (if they choose) without having to create a new account.
1. https://atproto.com
I'm lucky enough to have found a site like this and it's epic. Better than any social media I've ever experienced. People actually care about each other. We have a community.
I miss those days. Has it really been at least 20 years? I'm getting too old for this...
The reality is it was only a significant minority.
Most people don't care that they /communicate on Mysterious Twitter X/, they just care about communicating and Mysterious Twitter X is just the dominant one of all the social media networks.
Then there's people like me who use Mysterious Twitter X for a very specific purpose. In my case, I use it to follow announcements from my favorite games (FGO, Priconne, etc.) and join their repost campaigns, get info from some game guide makers, follow some Japanese illustrators, and follow a small handful of Japanese celebrities I'm actually interested in. Exactly none of them left Mysterious Twitter X.
For my use case, Musk's takeover was actually amazing because he killed off the political manipulations that Twitter Japan was spewing behind the scenes. Ain't nobody got time for politics when I'm there to be a man of culture.
If anybody wants a Bluesky invite code, I have a handful available. DM me at @edavis@hachyderm.io or at https://t.me/ejd215. First come, first served!
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-ac...
Though, the whole blue sky stack is significantly more complicated than ActivityPub so I’m doubtful as many would actually set up “instances”.
We have 10 servers federating in production, each housing around 270,000 users, and it all runs on disk and sqlite, quite affordable! We migrated 2 million users off a single large host onto these 10 smaller ones transparently and without need for much fanfare. We're dedicated to the tech and seeing it work in production has been super heartening.
Someone else was already first to market. Launching as an alternative that is half baked seems like really strange idea to me. Maybe they were trying to gain traction during the surge in Twitter hate, but if the thing you are asking them to jump ship to is a lesser product, only a tiny minority of them are going to stay. Half baked launches into a very well established market just seems like you'd be better off taking your investor's money and having grand ol' time in Vegas.
ActivityPub has some big flaws. We need something better, but I don't think I trust the Bluesky team to deliver that anymore.
One step at a time.
I suppose time will tell.
I do like how usernames are domain names, which gives them a portability similar to email.
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