It reminds me of google plus. Technically better than the existing top dog, but the forced migration and trying to bootstrap with a huge but only semi involved userbase let it fizzle soon after the start.
Has there ever been a successful case of bootstrapping a new social media product with an existing userbase? Like not just added features or merging two together.
It's not exactly new social media product, but Facebook did add messaging to their then Facebook app, build up usage of messaging itself (network effect within the user's friend list), and then split it off into its own Messenger app. They are sharing the same Facebook login through.
Not sure how you define "technically better" but in any way I'd add "citation needed". G+ was kinda horrible with a couple good ideas and I think the lack of widespread adoption spoke for that.
I never used and would never use Threads for the same reason I never even considered Google+. It was DoA and I guess everyone could see it, even the people who were trying it. Such is the case with Threads.
I mean that morning when Zuck woke up and decided that a Threads a/c would need an Instagram a/c he must have seen on his daily astronomy calendar "Day of self-sabotage".
No they don’t. That’s untrue. The fact that so many replies are speaking as if it’s true is quite telling. Instagram continually pesters me to create a Threads account, but doesn’t just “make one for me”. Threads’ user growth would look very very different if this were true. It’s another app. Instagram won’t even let you expand one of the stupid Threads posts it shows you until you install the app.
What we learned from the IE & Chrome periods of historical browser dominance is that defaults matter, and tying (specifically an anti-competitive move) works.
Facebook is doing the same with Threads. Sure you don't have a default account, but the pestering works, and it is "tying".
For the most part the types of people who find Instagram interesting (and would have a Threads account created automatically) are simply not the audience for a tool like Bluesky (or Twitter).
This is dripping with personal bias. Bluesky gets the stamp of being a “tool”. It can be just as much of a mind-numbing fuckaround as Threads. Most replies in this thread are just starting from “Bluesky is where my people are” and trying to turn it into something self-righteous. Why are HN users so afraid of admitting that they’re dumb humans like everyone else? Christ.
Yes, this! I wanted to join Threads as an alternative to Twitter, but I changed my mind when it tried to force me to create an Instagram account. I don't want an Instagram account because I think posting or looking at people's pictures is idiotic. So as long as Threads requires me to touch Instagram in any way, it's a hard pass.
i wouldn’t say falsely created, but i would say “padded statistics”
threads is beholden to KPIs unlike every other activity pub implementation
their team obviously wants to be successful to continue developing against activity pub
their metrics are akin to a company bragging about how much software they’ve written with the assistance of AI
threads was able to approximate how many instagram users wished they had twitter in the same way intellisense is able to provide auto complete for dot notation; as a magician, i spot the misdirection for investors
I agree. But then a big premise of Bluesky (hence AT Proto) is that it is not centralised however when we say BlueSky we just mean Bluesky i.e https://bsky.app and that is, frankly, very concerning. It might not sustain.
While Threads is just forced Instagram users, bsky is a decentralised social network which is not decentralised. Comparing bsky with Threads is anything but a compliment.
You know, they stopped Amazon from buying iRobot because of I guess unfair robot vacuum competition (why does that sound hilarious?). It's almost luck that Threads isn't that successful, because then they'd have to deal with monopoly concerns. At least now they can just say it's a shitty twitter knock off, don't bother us.
> but now the Bluesky app has exploded to 3.5 million daily active users, putting it just 1.5 times behind Meta’s Threads
Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it hard to believe. Realistically he is off by at least an order of magnitude.
Mashable used to be one of my go-to blogs, but I haven't been there in a while. Has it really fallen this far?
Be interesting to see if they count people with the app or not. As far as I’m aware you need the app to view threads in their entirety. I tried it but uninstalled shortly after
I click on it randomly to see if anything is going on and usually close it pretty rapidly, so that is almost a false positive. I find bsky much more of of a time sink
I wonder how many of those 20 million BlueSky users are squatters that are registering every popular brand name, in the hope it becomes a lot more valuable in a year
You can use your domain as a handle, so apple.bsky.social is likely to be a fake, as the real Apple would have the account apple.com. Certainly you could fool some users, but it's not like Apple would want apple.bsky.social to use as their actual account.
It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes.
All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else.
That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare. Over time, this has polarized people to ever further extremes and normalized disrespect and bickering (as opposed to discussion).
It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
Added to that is user choice over moderation and algorithms.
That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life.
Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.
> It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians.
Their advertising model certainly is a problem. But it isn't the only one, there are more and more users that demand other users be removed because of their opinion. When social networks started to listen to a few of them, they made themselves hostages to more demands. Platforms like Twitter or reddit certainly suffered from this.
It shouldn't be any surprise: it's not like the internet's userbase of 1990 represented a broad cross-section of American society, let alone western or global societies. It was mainly a bunch of academics and college students and government users. It's just gotten more and more fragmented as more people have been added.
I disagree somewhat. Social media apps are powered by feed algorithms that fall into two camps:
The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model.
The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well.
The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.
I don't know, the entire point of the "algorithmic bubble" was to keep the tribes separate but happy, no? And the value of the network still increases with more people on it. Maybe some future social media will figure out how to keep everyone happy at the same time. For example, I think everyone but a couple of hardcore FOSS advocates and the far-right are still using Youtube.
I think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups.
Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel").
This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.
It does seem natural to happen. But there are loads of "neutral" accounts: gov agencies, businesses, etc that use social media for announcements and simple broadcast communication. Most are on Twitter now. I think I big question is will they add bluesky, or move (probably not, because of inertia), or something else.
See the Fediverse for example, which prides itself on not having algorithms, and is yet the most echo-chambery and radical place I know of. People automatically filter themselves into different servers, and defederate with each other with frequency.
(Whether or not this is good or bad depends on your moral views. But I think it is obvious that "algorithms" are not really to blame.)
The press coverage is a bit misleading. Everyone is leaving Twitter. Liberals are just leaving faster.
Keep in mind that a lot of Twitter users never wanted political content. They were there for sports, art, science discussions, etc. Some of those communities are clearly migrating.
I think I’ve even noticed a huge decrease in hate bots lately in my feed, certainly doesn’t seem to up date as often (aka takes longer for my usual “followees”to go off the firehouse, as they have some precedence in the feed make up
The issue is that social media sites produce feeds and content matching, forcing alternative views in your face.
Its like, they have decided to push metcalfes law as far as possible, to see when the breaking point is. Like a giant social experiment.
But if everyone is in one place thats still the most desirable network to be on. Just dont push Joe Blo's dumbest political opinions in my face as sponsored content.
Is it all the ways that matter? The author mentions one way, DAU. Sure, that is important but I can think of other things that matter. The number of “creator” accounts matters just as much as the number of lurkers.
From my experience Bluesky is way better and has respect for the user’s choice front and center. Lists of users to follow is a first-class citizen feature. Their algorithm is a chronological feed, not boosting engagement bait.
Here's one metric that matters – revenue per user. Bluesky's is, I assume, zero, and soon that will have to change. Threads meanwhile has the largest social media ads and monetization platform in the world behind it ready to make the dollars flow at the push of a button.
If the revenue per user is enough to cover costs, does it matter? Will it have to change?
We’ve all had “hockey stick growth!” shouted at us so many times that we’ve internalised it but Bluesky is a team is 20 odd people. They don’t have the kind of footprint Meta has and right now they don’t need it. I hope they stay small and chart a different path to success.
Right, I’m sure they’ll have to bring in ads, but I believe we’ve seen this play before. I’m cool with ads, I’m not cool with promoting hate speech because it “improves engagement”
Not necessarily. There could be different types of content that requires different types of creators, like imagine professional video producers vs your friends posting about their day.
There could also be a different algorithm/network that allows for a few creators to feed a large number of consumers.
> In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation.
Looks good to me.
And did you just question "WHERE" and "ORDER BY" in SQL? I wouldn't do that. There are probably a ton of algorithms and optimizations done there. In my very naive understanding, quick sort is at least worth something.
It absolutely is. Sure it's the default, but it's the default to measure against and beat. It's like comparing ML algos against the average prediction, or forecasts against the previous known value.
I made a Bluesky account long ago and started cross-posting my tiktoks, often on the popular and titillating topic of project management. For a long time it was sleepy as I would have expected. I got a sudden uptick recently, which prompted me to figure out how to port my follows from X, which I did with "sky follower bridge." Bluesky has been a lively, friendly place.
Sky follower bridge was able to scrape my X blocklist, but could not turn it into a Bluesky block list. No troll problems yet so that's OK for now. I still have to host my videos on titok because some are too long for Bluesky.
My tiktok "for you page" has turned to sludge and my followers are not getting my posts without setting notification options. I wonder if the magical algorithm was sequestered in China to hide it from inquiries. Hopefully a Bluesky presence helps.
Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them).
That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.
Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.
Right. After the pay-to-play change that boosted Blue Checks to the top of everything it became unusable. No better than going into the local news comment section or Craigslist discussion forums.
Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.
'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.
Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.
But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.
There is more momentum against Musk now than when threads launched. Not sure it is enough to overcome the network effect - but there is a lot of illwill towards his projects.
I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.
Free speech is the upside of X. People leaving to join the echo chambers of Bluesky or Threads, only serves to turn X into the echo chamber they claim it is.
As someone (who likes to think) is pretty unbiased politically, I can say I’ll go wherever the people I’m interested post. I have been somewhat surprised that pretty non political accounts have moved to Bluesky which I have interpreted as both political and motivated by the loads of political bs that are posted on x that normal people simply get tired of. I think Bluesky will gain more traction than threads but will end up being a more successful mastodon. A place where people with massive followings who simply don’t like x will post and there will be two competing apps.
It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not, it's that it's flavor of politics is increasingly resembling that of 4chan. I just skimmed though the auto-play videos on my account and the algorithm decided to show me this for some reason: https://x.com/AlaskanTom/status/1860339990992925170
That's far from the worst I've seen on there either, evidently you can just post about how Hitler was right and it won't affect your visibility at all now, nevermind get you banned.
IMO the biggest difference is that they aren’t paying users based on engagement. That’s the #1 worst decision Musk made after buying Twitter, it incentivizes people to post incendiary content, to troll and to outright lie in the aim of going viral. You see it all the time on Twitter these days and Bluesky is vastly better not having that motive.
> Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same.
Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads.
I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation
Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there!
It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in.
There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss.
The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to.
There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on.
Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping.
The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049
I'm not sure Threads ever had that much of a spike in usage beyond the first day of new accounts. Got the impression a huge number of people curious about it signed up due to the very easy onboarding if you already had an instagram, looked around a little and then never went back.
Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.
I think overzealous moderation was what drove some people off Twitter in the first place.
Another social media site asking for my phone number, no thank you.
I read the occasional Twitter/X and probably now Bluesky post, but this offers nothing that would attract me. Twitter/X/Bluesky/Insta/Threads is for people that like celebrities with some interesting stuff in between. But overall that isn't worth it.
I have given Threads a good try, and recently when Bluesky activity started up I restarted using Bluesky (it didn't stick for me the first time). The technology doesn't really matter that much, as long as it's basically competent. It's only the social network itself.
I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't.
Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us.
X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two.
Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.
It would be the worst thing for Bluesky if the eternal September came over from Twitter. I think that population is too passive to make the move and will put up with any level of advertising etc.
It's not just checkbox features that matter, it's also the entire algorithm and who is allowed to have their posts gain organic traction. X actively penalizes high quality information, and pushes misinformation in an attempt to become an echo chamber.
If you want to find your colleauges' posts, if you want to find high quality information, if you want good links to long articles, X is no longer the place to be.
If you want to have click-bait and rage-bait or lots of right-wing politics, X will cater to your needs. But it won't cater to somebody that's trying to get to highly-curated high-signal information networks that Twitter allowed in the past. That's all been actively destroyed, with great intention.
I've fallen for the Threads-links shown in Instagram. Obviously the instagram connection is what gave them a great start at a user-base. But, everytime I try to use Threads, something seems off (mainly see lame, boring, engagement-bait). Bluesky seems different and better. Also a much better story in-terms of open data, open protocol, etc.
Yeah, getting anywhere near what the major tech companies are capable of should be understood as a triumph.
Does anyone remember now Spoutible? Substack Notes? How about Spill, Hive, or Post? Being even with in anything approximating striking distance of Threads would have been a triumph for any of them.
Readit News
It wasn't adopted, it was falsely created.
I'd go even further to say that it isn't a social network, it's an add-on to another social network.
Has there ever been a successful case of bootstrapping a new social media product with an existing userbase? Like not just added features or merging two together.
Google+ was successful from any real metric but it didn’t replace Facebook so it was axed.
I mean that morning when Zuck woke up and decided that a Threads a/c would need an Instagram a/c he must have seen on his daily astronomy calendar "Day of self-sabotage".
Facebook is doing the same with Threads. Sure you don't have a default account, but the pestering works, and it is "tying".
i wouldn’t say falsely created, but i would say “padded statistics”
threads is beholden to KPIs unlike every other activity pub implementation
their team obviously wants to be successful to continue developing against activity pub
their metrics are akin to a company bragging about how much software they’ve written with the assistance of AI
threads was able to approximate how many instagram users wished they had twitter in the same way intellisense is able to provide auto complete for dot notation; as a magician, i spot the misdirection for investors
They didn't.
While Threads is just forced Instagram users, bsky is a decentralised social network which is not decentralised. Comparing bsky with Threads is anything but a compliment.
Dead Comment
Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it hard to believe. Realistically he is off by at least an order of magnitude.
Mashable used to be one of my go-to blogs, but I haven't been there in a while. Has it really fallen this far?
I've managed to never go there because I'm only on Instagram for the pretty pictures
https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/b...
All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else.
That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare. Over time, this has polarized people to ever further extremes and normalized disrespect and bickering (as opposed to discussion).
It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life.
Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.
Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians.
The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model.
The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well.
The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.
I think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups.
Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel").
This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.
Did this happen at all? Social networks have always been balkanized by culture.
(Whether or not this is good or bad depends on your moral views. But I think it is obvious that "algorithms" are not really to blame.)
Keep in mind that a lot of Twitter users never wanted political content. They were there for sports, art, science discussions, etc. Some of those communities are clearly migrating.
The issue is that social media sites produce feeds and content matching, forcing alternative views in your face.
Its like, they have decided to push metcalfes law as far as possible, to see when the breaking point is. Like a giant social experiment.
But if everyone is in one place thats still the most desirable network to be on. Just dont push Joe Blo's dumbest political opinions in my face as sponsored content.
Dead Comment
From my experience Bluesky is way better and has respect for the user’s choice front and center. Lists of users to follow is a first-class citizen feature. Their algorithm is a chronological feed, not boosting engagement bait.
We’ve all had “hockey stick growth!” shouted at us so many times that we’ve internalised it but Bluesky is a team is 20 odd people. They don’t have the kind of footprint Meta has and right now they don’t need it. I hope they stay small and chart a different path to success.
At the direct cost of making a worse product for users.
I remain hopeful that Bluesky is able to monetise/fund development without succumbing to working against its users.
Yet it was definitely the place to go and get the latest updates.
Why does a chronological feed get considered and algo? Do we consider SQL queries with WHERE and ORDER BY clauses an algo now?
> In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation.
Looks good to me.
And did you just question "WHERE" and "ORDER BY" in SQL? I wouldn't do that. There are probably a ton of algorithms and optimizations done there. In my very naive understanding, quick sort is at least worth something.
Congratulations, you have yourself an algorithm.
Sky follower bridge was able to scrape my X blocklist, but could not turn it into a Bluesky block list. No troll problems yet so that's OK for now. I still have to host my videos on titok because some are too long for Bluesky.
My tiktok "for you page" has turned to sludge and my followers are not getting my posts without setting notification options. I wonder if the magical algorithm was sequestered in China to hide it from inquiries. Hopefully a Bluesky presence helps.
Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them).
That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.
Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.
'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.
Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.
But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.
I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.
That's far from the worst I've seen on there either, evidently you can just post about how Hitler was right and it won't affect your visibility at all now, nevermind get you banned.
I disagree. Bluesky will grow further and then be like a "Coke or Pepsi" to Twitter. (Albeit, it will stay smaller than Twitter.)
I have 2 threads accounts and never created a single one. That's because I had 2 Instagram accounts.
The difference is people chose to go to Bluesky, Threads accounts were just added on to your Insta account by Meta.
Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads.
I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.
Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there!
It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in.
There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss.
The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to.
There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on.
Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping.
The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049
Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.
Another social media site asking for my phone number, no thank you.
I read the occasional Twitter/X and probably now Bluesky post, but this offers nothing that would attract me. Twitter/X/Bluesky/Insta/Threads is for people that like celebrities with some interesting stuff in between. But overall that isn't worth it.
I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't.
Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us.
X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two.
Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.
If you want to find your colleauges' posts, if you want to find high quality information, if you want good links to long articles, X is no longer the place to be.
If you want to have click-bait and rage-bait or lots of right-wing politics, X will cater to your needs. But it won't cater to somebody that's trying to get to highly-curated high-signal information networks that Twitter allowed in the past. That's all been actively destroyed, with great intention.
So the lowest bar possibly imaginable?
Bluesky started from word of mouth invite only
Does anyone remember now Spoutible? Substack Notes? How about Spill, Hive, or Post? Being even with in anything approximating striking distance of Threads would have been a triumph for any of them.
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/sky-follower-...
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated in any way. I just tried it and it worked well.