This was a great little article. Very fair summary of the situation.
After the demise of Twitter, I first tried Post.news — which had great branding but failed to get the everything-is-a-tweet model right (comments were 2nd class citizens to posts).
Then I moved to Mastodon, which I enjoy. Mastodon’s biggest issue is the enormous UX hurdle to pick an instance before even signing up, though. That and the lack of a unified view (mentioned in the article) will probably keep it niche. Also lack of quote-tweeting, a deliberate choice.
BlueSky is the first truly worthy successor. It’s better than Twitter in its prime, before it went algorithmic. It allows quote-tweeting but gives the quoted party control over the scenarios that Mastodon was trying to prevent by avoiding the feature entirely.
Agreed about that they nailed the UX for BlueSky in terms of “best possible Twitterlike”.
That said, my biggest concern is how they plan to make money. With BlueSky being completely open at the moment, there is effectively no possible monetization strategy for them without making major breaking changes to the protocol.
For example, if they added ads to the app, someone could just write a client that didn’t have ads. Donations are another possibility, but probably wouldn’t be enough to pay for the servers.
In fairness, Mastodon apparently is working on quote-tweeting. AIUI to do it properly (ie, like Bluesky, with the ability to remove quote-tweets etc) requires changes to ActivityPub.
Bluesky, at least for now, has the advantage that they essentially control the protocol, and are the only significant user; they can move a lot quicker. It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves.
It's so user-friendly that you get banned for sharing any remotely controversial opinion. Just like the good old days of Twitter!
Twitter/X is actually a balanced discourse site now. CNN even admitted that the party affiliation of its users went from majority-left (65/31) to split down the middle, 48/47. https://x.com/ScottJenningsKY/status/1861445812175147353
Ergo if everyone who hates mars man proclaims that the alternative to mars man website is “the next big thing” and “exploding in popularity” loudly and often enough, then maybe it will actually become popular outside the mars man bad crowd.
You know it’s manufactured when news outlets are comparing App Store download rankings of X and BlueSky. The new app versus the one that’s been around for nearly 20 years and already present on most devices it ever will be.
Meanwhile in the real world nobody has heard of BlueSky or really cares that people they’ll never interact with no longer get banned for being bigots on X.
Change doesn’t happen all at once, right? Bluesky may still not have the mindshare — but two weeks ago they were 3-4 coin flips away from unseating Twitter, and now they only need one more. That they could become the leader in their category was unthinkable, and now it’s not.
The people active on Twitter are a small subset of "the real world", and the move to BlueSky is certainly very noticeable there. About 80-90% of people I was following on Twitter have a Bluesky account now, most of them are actively posting there. And this is not just a left-wing bubble, I mean I don't follow any Trump supporters but there are plenty of people in my feed that would usually be considered conservative.
After all the hullabaloo recently I went and looked at it for the first time.
Here's my true first-time user experience: The first 10 posts recommended to me were 1 comedian making a joke, 2 pictures of space, and 7 hate-based partisan political posts. All from one extreme end of the political spectrum. You can guess which. I instantly left and will never go back.
I'd agree the default user experience is shit (and I felt it was shit on old Twitter too). It's like a shotgun of shit at the wall to see what sticks. But once you engage with content you want (which can be entirely non-political and niche-interest based) that goes away.
Or at least I suspect so. I often end up being interested in politics and thus get more of it, but I'm not complaining. I get a good mix of my specific interests, art, humor, cute animals, and politics.
> Twitter/X is actually a balanced discourse site now. CNN even admitted that the party affiliation of its users went from majority-left (65/31) to split down the middle, 48/47
To repeat a quote I have seen repeated in dozens of email signatures (below the pronouns, of course!)
"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
That was true previously as well. The most substantial difference between Jack and Musk is that the former was better at maintaining a professional demeanor. His biases were no fewer, his tenure at Twitter was markedly more censorious, but he was better at presenting himself. This seems to be the main distinguishing feature of American liberalism as opposed to conservatism. The point about misinformation is another place this can be seen. There's a lot of misinformation from both mainstream political camps in the US, but liberal misinformation is more dressed-up whereas conservative misinformation is downright clownish--Alex Jones being a good example.
Every time there's a Bluesky or ATProto post I comment with how I think their killer feature is video.
Their smart use of domains makes it so that their equivalent of "channel" can be an actual website, that will offer you recommendations when you watch videos on it exactly like YT, except you control the algorithm.
Users will get much better choice and experience over the already excellent YouTube, but most importantly the creators will be able to express themselves however they wish. They will rent hosting from a provider, shows ads from an Adsense-like service, and actually own both their content _and_ their subscriber list.
I've been wanting to build it, but I'm always deterred by how ATProto is still tightly linked to Bluesky itself.
Getting tired of these samey sort of 'look what a revolution Bluesky is' posts. Yes, it's doing well. A boom. A recent boom. But I also anecdotally am not seeing huge swathes of engagement or migration depending on niche. It was like that when the whole Mastodon exodus happened a few years ago also - both in the numerous excitement posts, and the niche-specific migration. Let's just see where it goes. The thoughtpieces are endless and lack any real insight or substantive data.
I switched to Bluesky yesterday due to the bots/zero engagement on X.
It's basically become yelling into the void. Started out in 2007 and it was great for finding people and getting interest in your projects, but now, I just get a bunch of spam bot follows and on an account with 3,600+ followers, only 30-40 views at most per post (w/ no engagement).
Same for me. 1,000 followers and barely any engagement. I swear it used to be different. My posts weren't any less dumb years ago, but I used to at least get a few replies and likes, even retweets.
Readit News
After the demise of Twitter, I first tried Post.news — which had great branding but failed to get the everything-is-a-tweet model right (comments were 2nd class citizens to posts).
Then I moved to Mastodon, which I enjoy. Mastodon’s biggest issue is the enormous UX hurdle to pick an instance before even signing up, though. That and the lack of a unified view (mentioned in the article) will probably keep it niche. Also lack of quote-tweeting, a deliberate choice.
BlueSky is the first truly worthy successor. It’s better than Twitter in its prime, before it went algorithmic. It allows quote-tweeting but gives the quoted party control over the scenarios that Mastodon was trying to prevent by avoiding the feature entirely.
That said, my biggest concern is how they plan to make money. With BlueSky being completely open at the moment, there is effectively no possible monetization strategy for them without making major breaking changes to the protocol.
For example, if they added ads to the app, someone could just write a client that didn’t have ads. Donations are another possibility, but probably wouldn’t be enough to pay for the servers.
Bluesky, at least for now, has the advantage that they essentially control the protocol, and are the only significant user; they can move a lot quicker. It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves.
Twitter/X is actually a balanced discourse site now. CNN even admitted that the party affiliation of its users went from majority-left (65/31) to split down the middle, 48/47. https://x.com/ScottJenningsKY/status/1861445812175147353
Ergo if everyone who hates mars man proclaims that the alternative to mars man website is “the next big thing” and “exploding in popularity” loudly and often enough, then maybe it will actually become popular outside the mars man bad crowd.
You know it’s manufactured when news outlets are comparing App Store download rankings of X and BlueSky. The new app versus the one that’s been around for nearly 20 years and already present on most devices it ever will be.
Meanwhile in the real world nobody has heard of BlueSky or really cares that people they’ll never interact with no longer get banned for being bigots on X.
Besides, 25 million users is plenty already.
Twitter fundamentally offers no killer feature. Being "around for nearly 20 years" means nothing.
Here's my true first-time user experience: The first 10 posts recommended to me were 1 comedian making a joke, 2 pictures of space, and 7 hate-based partisan political posts. All from one extreme end of the political spectrum. You can guess which. I instantly left and will never go back.
For what it's worth, I also do not use X.
Or at least I suspect so. I often end up being interested in politics and thus get more of it, but I'm not complaining. I get a good mix of my specific interests, art, humor, cute animals, and politics.
To repeat a quote I have seen repeated in dozens of email signatures (below the pronouns, of course!)
"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
That might have a chance at being true if the owner didn't flood the network with deliberate misinformation and block dissenting opinions.
Their smart use of domains makes it so that their equivalent of "channel" can be an actual website, that will offer you recommendations when you watch videos on it exactly like YT, except you control the algorithm.
Users will get much better choice and experience over the already excellent YouTube, but most importantly the creators will be able to express themselves however they wish. They will rent hosting from a provider, shows ads from an Adsense-like service, and actually own both their content _and_ their subscriber list.
I've been wanting to build it, but I'm always deterred by how ATProto is still tightly linked to Bluesky itself.
yeah, there are 1-2 posts on the frontpage every day now. totally organic
1. Make Twitter/X Clone
2. ???
3. Profit!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park)
It's basically become yelling into the void. Started out in 2007 and it was great for finding people and getting interest in your projects, but now, I just get a bunch of spam bot follows and on an account with 3,600+ followers, only 30-40 views at most per post (w/ no engagement).
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