I moved over from Twitter to Bluesky with the big wave (I've been using it since mid-2023 however). It's everything I've wanted from the community to the engagement. What's more, I'm not punished for linking to my blog! Everything I could have asked for.
I've gradually moved over to Mastodon for most of my posting. The pocket of Fedi I reside within (queer fedi) is quite nice.
Last year, I seriously started using Bluesky. It's okay, but a little too much like "old Twitter" for my tastes. I still use it, but my most interesting posts go on Fedi.
This is all to say, Bluesky has replaced Twitter for me, but I was already phasing it out.
I found the same. It's impressive how much bluesky resembles twitter, but I'm not sure if that's a compliment.
On Mastadon I find much smaller circles, but much more engaged.
I think bluesky is winning at discovery. If I want to feel the pulse on a topic, bluesky is winning. If I'm not even aware there's a topic that I want to feel the pulse on, bluesky is winning. But I think mastadon has been successful at curating a very different 'vibe', and I appreciate it. So I catch up on mastadon first, and then doomscroll bluesky if I need to find work for idle hands.
Anecdotal, but so many people in my circles have jumped ship to Bluesky that the transition is pretty seamless at this point. It feels more like Twitter than what became of Twitter does.
Curious: what happens when Bluesky has all the same people/posts as Twitter? Will it be any better? Or will it just be the same thing on a new website?
Well, for a start it won't have Musk trying to break it. Like, its worst near-term case is probably 2022 Twitter. It's unlikely they'll do pay-for-attention, say; musk!Twitter is the only social network I know of to have done that outside the dating/hookup site world.
Also, though, it has significantly better self-serve moderation tools than Twitter ever did (they _kind_ of existed for pre-Musk Twitter as third-party stuff, though Musk's API changes broke most of them). For instance, I subscribe to a moderation list which auto-blocks transphobes, so I don't have to read their One Joke again and again (seriously, they've pretty much had the one thing for the last 20 years; you'd think they could at least come up with some new material). People who, er, enjoy the one joke are of course free to enjoy it by not subscribing to that mod list.
I do expect it to get worse over time as more people join, tbh; the current user base is rather self-selecting. But I don't think it will get as bad as current-Twitter. If it does, er, onto the next thing, I suppose.
I found the moderation and choosing your own feed with blocklists so far implies that even if you copied and pasted all the odious people from Twitter, I still would never see them, nor would any other thinking person, and they would die in darkness. Also, there are examples of the most odious people joining and BlueSky banning them sua sponte almost immediately.
It's worth mentioning that X's problems with toxicity are greatly enhanced by its current leadership, so even if everybody switched to bsky tomorrow it would be different. There are far better tools for users to manage their own experience on bsky than X allows.
But, assume that bsky does turn to shit too... if nothing else the (successful?) migration from X shows that people are capable of moving - should bsky face its own calamity the friction to move again will be lower.
There's reason to hope that it won't end in total disaster though. It should (at some point) be possible to federate with bsky in a meaningful way, and perhaps a migration can be even easier than this one (i.e. you can switch to another instance that is run differently).
The ability to control your own experience via custom feeds makes Bluesky so delightful. The new X algo made it impossible to just follow the people I wanted to.
This launched today, trying to address your valid concerns:
> Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart. [0]
> FreeOurFeeds aims to build a new social media ecosystem on top of the AT Protocol, an open, decentralized framework designed to enable interoperable social media platforms, giving users greater control over their data, algorithms, and online experience (it’s what Bluesky runs on). They want to leverage this tech to create a social media ecosystem focused on individual control, creativity, community well-being, and free expression.
> They basically want to build Bluesky out from one company into a whole ecosystem of different apps and companies by making a non profit foundation that opens up its underlying technology so anybody can build on it. [1]
That last part is not very accurate. Anybody can build on it now. Their goal is to make a second AT Proto Relay [2] that is not under the control of Bluesky.
I don't believe that will happen. It looks like the eternal September will never leave the current giants. As more and more of the world came online, we passed a threshold where a majority of users are passive and undiscerning. The current giants are the generation of platforms that benefitted from this.
It will be better because Bluesky gives users control of the algo & moderation via the open ATProto(col). We get choice and competition without the switching cost (after you move over to ATProto)
Curious :why Bluesky and not Mastodon? I would have thought that decentralization would be a better safeguard against Bluesky becoming Twitter after being successful...
Honest question: I left Twitter so long ago (I guess that I never got it) and am not really using Mastodon... so I think that I'm not the right people
Bluesky is much easier to use than Mastodon, particularly for non-technical folks. It’s also has an UI that looks a lot like Twitter from 2-3 years ago.
I big question is whether "official" accounts will move to Bluesky - governments, businesses, organizations, etc. I see some, but not too many.
Of course, maybe that's fine, some people prefer it that way. But, for me, it seems nice to have a common place where organizations put out announcements.
Honestly I thought most of that was strictly Facebook's domain. Maybe that's just the consequences of living in a smaller metro than most, the folks around here are slower on the uptake of new tech. But yeah, none of my local municipal orgs are on Twitter or ever have been in any capacity. They use Facebook for everything, that and local businesses are the only reason I still have a Facebook account.
I second your anecdote. I ran both for a good amount of time but the last time I went to X, I opened it on my phone, waiting for a coffee, and got 3 posts about idiotic culture war nonsense chased with an ad for a crypto scam, and I genuinely aloud said, "what the fuck am I still on this for" and deleted it. Haven't missed it once since.
I'm not sure why but blue sky serves me a lot of very specific content I'm not interested in seeing and no matter how many dozens of pictures I choose (show less like this) on, it continues to show.
The problem is that you are creating an echo chamber. My experience using let’s quit “insert company name” is that these echo chambers tend to be toxic and terrible. IE.. Gab, Truth Social, etc.
It’s very difficult to do unless you can have broad consensus. I tend to use Twitter for an industry wide group and while a few individuals have moved, the Bluesky version just doesn’t have the reach or usefulness of the twitter or x version.
Twitter is already, and increasingly so, an echo chamber of the type of people who want to stay on Twitter.
From that vantage point it is the conscious decision to stay on the network during an exodus that creates an echo chamber. Something similar happened with facebook. The people who are still on facebook in 2025 are having a pretty different conversation than occurs in some other places.
It's still way more diverse than any other platform. Blue sky is still mostly a "tech bro" related, western tech circles centric platform. You absolutely do not get even close to the variety and diversity that X has.
This will eventually shift. There is legitimately very little reason to use X unless you're a Musk-stan. Case in point: I started using twitter regularly during the CA fires & blackouts in 2017. I was amazed at how quickly I could get a read on a situation and actual on the ground facts at near real-time speed.
For the Palisades fire, I'm struggling to make X nearly as useful as it was. There is a lot of random diatribe and speculation but on-the-ground facts just don't appear.
I chuckle at the argument that you're entering an echo chamber when you leave X.
News flash: X is already an echo chamber!
Maybe the "oh no don't leave for an echo chamber!" assertion is a case of people remembering the pre-X version of twitter, and comparing competitors to that - rather than what X is today. Or maybe it's a case of "boiling a frog," where people on X are actually unaware of what it has become.
Or maybe... it's actually just a bad faith argument by people who like the current X echo chamber.
Every major LA fire hashtag is a 10-1 ratio of political nonsense and engagement farming to actual content. Maybe 20-1. It's depressing to try to sift through for actual information. The LA local news was light-years more timely and informative than twitter.
Is there a personal reason you have to keep with it at all at that level? Not doubting you do, but I feel like people are generally addicted to keeping up with shit that affects their emotions and really doesn't need to.
I remember during covid and after when we had nearby wildfires. even during a mass shooting event a few years back how useful twitter was for realtime information sharing between public and agencies. There was a few years I'd regularly know things before radio/news picked them up. I also remember how during major world events twitter would explode in volume and reactions to the point third party systems would struggle (I once upon a time worked on one of those third party systems)
Now I struggle to find regular updates and half the accounts I used to follow are idle. By the time that third party twitter processor I had worked for shut down, the cadence of posts were so scheduled it was obviously driven by bots and not organic reactions. Even major world events would be gamed by bots as fast as real reactions which had significantly decreased on their own.
I haven't found a replacement to be fair, but I definitely see the enshittification of it from an incredibly useful short form broadcast channel to an engagement-gamified advertising megaphone.
> The problem is that you are creating an echo chamber.
How's that? Bluesky, say, has a fair bit of diverse opinion. It's low on the far-right (though there are certainly some; I subscribe to a few blocklists to filter their nonsense out), which has a bit of a personal affinity for Musk, but to an extent, y'know, who needs 'em? Like, it is not the case that there exist two opinions, far-right lunacy and everything else; the non-far-right segment contains multitudes.
X is already a far right echo chamber, if you create a new account and navigate to the "for you" page, all you see is Elon Musk, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate and other far right "role models".
It's unfortunate that X still retains a greater reach than its alternatives, but that can change in the medium term.
I follow a bunch of Japanese game developers, who at present don't have a strong motivator to leave X. Most of them are also on LINE, but I'm a little reluctant to try it since I don't actually read Japanese. (ETA: I looked at LINE just now and it seems more like a chat app than a board where users post information for anyone, so I think it's off the table.)
Then just don't navigate to For You. I wish I could just see my friends on Facebook (those are the people I care about), but I can't turn off crappy suggestions.
With X I can control my own feed by using the followers tab.
There's also 99.99% less bots on bluesky at the moment. I can live with actual good-faith discourse. But twitter right now is a cesspool of political bots, outrageous take engagement farming, and toxic personal attacks.
Obviously, this is going to be a problem with any site that becomes the town square, just like how Yelp and TripAdvisor eventually became so gamed as to be mostly useless. The question to me is can bluesky rise to the level of being useful w/o succumbing to the pitfalls that come with being ubiquitous.
God forbid people have standards of basic human decency. "Trump bad" posts being popular on a website is a world of a difference from a rich guy buying another platform with the specific goal of bringing back literal nazis, as proven in released court documents, doing it, and then going above and beyond by posting that kind of content himself.
I just checked this myself and it isn't accurate. The first post was trump, the second was rich people, the third was pigeons, fourth was about bluesky, fifth cheese puns, sixth ken jennings on shirts, seventh cats/maybe wildfires, eighth work really do be like that, ninth us politics, 10th john woo movies.
I don't think there's anything about Bsky that makes it "left wing" or an echo chamber, it's just that the first people to jump ship from Twitter were by and large, on the left of the US political spectrum. If Bsky ends up with hundreds of millions of people on it then it won't be any sort of echo chamber.
For now it's very much dominated by Twitter ex-pats, and that gives it a pretty predictable slant. Unlike Twitter however this isn't being imposed by the owner, it's organic.
I think though that Trump truly is worse. If you made this comment in 2008 or 2012 and used Trump or McCain I’d say you are right. But what happens when a person truly is a vile disgusting human being? Then it no longer becomes the same shit. As an extreme example, Kerensky wasn’t as bad as the Bolsheviks. It wasn’t the same shit.
I'm active in the retro game console modding community and we pretty much all jumped ship same time in early November.
I still log to Twitter once a week to check, there haven't been anything new in my following feed for at least a month beside the people cross posting.
So I can easily see myself do just that, I wouldn't miss anything anyway.
I quit Twitter in 2008, around the time I quit Facebook. Here's what I can say with confidence: Bluesky, Mastodon, whatever—they're all going to end up being bad, like Twitter. The problems ultimately come out of the format, not the specific instance of the format.
I disagree. Moderation is like culture. Twitter's moderation has gone to complete junk in the past couple of years. Bluesky and Mastodon don't have that problem (yet, or possibly ever).
In your analogy - moderation is part of the format.
I couldn't stand plain vanilla X either and entirely sympathize. I did leave it, for several years. But now, my heavily curated X feed (I use Control Panel for Twitter) is the single highest signal to noise news source I've found in five decades as an obsessive infovore. I filter out everything but the direct opinions of specific contributors, creating the bespoke daily newspaper I dreamed of for so long. I'd really rather that this wasn't the product of a centralized platform and would happily leap to a decentralized platform with similar value. But I won't let perfect be the enemy of the best collection of smart people I like to listen to I've yet to find except maybe on HN. And HN would benefit from better curation options too.
Readit News
My profile in case you want to follow: https://bsky.app/profile/xeiaso.net
Last year, I seriously started using Bluesky. It's okay, but a little too much like "old Twitter" for my tastes. I still use it, but my most interesting posts go on Fedi.
This is all to say, Bluesky has replaced Twitter for me, but I was already phasing it out.
On Mastadon I find much smaller circles, but much more engaged.
I think bluesky is winning at discovery. If I want to feel the pulse on a topic, bluesky is winning. If I'm not even aware there's a topic that I want to feel the pulse on, bluesky is winning. But I think mastadon has been successful at curating a very different 'vibe', and I appreciate it. So I catch up on mastadon first, and then doomscroll bluesky if I need to find work for idle hands.
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Also, though, it has significantly better self-serve moderation tools than Twitter ever did (they _kind_ of existed for pre-Musk Twitter as third-party stuff, though Musk's API changes broke most of them). For instance, I subscribe to a moderation list which auto-blocks transphobes, so I don't have to read their One Joke again and again (seriously, they've pretty much had the one thing for the last 20 years; you'd think they could at least come up with some new material). People who, er, enjoy the one joke are of course free to enjoy it by not subscribing to that mod list.
I do expect it to get worse over time as more people join, tbh; the current user base is rather self-selecting. But I don't think it will get as bad as current-Twitter. If it does, er, onto the next thing, I suppose.
So, I am optimistic.
But, assume that bsky does turn to shit too... if nothing else the (successful?) migration from X shows that people are capable of moving - should bsky face its own calamity the friction to move again will be lower.
There's reason to hope that it won't end in total disaster though. It should (at some point) be possible to federate with bsky in a meaningful way, and perhaps a migration can be even easier than this one (i.e. you can switch to another instance that is run differently).
> Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart. [0]
> FreeOurFeeds aims to build a new social media ecosystem on top of the AT Protocol, an open, decentralized framework designed to enable interoperable social media platforms, giving users greater control over their data, algorithms, and online experience (it’s what Bluesky runs on). They want to leverage this tech to create a social media ecosystem focused on individual control, creativity, community well-being, and free expression.
> They basically want to build Bluesky out from one company into a whole ecosystem of different apps and companies by making a non profit foundation that opens up its underlying technology so anybody can build on it. [1]
That last part is not very accurate. Anybody can build on it now. Their goal is to make a second AT Proto Relay [2] that is not under the control of Bluesky.
[0] https://freeourfeeds.com/
[1] https://www.usermag.co/p/freeourfeeds-a-30m-plan-to-take-bac...
[2] https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#relay
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Honest question: I left Twitter so long ago (I guess that I never got it) and am not really using Mastodon... so I think that I'm not the right people
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Of course, maybe that's fine, some people prefer it that way. But, for me, it seems nice to have a common place where organizations put out announcements.
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I've basically stopped using it.
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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42623590
[0] https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2025/01/2024-internet-...
He says Section 230 is on the chopping and extinction block in 2025 and he would be shocked if it made it to 2026.
It’s very difficult to do unless you can have broad consensus. I tend to use Twitter for an industry wide group and while a few individuals have moved, the Bluesky version just doesn’t have the reach or usefulness of the twitter or x version.
From that vantage point it is the conscious decision to stay on the network during an exodus that creates an echo chamber. Something similar happened with facebook. The people who are still on facebook in 2025 are having a pretty different conversation than occurs in some other places.
For the Palisades fire, I'm struggling to make X nearly as useful as it was. There is a lot of random diatribe and speculation but on-the-ground facts just don't appear.
The juice is gone.
News flash: X is already an echo chamber!
Maybe the "oh no don't leave for an echo chamber!" assertion is a case of people remembering the pre-X version of twitter, and comparing competitors to that - rather than what X is today. Or maybe it's a case of "boiling a frog," where people on X are actually unaware of what it has become.
Or maybe... it's actually just a bad faith argument by people who like the current X echo chamber.
Now I struggle to find regular updates and half the accounts I used to follow are idle. By the time that third party twitter processor I had worked for shut down, the cadence of posts were so scheduled it was obviously driven by bots and not organic reactions. Even major world events would be gamed by bots as fast as real reactions which had significantly decreased on their own.
I haven't found a replacement to be fair, but I definitely see the enshittification of it from an incredibly useful short form broadcast channel to an engagement-gamified advertising megaphone.
what's a -stan? do you mean like kazakhstan?
Unless you are a sports fan.
How's that? Bluesky, say, has a fair bit of diverse opinion. It's low on the far-right (though there are certainly some; I subscribe to a few blocklists to filter their nonsense out), which has a bit of a personal affinity for Musk, but to an extent, y'know, who needs 'em? Like, it is not the case that there exist two opinions, far-right lunacy and everything else; the non-far-right segment contains multitudes.
It's unfortunate that X still retains a greater reach than its alternatives, but that can change in the medium term.
With X I can control my own feed by using the followers tab.
Yeah but it's a left wing echo chamber and that's good! /s
Incognito window > bsky > discovery feed > every post is about US politics, Trump bad, rich people bad, Musk bad etc. Same shit just different colors
Bsky is not the answer, the only answer is not to use social media at all. And more or less that applies to HN too.
Obviously, this is going to be a problem with any site that becomes the town square, just like how Yelp and TripAdvisor eventually became so gamed as to be mostly useless. The question to me is can bluesky rise to the level of being useful w/o succumbing to the pitfalls that come with being ubiquitous.
That is the only correct answer. To essentially delete all your social media accounts.
If one wants to stop their alcohol addiction for example (Using Facebook, X), is not done by switching the brand of alcohol (Threads, Bluesky).
It is done by stopping altogether (by deleting all your accounts) and only you can do that.
For now it's very much dominated by Twitter ex-pats, and that gives it a pretty predictable slant. Unlike Twitter however this isn't being imposed by the owner, it's organic.
I think though that Trump truly is worse. If you made this comment in 2008 or 2012 and used Trump or McCain I’d say you are right. But what happens when a person truly is a vile disgusting human being? Then it no longer becomes the same shit. As an extreme example, Kerensky wasn’t as bad as the Bolsheviks. It wasn’t the same shit.
I still log to Twitter once a week to check, there haven't been anything new in my following feed for at least a month beside the people cross posting.
So I can easily see myself do just that, I wouldn't miss anything anyway.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241226192120/https://www.hello...
In your analogy - moderation is part of the format.