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The key thing for me is whether it's really a text focused app or they ruin it by trying to cross promote Instagram/Reels and turn it into a mindless time suck.
by babl-yc 3y ago
The key thing for me is whether it's really a text focused app or they ruin it by trying to cross promote Instagram/Reels and turn it into a mindless time suck.
If they get the little details right, I see this as the only real competition to Twitter right now. After trying Mastodon for a few months, it's certainly not it.
- delecti 3y agoAgreed. I think this succeeds or fails based on the ability to follow different kinds of things from users separately. If I can follow someone's Threads and not their Reels, I'd be glad to have such an easy migration path off of Twitter (I'm having a lot of fun on bluesky, but it's not ready). I'm not optimistic about that though, because you already can't choose to not follow reels separately from pictures.
- skiman10 3y agoI never got a Bluesky invite and I've seen a couple comments mentioning "it's not ready" so I'm wondering why people keep saying that? It has been in development for a while, so I would assume it is ready at this point in time.
- firecall 3y agoYou arnt missing anything :-)
- delecti 3y agoBluesky feels like a beta. It's missing: DMs, private accounts, gif/video embeds, and any sort of advanced notification controls. They don't have a trust and safety team, and they're using the invite system to slow down their growth because they can't keep up with demand. It's fun at its current small scale, but they aren't ready to be a Twitter replacement yet.
- skiman10 3y agoThe invite system just really gives off Google+ vibes and I'm wondering if we end up in the same place after Threads launches. Facebook/Meta seems really poised to eat Bluesky's lunch in a few days.
- depereo 3y agoGmail also had invites to start, back in the day, and that's the de facto email service now. But that had a compelling day-1 offering that was clearly better - massive free storage allocation. Bluesky doesn't have a compelling reason to sign up like that, so the invite system feels flawed.
- Semaphor 3y agoGmail also had so much hype around it, invites were sold online (I paid ~1.10€ or something on eBay). ~~Blusky, not so much.~~
- mminer237 3y agoI see a lot of Bluesky invites that have sold on Ebay today. For ~$20 too.
- Semaphor 3y agoHuh. Not only correct, they were selling for ~200 in May. Do people actually talk about bluesky outside of HN? I never heard of it anywhere else.
- zimpenfish 3y ago> Do people actually talk about bluesky outside of HN? I see a bunch of people talking about it on Twitter in the context of "I'm on Bluesky, follow me there in case this implodes". But yeah, >90% of the Bluesky mentions I see are on HN.
- 3y ago
- firecall 3y agoI just checked, I have some invite codes! I’ll DM you! EDIT: realised you can’t DM on HN How can I send a code to you? If you want one that is, you might not be bothered :-) EDIT EDIT: I’m using the Hack App on my Phone, I think maybe I can DM followers from the desktop site?
- skiman10 3y agoSure, thanks! Seems like an interesting platform. skiman10 at duck.com Not sure on the DM stuff, if you figure it out let me know!
- firecall 3y agoOn your email! Apologies for the delay! I'm all out of codes now - If I get anymore, I'll share them here. I didnt realise at first there were so many requests! :-)
- skiman10 3y agoThank you!
- dotcoma 3y agoWould love an invite, thank you! 6ndpn1zk AT duck.com
- firecall 3y agoI'm out, if I get more, I'll come dish them out :-)
- Vaskerville 3y agoI can't resist - I've been trying to get an invite for awhile now. Thanks! zhym4g7v AT duck.com
- firecall 3y ago
- astrange 3y agoIf it was ready I assume they'd take the invite wall down. I haven't got one either yet so don't know its state.
- gochi 3y agoIt's not a large team, and it's very barebones in terms of features, like DMs. They also weren't ready for the small boom in users trying to sign up the other day, so networking is still a concern for them. Also they haven't been working directly on the app itself this entire time, they also created a new protocol due to Jack's desire to re-evaluate everything rather than "create a twitter clone".
- lapcat 3y agoIt's not. Bluesky is still quite primitive. I wouldn't even call it a "beta", more like an alpha. They gave invite codes to some "influencers", and it got a lot of hype and media attention, but after the hype died down somewhat, it's become basically a nothing burger. I've stopped giving out the invite codes that I'm accumulating, because my feed is pretty boring and dead. Bluesky is far more "promise" than reality. Meta has 1000x the engineering resources of Bluesky.
- biggestfan 3y agoYou should post any codes you have here, I imagine the HN userbase is more likely than most to be interested in trying a project like that out (or maybe it's just me :))
- lapcat 3y agoI already have plenty of people interested in the codes. But when new people arrive and look around, they tend to lose interest just like I did.
- skiman10 3y agoSo instead of sending out your invite codes to diversify the user base to generate more content, you will instead not distribute the codes?
- lapcat 3y ago> diversify the user base to generate more content That's an incorrect assumption. I've given out codes before. It didn't generate more content, because people quickly lose interest. The grass is not greener on the other side. It's a dead party. Inviting a few more people isn't going to help. If they open up the gates to everyone, that's a different story, but they're not nearly ready to do that.
- skiman10 3y ago
- elliotec 3y agoI feel like the fact you can’t even use it yet because you don’t have an invite is exactly why it isn’t ready yet.
- skiman10 3y agoWell sure, but to be fair they let a lot of "influencers" on some sort of working platform and it got a lot of hype, but since then... You don't hear much anymore. I was just wondering what was going on, they've been working on it for a while now.
- depereo 3y agoI've heard most of the discussion on the platform is 'meta' discussion about bluesky itself, rather than anything interesting.
- sokz 3y agoMy experience with mastodon was the same for a while until Elon took over twitter. Now I do see discussions on stuff I care about although I am starting to see discussions regarding the threat of Meta federating with some big instances of mastodon.
- depereo 3y agoYeah, seemed like a lot of chatter from people onboarding Mastodon was 'how does this work' or 'how do I use it to build and find community or news' or 'why this is better than other options'. That seemed to fade fast on an individual basis once there was critical mass to support conversation on other shared interests between users but flares up again from time to time when a new 'wave' of people join. Maybe bluesky just lacks critical mass for user interest overlap other than 'being on bluesky'.
- skiman10 3y agoI think this right here is what makes me curious about Bluesky in the first place, the meta discussion on HN about it is weird and I want to see it for myself.
- shivz45 3y agoBluesky is where ppl bash twitter and no other comments
- pferde 3y agoApparently, (at least some) content creators like it better than Mastodon already. See https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/30/Social-and-parasocial-media.html https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/30/Social-and-parasocial-med...
- jug 3y agoI think it's too barebones and they are still working out the moderation and safety problem. Besides, it looks like it scales like shit. It's not ready for wide adoption, I have to agree about this one.
- dbbk 3y agoThe UI sucks.
- skiman10 3y agoThis is a new one I haven't seen before, could you go into more detail?
- kafkaesque 3y agoSocial media needs to be destroyed, not enhanced, empowered or encouraged. Don't give Meta PMs ideas. Ceci est un post de protestation.
- pxoe 3y agoit's akin to calling for people to be silenced. it is literally that. "socialization needs to be destroyed". lol
- BonitaPersona 3y agoSocial media is definitely not socialization. In a Venn diagram, the cross section of social media and socialization is tiny. - A very, very small part of socialization may very, very occasionally happen on social media. - Social media allows for multiple phenomena to happen, but the overwhelming majority of it won't be socializing. The issue here is the redefinition of "socialization" intrinsically made by the "social media" marketing campaigns. The solution is a better understanding of what human socialization actually is. This is not a critique of social media. I like and use it, even though I'd like more diversity. But stop mixing it up with "socialization" because it is not, even if the marketing of social media relies on trying to mix them up.
- 1270018080 3y agoI have a feeling it'll have the intellectual quality of the Instagram comment section, which is worse than the Facebook comment section, which is 10x worse than Twitter. But I agree if there is heavy integration with the rest of Meta's products I'll be less happy.
- gureddio 3y agoSurely this is about who or what you are following though. Personally there is very little crossover between what I follow on instagram and twitter. So the quality of the discussions vary greatly. On Twitter I follow developers and product people. The quality is better on Twitter, but it's definitely declined because of engagement seeking over the last few years.
- inDigiNeous 3y agoHopefully they really put effort into the web part of the product, I mean really writing text on a phone or even a tablet is not so easy. But I'm guessing they wont do that, as Meta wants lock in and registration, and following all your data. At least current version of instagram on the web is pretty lame, if you don't install some browser extensions.
- solarkraft 3y ago> After trying Mastodon for a few months, it's certainly not it. Why?
- babl-yc 3y agoFrom my experience: - Feed was purely chronological (no algorithmic feed) so I missed a lot of content - Sign-up process isn't obvious due to decentralization - Likes, profiles sometimes had bugs or required extra clicks if from other servers - Few people I follow migrated from Twitter, and most have since stopped posting due to lack of engagement
- mjhagen 3y agoThe pure chronologic feed is why I used Tweetbot and is why I'm on Mastodon.
- mrweasel 3y ago> Feed was purely chronological (no algorithmic feed) so I missed a lot of content People normally have the reverse complaint, that the algorithm makes them miss content.
- Yizahi 3y agoPeople (tech inclined and looking for a forum platform) want chronological feed, yes. But they want it usable too. Mastodon doesn't have any categorization/classification/tags tools, everyting is dumped into a single gigantic realtime thread, and if you blink you miss the post and its gone forever. I tried Mastodon once, when it was just starting out and abandoned after playing around for a while. It's simply unusable, compared to any forum or reddit. Or even to a Facebook, with it's horrible UI. At least FB has groups and pages which kinda work like a bad crutch for categorization. Mastodon is lacking any of that.
- rodgerd 3y agoIf?
- vlunkr 3y agoThat’s the key thing for you, but reels are super popular, so I would expect cross promotion.
- andsoitis 3y ago> text focused app what ratio of tweets are rich media vs. text?
- mjhagen 3y agoThe twitter I used was way more text than media, I had Tweetbot set to small thumbnails as well. For me at least, Twitter started as text only and ended as text mostly.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- no_butterscotch 3y agoIf they also tie your account to Instagram/FB, then do I get banned across services if my account is somehow "flagged"? Whether that's for unknown logins, spam accusations (just an accusation is enough for a tech company to throw the ban hammer), etc.