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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 c

• jeffbee 3y ago
  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.
  • brundolf 3y ago
    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
    • bordercases 3y ago
      A nice migration story would probably help for Mastodon no? Sign-up on an "index" server, then one button to end up somewhere else?
      • h0l0cube 3y ago
        The problem with that is coordination. All the Mastodon servers would need to align, agree, and implement this new process. The whole point of Mastodon is that it is federated, and so consensus will ensure progress is limited to the lowest common denominator.
        • bordercases 3y ago
          Federation works when protocols and standards are negotiated upon, and people do coordinate implicitly wherever they apply the protocol. So I'm not sure if there's anything to explain as if we're at cross purposes. Why couldn't a protocol and reference implementation exist for a client migration if servers have similar schemas for users and posts?
    • cubefox 3y ago
      Do you know how censorship and Balkanization work on Bluesky? On Mastodon this was quite extreme, as entire servers can block each other, without any involvement from the individual user.
      • echelon 3y ago
        This is why p2p will always be superior to federation. I don't want others making decisions for me. I'm okay with consuming an upstream block/filter list, but I ultimately want executive control over it.
        • jghn 3y ago
          The thing that still grinds my gears about Mastodon is the concept of search is inherently broken. In Twitter I can search whatever and see all the old public posts from the start of time. On Mastodon, I'll get ... some stuff. With your model that wouldn't be an issue.
        • caskstrength 3y ago
          People who want such experience just run their own instance.
          • cubefox 3y ago
            No because that doesn't solve the problem.
      • BryantD 3y ago
        At the moment there’s no issue because there’s still only one server. De facto I can’t imagine any federated protocol that won’t enable servers to block each other, though.
      • dredmorbius 3y ago
        FWIW, many Fediverse instances will be / are blocking Bluesky. Some instances and individuals will block Fediverse instances which federate with Bluesky.
    • JoshTriplett 3y ago
      > Mastodon puts too much onus on the user to pick a home server So don't. There are multiple services you can pay a small fee to to host your own instance with only you on it.
      • Ombudsman 3y ago
        You don't see how that's an even larger barrier to entry than just picking an existing home server?
        • JoshTriplett 3y ago
          It could certainly be more user-friendly than it currently is, but no, I think it's more user-friendly than having to pick a home server and worry about whether you picked well.
        • anigbrowl 3y ago
          Mastodon evangelists just don't seem to get why nobody else shares their masochistic tastes. It's not terrible if you want something highly configurable but most social media users want to chat, not federate.
  • drusepth 3y ago
    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.
  • lamontcg 3y ago
    After a year or so my mastodon feed is getting better and its more of the same people who were on twitter, less void-shouty than it was.
  • hn1986 3y ago
    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.
• adastra22 3y ago
  > it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms Compelling for whom? For developers? I’m not sure anyone else will care.
  • brundolf 3y ago
    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
    • jjfoooo4 3y ago
      Choice is only good if the options are differentiated and easy to understand. A bunch of algo and client options sound good for someone who is already a committed user, but for a new user it just complicated the onboarding experience. Not to mention, it’s unclear what the incentive to put real resources behind any of these clients is.
      • brundolf 3y ago
        It doesn't complicate the onboarding process though, because there's an official client and a default algo. That's Bluesky's whole thing: sensible defaults and easy onboarding, so it can be "just twitter" if you want it to be. But the open protocol and ecosystem that give you more options if/when you want them, and put pressure on the official ones to stay good
        • ziml77 3y ago
          That's really the key. Most people don't need to care. Bluesky is nice and easy for their needs. They just use the bsky.app website and the official Bluesky phone app. This is in contrast to Mastodon where people were told to pick an instance and not really guided to any one as the primary one (because Mastodon devs/users don't want there to be a thought that there even is a "primary" instance). People here on HN can claim picking an instance isn't a big deal all they want, but I can say with confidence it is. I'm in various furry artist Discord servers where people expressed their distaste for having to deal with the multiple instances.
• pierat 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • brundolf 3y ago
    Bluesky is an open protocol
    • malermeister 3y ago
      But why isn't the whole thing just an activitypub client? It seems like it's an open protocol in the same way OOXML was an open format.
      • caslon 3y ago
        ActivityPub wasn't the first federated web discussions protocol. It isn't even a good one. Given how few users use ActivityPub-based services, it makes sense to experiment while the window is open.
      • brundolf 3y ago
        It has no overlap with ActivityPub, it's an entirely separate protocol
      • edavis 3y ago
        During the early days of what would become Bluesky, they first reviewed the available options for decentralized public communications and nothing out there checked all the boxes. So they moved forward building something completely new that did. I wrote a comment last week diving more into this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660192
      • jakebsky 3y ago
        This is a very reasonable and common question (I asked it myself before joining the team) Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data. Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors). https://atproto.com/guides/faq https://atproto.com/guides/faq
• matsemann 3y ago
  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.
  • skybrian 3y ago
    What sort of community?
    • matsemann 3y ago
      Cycling / urban planning / environmental in my country. So it's quite niche. A couple of hundreds. But that's also how I used Twitter. An account specifically for this. Only ever followed or interacted with content related to this. So not using it to consume other content, write about anything that comes to mind etc.
  • chatmasta 3y ago
    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.
    • rileyphone 3y ago
      Here's a few invite codes for anyone to use (maybe reply if you successfully use one) bsky-social-exnc4-5h2qb bsky-social-cocv2-coy6u bsky-social-txqzx-nqhw3 bsky-social-h6snn-255ig
      • 3y ago
• kjkjadksj 3y ago
  > "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.
  • madeofpalk 3y ago
    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.
    • blurrybird 3y ago
      Threads is this now. API is almost finished / ready for release.
      • madeofpalk 3y ago
        You and I have very different definitions of "now" :)
      • jakebsky 3y ago
        In the early days, Twitter used to have a very open and friendly API. It's a big part of why users and third-party devs (I was both) loved it. Same thing was true of Facebook and Reddit. Over time, they shut down their APIs (or charged huge fees) in an effort to intentionally kill off third-party clients and services. A key goal for Bluesky is to "lock open" the network and the API so that it's impossible to reverse the decision.
  • semitones 3y ago
    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
• npunt 3y ago
  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.
• lairv 3y ago
  You still need to get an invite / a waitlist to register or am I missing something ? I don't know how you can expect people to make the move when they're not even able to sign in
  • brundolf 3y ago
    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
    • EstanislaoStan 3y ago
      Could I get a Bluesky invite, by chance?
      • greeneggs 3y ago
        bsky-social-mjs72-44f7v bsky-social-hqjo5-ylied bsky-social-vjfij-soadz bsky-social-qmeyu-jwmds bsky-social-2joo4-sjp5p
        • brainchild-adam 3y ago
          Thank you!
  • jakebsky 3y ago
    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. For devs that want to experiment, we've had a special waitlist for a while: https://atproto.com/blog/call-for-developers https://atproto.com/blog/call-for-developers
• Tiktaalik 3y ago
  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. Seems like Bluesky is the grassroots favourite.
  • beanjuiceII 3y ago
    yea fail me once...
    • threeseed 3y ago
      Threads will support ActivityPub. So this isn't the same situation again.
• twobitshifter 3y ago
  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.
  • brundolf 3y ago
    Not a migration, just a successor. Nothing moves over automatically/wholesale
• scruple 3y ago
  > For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for. Okay, but I never even signed up for Twitter.
• TheChaplain 3y ago
  > But twitter as a platform gets worse each day 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 :(
• maxhille 3y ago
  > "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" Twitter was like that once. Just people flocking into the next walled garden...
• bboygravity 3y ago
  > But twitter as a platform gets worse each day Well that's just an opinion. I feel that it's better than it ever was. Sorry.