7 ms·

I've been on for a few months now. It feels like 2014 Twitter in that it doesn't have gifs or video, so you will see some very good jokes. A number of people I

I've been on for a few months now. It feels like 2014 Twitter in that it doesn't have gifs or video, so you will see some very good jokes. A number of people I used to follow on Twitter are over there but seem to have broken out of the posting habit and are quieter now. When I look at the "discover" tab I don't usually see much stuff that's interesting to me. It's a lot of men posting thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics, and discussion about what's going on on Twitter Edit to add: people really like to advise blocking. It's to the point that new users are often advised to add a profile photo and an intro post before following people, because you might get blocked just for not having those. I don't know what this is about - possibly because there's no private/locked accounts? It seems really strange to me.

JacobThreeThree 3y ago
The network effect is very strong.
RankingMember 3y ago
It will be interesting to see how the fragmentation in the post-Twitter landscape eventually consolidates. To your broader point, I think it's an interesting time where there's trepidation over just becoming Twitter 2.0 versus making some improvements that improve the experience of the platform. Even before Elon, Twitter definitely had some pain points, such as repetitive gif-replies and toxic political stuff, as you alluded to.
packetlost 3y ago
Yeah, I've tried to seek out and post technical stuff but it's mostly people virtue signalling, rage baiting, and complaining about other sites.
- j4yav 3y ago
  I made an account to check it out and was surprised to see it was just recommending nothing but US politics outrage bait, just like Twitter.
- kevinmchugh 3y ago
  I think a lot of that is on mastodon fwiw, and some hasn't left Twitter
  - packetlost 3y ago
    I've mostly been able to curate my Twitter feed to not include that stuff. Similarly for Mastodon. The problem is BlueSky tries to add algorithmic feeds while not doing it well enough to learn that I don't want to see it.
    - flkiwi 3y ago
      I tried to create a curated feed on Bluesky. It didn't go well. It interpreted my unambiguous keyword in the technology space as applying to content in the uh personal massage space. Much, much prefer Mastodon's direct hashtag following.
    - AJ007 3y ago
      I think the future has to be feed ingestion that is 100% controlled by the user. To some extent we were there with RSS readers. I'm still able to retrieve Twitter feeds with an RSS reader. Everything comes together in one place, in order. If this is done on device and everything is archived, it starts getting really powerful. For example, after the 737 MAX door incident, I searched "Boeing" in my RSS reader and instantly had a list of news stories going back over the past year. (The number of 737 incidents that has been happening around the world is a lot more than what sits in the top of the news, but that's another discussion.) A local LLM could even summarize large amounts of stored headlines and tweets going back over years, and that's tech that works today. I don't want third party ad platforms (which now consists of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and more) measuring, running tests, re-ordering, and deleting on my communications. The LLMs and machine learning advancements are going to just make this more invasive, ugly, and manipulative. Sure, hn is largely about VC backed startups going on to try to have a multi-billion dollar IPO. It's also about disrupting incumbents. I can't think of a better path to disruption than coming up with business models that choke off their user-bases and end ad monetized surveillance. I for one have no interest in a future where I wear an Apple/Facebook/Google controlled AR/VR headset that has cameras to make sure my eyes are looking at all of the ads which are targeted based on the other pixels it knows I looked at. (I feel like a paranoid schizophrenic writing that, but that is what they are making.)
- CM30 3y ago
  This is sadly a bit of a problem with most Twitter alternatives right now; many more niche communities haven't moved over (or have only chosen to go to one of them), so there's a good chance you won't find content you're interested in. Mastodon seems to have more of the tech crowd from what I can tell, but even then it's maybe 1% of the audience you might have had on Twitter.
  - 15457345234 3y ago
    They aren't going to move over; the reddit/twitter model of 'crosspollination' is fundamentally flawed - if trolls can just stroll over from their little trollzone at any time they will do so and every conversation will get derailed with politics/gender/whatever gets the most engagement; character assassination will be the dominant paradigm. Silos are the answer. Open to all but topic focussed and with no cross-referencable userhistory. Or 100% anonymity with no userhistory i.e. futaba type message boards.
- DoItToMe81 3y ago
  Most "Twitter alternatives" don't deal with the fundamental, sensation-seeking oriented flaws in the medium and just turn out to be Twitter with more perpetually upset losers. It's disappointing, because a lot of work has gone into these. Especially Mastodon and Pleroma.
  - packetlost 3y ago
    I somewhat like Mastodon's model where you can have mostly focus on members within a community that maintains/owns the instance. Federation completely optional, though connecting communities more explicitly would be really cool!
- Kreutzer 3y ago
  it's very 'scoldy' too
panarky 3y ago
> thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics Maybe the biggest problem with Twitter never was its centralization. It shouldn't be surprising that cloning Twitter mechanics just to decentralize it would result in the same signal-to-noise ratio as Twitter.
delecti 3y ago
Regarding your edit, much of bluesky's culture is developing in reaction to Twitter, or based on lessons learned from it. That block-first attitude is a response both to the kinds of bots that are endemic on Twitter, and to the kinds of engagement-bait that made it such a mess at times. New follower looks like it might be a bot? Block. See a skeet from someone who looks like an asshole? Block. Don't feed the trolls, just block and move on. Personally I tend to mute, rather than block, but I think lots of social media would be better if people didn't boost things they dislike for the purpose of dunking or disagreeing. And to be clear, not all of bluesky's culture is a response to twitter, a lot of it is just the kind of lighthearted playfulness you can only get on a small and new social network.
- kevinmchugh 3y ago
  I mute annoying posters (the frequent users who already have >5k posts tend to be uninteresting to me and obviously show up more often in feeds), that makes sense to me. How goes my experience improve if I block a bot that follows me? Follower bots is a platform problem
  - delecti 3y ago
    I think it's mostly the same motivation as blocking assholes, partly "I don't want to be part of your attempt to game the algorithm" and partly "I don't want to see this".
- everybodyknows 3y ago
  What is a "skeet"?
  - delecti 3y ago
    The unofficial name for a post on bluesky. It comes from a combination of "sky" and "tweet". The people running the site don't like that name, which of course only made people embrace it even more.
    - 3y ago
psionides 3y ago
Yeah, I strongly dislike this blocking culture there, because blocking also affects the other person's experience on the site - they won't be able to follow threads where you're involved. There's no reason to not use muting instead if you just want to get someone out of your view, except if you do it out of spite.
btbuildem 3y ago
Maybe this will give it critical mass -- with more people able to join, perhaps more will stop visiting twitter and We Can Have Nice Things Again.
creaturemachine 3y ago
Just echo chambers doing echo chamber things.

JacobThreeThree 3y ago

The network effect is very strong.

RankingMember 3y ago

It will be interesting to see how the fragmentation in the post-Twitter landscape eventually consolidates. To your broader point, I think it's an interesting time where there's trepidation over just becoming Twitter 2.0 versus making some improvements that improve the experience of the platform. Even before Elon, Twitter definitely had some pain points, such as repetitive gif-replies and toxic political stuff, as you alluded to.

packetlost 3y ago

Yeah, I've tried to seek out and post technical stuff but it's mostly people virtue signalling, rage baiting, and complaining about other sites.

j4yav 3y ago
I made an account to check it out and was surprised to see it was just recommending nothing but US politics outrage bait, just like Twitter.
kevinmchugh 3y ago
I think a lot of that is on mastodon fwiw, and some hasn't left Twitter
- packetlost 3y ago
  I've mostly been able to curate my Twitter feed to not include that stuff. Similarly for Mastodon. The problem is BlueSky tries to add algorithmic feeds while not doing it well enough to learn that I don't want to see it.
  - flkiwi 3y ago
    I tried to create a curated feed on Bluesky. It didn't go well. It interpreted my unambiguous keyword in the technology space as applying to content in the uh personal massage space. Much, much prefer Mastodon's direct hashtag following.
  - AJ007 3y ago
    I think the future has to be feed ingestion that is 100% controlled by the user. To some extent we were there with RSS readers. I'm still able to retrieve Twitter feeds with an RSS reader. Everything comes together in one place, in order. If this is done on device and everything is archived, it starts getting really powerful. For example, after the 737 MAX door incident, I searched "Boeing" in my RSS reader and instantly had a list of news stories going back over the past year. (The number of 737 incidents that has been happening around the world is a lot more than what sits in the top of the news, but that's another discussion.) A local LLM could even summarize large amounts of stored headlines and tweets going back over years, and that's tech that works today. I don't want third party ad platforms (which now consists of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and more) measuring, running tests, re-ordering, and deleting on my communications. The LLMs and machine learning advancements are going to just make this more invasive, ugly, and manipulative. Sure, hn is largely about VC backed startups going on to try to have a multi-billion dollar IPO. It's also about disrupting incumbents. I can't think of a better path to disruption than coming up with business models that choke off their user-bases and end ad monetized surveillance. I for one have no interest in a future where I wear an Apple/Facebook/Google controlled AR/VR headset that has cameras to make sure my eyes are looking at all of the ads which are targeted based on the other pixels it knows I looked at. (I feel like a paranoid schizophrenic writing that, but that is what they are making.)
CM30 3y ago
This is sadly a bit of a problem with most Twitter alternatives right now; many more niche communities haven't moved over (or have only chosen to go to one of them), so there's a good chance you won't find content you're interested in. Mastodon seems to have more of the tech crowd from what I can tell, but even then it's maybe 1% of the audience you might have had on Twitter.
- 15457345234 3y ago
  They aren't going to move over; the reddit/twitter model of 'crosspollination' is fundamentally flawed - if trolls can just stroll over from their little trollzone at any time they will do so and every conversation will get derailed with politics/gender/whatever gets the most engagement; character assassination will be the dominant paradigm. Silos are the answer. Open to all but topic focussed and with no cross-referencable userhistory. Or 100% anonymity with no userhistory i.e. futaba type message boards.
DoItToMe81 3y ago
Most "Twitter alternatives" don't deal with the fundamental, sensation-seeking oriented flaws in the medium and just turn out to be Twitter with more perpetually upset losers. It's disappointing, because a lot of work has gone into these. Especially Mastodon and Pleroma.
- packetlost 3y ago
  I somewhat like Mastodon's model where you can have mostly focus on members within a community that maintains/owns the instance. Federation completely optional, though connecting communities more explicitly would be really cool!
Kreutzer 3y ago
it's very 'scoldy' too

panarky 3y ago

> thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics Maybe the biggest problem with Twitter never was its centralization. It shouldn't be surprising that cloning Twitter mechanics just to decentralize it would result in the same signal-to-noise ratio as Twitter.

delecti 3y ago

Regarding your edit, much of bluesky's culture is developing in reaction to Twitter, or based on lessons learned from it. That block-first attitude is a response both to the kinds of bots that are endemic on Twitter, and to the kinds of engagement-bait that made it such a mess at times. New follower looks like it might be a bot? Block. See a skeet from someone who looks like an asshole? Block. Don't feed the trolls, just block and move on. Personally I tend to mute, rather than block, but I think lots of social media would be better if people didn't boost things they dislike for the purpose of dunking or disagreeing. And to be clear, not all of bluesky's culture is a response to twitter, a lot of it is just the kind of lighthearted playfulness you can only get on a small and new social network.

kevinmchugh 3y ago
I mute annoying posters (the frequent users who already have >5k posts tend to be uninteresting to me and obviously show up more often in feeds), that makes sense to me. How goes my experience improve if I block a bot that follows me? Follower bots is a platform problem
- delecti 3y ago
  I think it's mostly the same motivation as blocking assholes, partly "I don't want to be part of your attempt to game the algorithm" and partly "I don't want to see this".
everybodyknows 3y ago
What is a "skeet"?
- delecti 3y ago
  The unofficial name for a post on bluesky. It comes from a combination of "sky" and "tweet". The people running the site don't like that name, which of course only made people embrace it even more.
  - 3y ago

psionides 3y ago

Yeah, I strongly dislike this blocking culture there, because blocking also affects the other person's experience on the site - they won't be able to follow threads where you're involved. There's no reason to not use muting instead if you just want to get someone out of your view, except if you do it out of spite.

btbuildem 3y ago

Maybe this will give it critical mass -- with more people able to join, perhaps more will stop visiting twitter and We Can Have Nice Things Again.

creaturemachine 3y ago

Just echo chambers doing echo chamber things.