9 ms·

Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

261 points by joelg 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
OmarShehata 2y ago
> can't make a map of all of twitter no, but nothing can stop you & a bunch of people from exporting your tweet archive and visualizing that!
- Retr0id 2y ago
  Hard to get 13M people to do it, and harder to stop some subset of those 13M people polluting your dataset with fake data.
  - _ea1k 2y ago
    Yep, and there will be self selection biases even among people who don't export fake data.
OmarShehata 2y ago
I'd love to see a more NLP look at this data, Google trends style. What topics of discourse come up regularly, what spikes during certain time periods? Can you summarize what economists are discussing? Can you find people talking about the same things but are not in each other's networks?
cwal37 2y ago
Bluesky has really exploded in certain niches over the past week, I think my followers have gone up 5-6x since Saturday. I'd been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now there's some real heat to it as things pick up. Hopefully this surge is real, has certianly gotten me to be much more active.
- microtonal 2y ago
  Yeah, I've had an account for quite a while now (from before registrations were open), but it was largely a ghost town. The last few days there is a lot more stuff happening in my feed. And so far free of all the drama, bots, etc.
- unpopularopp 2y ago
  I yet to find "utility" accounts on Bluesky. I use Twitter to follow news from games, game studios and publishers, news sites, bands, NASA etc. There is nothing like there yet and I don't care about random people (as I don't care about them on Twitter either) I check time to time but basically it's 0/50
  - minimaxir 2y ago
    It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Fortunately it appears that utility accounts are slowly popping up now that there's an audience.
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    If you are looking for stuff from big publishers then yeah it's gonna be a bit slow/empty but there are a lot of small/indie devs on bluesky and it's awesome being able to interact with them directly without all the spam that usually came with posts on twitter.
  - omoikane 2y ago
    For NASA, looks like someone has made an unofficial mirror account: https://bsky.app/profile/nasa.extwitter.link https://bsky.app/profile/nasa.extwitter.link Also, some game companies do maintain a presence on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/sega.jp https://bsky.app/profile/sega.jp https://bsky.app/profile/panic.com https://bsky.app/profile/panic.com
  - threeseed 2y ago
    You will find a lot of games, studios and bands on Threads. Since it leverages Instagram and has pretty fantastic photo features.
  - 2y ago
andreygrehov 2y ago
Is the "scraper" still running? If so, how many users are there today?
- joelg 2y ago
  there are a other few places tracking those stats too; I just counted 14487454 in my database :)
kmelve 2y ago
Pretty cool! The BlueSky API is on point. A colleague of mine put together this visualization based on the firehose: https://bigmood.blue/ https://bigmood.blue/ Source: https://bsky.app/profile/even.westvang.com/post/3laob7tefxk23 https://bsky.app/profile/even.westvang.com/post/3laob7tefxk2...
tcdent 2y ago
[flagged]
- tomrod 2y ago
  We've had enough of that, thank you. What I've found is you'll find open discussion and real free speech versus whatever Musk tried to implement at Twitter.
  - degosuke 2y ago
    I'm not up to speed. Are there currently any instances where free speech was limited on x/twitter? Genuinely curious
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Any of the people/journalists that were reporting on the inner workings of Twitter that Musk didn't like so he shut it down would be something that jumps to mind.
    - philodelta 2y ago
      Musk very clearly actively sticks his fingers in the pie to steer narratives. Easy example, one of his children came out as trans (to Elon's apparent dismay), and now "cisgender" is flagged as a slur/hate-speech. There is other, anecdotal evidence that certain posters (ridiculously, Musk included) have their posts elevated above baseline visibility, but I don't have any statistics to back that up. Other flavorful unsolicited changes to the platform, such as changing blocking to allow blocked people to still see your posts, seem again like self-serving dictates from the top. Perhaps generally not censorship, but heavily biased moderation very clearly steered by the agenda of a single man.
    - tomrod 2y ago
      Several. Consider ElonJet as a silly but representative example of where the limits of free speech are considered for the far right. Hate speech and harassment is totally fine, but not critique. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet
willcodeforfoo 2y ago
Love this kind of post! I was surprised to see you really can drink from the firehose: brew install websocat websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos ...haven't tried to decode it, though.
- alpb 2y ago
  Twitter used to have a Firehose API, too. Over time they closed it, and made it only available to large users like Google Search with real-time indexing needs.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    Twitter had a really outstanding search and streaming API, but after Musk bought it they put it behind a $60k/year paywall. You can see a corresponding and abrupt falloff in academic network research papers, with newer ones that revolve around Twitter largely limited to cannibalizing old datasets. With luck bsky keeps growing and researchers invest effort in studying a more open-by-design platform.
- tomrod 2y ago
  I hadn't come across this before, looking forward to exploring a new tool. Thanks!
- ericvolp12 2y ago
  Give Jetstream a try instead, it's all JSON for you already: websocat wss://jetstream2.us-west.bsky.network/subscribe
zdimension 2y ago
Very nice. Modern GPUs really are fast as drawing points. It's pretty similar to a project I've been working on for the past year, scraping Facebook instead of BlueSky (which is a bit harder since FB doesn't expose an API for that). I currently have about 140 million nodes on my scraped graph and a GUI with pathfinding and stuff like that. It's a shame though because as nice as the thing is, I'm not sure I can publish it online, given it contains names of people. I don't think the GDPR would be very happy. Which is why I'm a bit surprised you published this, aren't you afraid of people, uh, disliking the fact that they're present in your dataset?
- jchw 2y ago
  AT proto is an open network. Everything you do is public by default. e.g. anyone else can just drink from the firehose.
  - zdimension 2y ago
    Yeah, but that doesn't solve the data privacy problem. Not that I care, I'd love to be able to do all sorts of stuff with scraped datasets.
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      One would hope the people on bluesky understand that they're posting publically to a centralized database. What data privacy problem are you concerned with?
      - zdimension 2y ago
        As I understand it, the moment you're processing someone's personally identifiable information, you're in the red zone, GDPR-wise. The users consented to publish their info on BlueSky, but not on OP's website. I get the idea behind the GDPR and it's nice to protect consumers but I'm scared for hobby projects like this.
        2y ago
Etheryte 2y ago
Hard to overstate just how much I like this. Not only does the end result convey information in many dimensions, it's also extremely appealing visually. The graininess that stems from rendering such a large number of nodes really adds a nice touch here, something that you don't often see in other graph visualizations.
andreygrehov 2y ago
The visualization looks absolutely fantastic. Great work. Would love to dive deeper into the tech behind it. I'll just share some irony. They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X/Twitter.
- jamwil 2y ago
  Hate speech is derogatory or harmful speech targeted at a marginalized community. Hating a company or product is not the same thing.
  - andreygrehov 2y ago
    I just clicked "Discover" to see popular posts. https://bsky.app/profile/lepapillonblue.bsky.social/post/3largk2jkuq27 https://bsky.app/profile/lepapillonblue.bsky.social/post/3la... https://bsky.app/profile/sethabramson.bsky.social/post/3larjiscoc22y https://bsky.app/profile/sethabramson.bsky.social/post/3larj... https://bsky.app/profile/browneyedsusan.bsky.social/post/3lar3j7fn2s2y https://bsky.app/profile/browneyedsusan.bsky.social/post/3la...
    - minimaxir 2y ago
      None of that is remotely close to hate speech. President Trump is not a marginalized community.
      - andreygrehov 2y ago
        Hate speech or not, there is nothing pleasant about it. The irony is that the 'holier-than-thou' crowd, who are against hate and for love all over the world, overwhelmingly post negative political comments and are rooting for X/Twitter to collapse. This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.
        rsynnott 2y ago
declan_roberts 2y ago
Bluesky to me still seems like a place completely dominated by software type (HN crowd). I know there are obvious exceptions there's no need for you to list them. Threads has extreme normies, bluesky has the nerds, and twitter seems to have just the right mixture of both.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  Bluesky seems to be also very common among artists.
  - kps 2y ago
    The mid-October bump was artists discovering that posting on Twitter allows them to use posts for training AI. https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-year.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-year.html
    - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
      If Bluesky is decentralized, can't twitter still train on Bluesky posts?
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        There’s arguably a moral difference between having your stuff stolen, and giving it up as part of the TOS. Most artists, you’d assume, would prefer the former.
        YetAnotherNick 2y ago
        Bluesky's TOS[1]: > You grant us permission to: Use User Content to develop, provide, and improve Bluesky Social, the AT Protocol, and any of our future offerings [1]: https://bsky.social/about/support/tos#user-content https://bsky.social/about/support/tos#user-content
parsimo2010 2y ago
That looks really cool. I would also be interested to see examples of what commonality links the clusters of nodes- like are there clusters of people with the same hobby? Are there clusters of people speaking the same language, or living in the same city? Another thought since Bluesky is a pretty inclusive place, are the LGBTQIA+ folks clustering into their own respective labels, or is everyone mixing together? Is any of this behavior similar or different to what we see on other social networks?
- treyd 2y ago
  Those groups are more on Mastodon.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Nah, lots of LGBT+ people on Bluesky, too. Especially in the last week or so.
bradgessler 2y ago
The best thing about Bluesky is you can use your domain as your username. I'm @bradgessler.com on there, so if people want to "verify" me, they see something more meaningful than a blue checkbox, which is my website. If I ever get blocked, banned, deplatformed, whatever—people would see my domain and be able to go there to determine what's going on. In a sense it's "censorship-evident". I think this will be great for businesses—it's so much more less ambiguous if I can @example.com a business and get a response. I put a starter pack together of SaaS built on Rails that's already doing this at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u I really like what BlueSky is doing and hope it doesn't get enshitified as the future plays out. Even if it does, it seems like now is a goldilocks moment where things are feeling really good there. I highly recommend spending the 5 minutes it takes to setup an account and point it at your domain.
- ZacnyLos 2y ago
  Verifying your identity on Mastodon is for everyone as well and based on open web standards. https://joinmastodon.org/verification https://joinmastodon.org/verification
  - bradgessler 2y ago
    Problem with Mastodon is you’re forced to associate with the identity of the sever or run your own instance, both of which are very awkward. I’m @bradgessler@ruby.social, but I’m more than a Ruby dev. I could run a Mastadon instance for bradgessler.com, but I have no desire to spend even 3 minutes figuring out how to set all that up. Maintaining my own instance sounds even worse. Bluesky gets the ergonomics of this right: the usernames feel like they occupy a global namespace and I can point the aliases at my domains in a few minutes without having to worry about a bunch of standards that I don’t really care about. For some reason I can’t explain, it also really bothers me that I have to @ people on Mastadon via @brad@bradgessler.com. I don’t want to say “@“ twice if I’m verbally telling somebody where to find me when presenting and “@me@bradgessler” is weird too. Much easier to say “Follow me @bradgessler.com” Am I lazy? Yes, but most people are. Bluesky strikes a nice balance of control and identity that I’m comfortable with for the amount of time and effort I’m willing to put into it.
typical182 2y ago
Bluesky and atproto seem to be built to be hackable. Someone in the community recently built a searchable directory of Bluesky "Starter Packs" (which are a way for a user to publish a set of interesting people & feeds to follow, primarily to help newcomers bootstrap their experience): https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all Dan Abramov posted about it earlier today, saying he liked it and: "the fact that it can be done in the ecosystem is awesome. let the ecosystem cook" [1] And maybe more poignantly: "seeing random projects pop up in the atproto ecosystem reminds me just how much public web common were stifled by social companies closing down their APIs. an entire landscape of tools given up on and abandoned" [2] [1] https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3sdna222d https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3sdna222d [2] https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3xpuu4c2d https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3xpuu4c2d
- mhartz 2y ago
  Wasn't this also sort of a feature with Twitter? iirc the retweet and other now popular features were originally hacked together by users
  - frabcus 2y ago
    Retweet was original using the text "RT". Hashtags were also invented by Twitter users.
    - FranklinMaillot 2y ago
      Wasn't the @ also invented by users? I remember it was fascinating to watch this network self organize and create conventions of its own, that are now used everywhere.
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        Also hashtags. Though I think some of this stuff came from other social networks.
    - 2y ago
SubiculumCode 2y ago
A lot of high profile commentators were waiting until after the election to move to Bluesky. They felt that they'd be giving up their influence if they left then, but now that the election is over they have time to rebuild onto a new platform. Bluesky seems quite nice. I was on Mastadon for a while, but after the initial burst of activity, its silo-like orientation led to stagnant servers. That is, it neither fully embraced the community-first services that Discord provides, nor the easy-discoverability of open-platform of Twitter/X/. Also, this may seem silly, but I like the butterfly logo.
- pohl 2y ago
  There's another narrative that I've heard about the recent flood of former-X users into Bluesky: a new Terms of Service document goes into effect in about 4 days, giving X ownership of your content with respect to its use in training LLMs.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    I thought Grok has been using Twitter content this whole time, are they just getting around to updating their ToS? I can see some amount of protest, people who are anti-AI/pro-copyright might find a better niche on bsky, but everything you post there is public so it's legal for anyone to scrape and train with
notconsidering 2y ago
[dead]
dylan604 2y ago
"We can't make a map of all of Twitter, because the data isn't available and scraping it would be difficult and illegal." What makes scraping illegal?
- barbazoo 2y ago
  Perhaps even the threat of being sued might be enough to even consider doing this.
- atemerev 2y ago
  Nothing. A precedent determining that scraping is legal is already established.
  - minimaxir 2y ago
    "legal" doesn't imply that Twitter/X won't send a C&D due to scraping that is expensive for a normal person to fight. Moreso if Twitter/X invokes the CFAA which has been common for scraping cases post HiQ vs. LinkedIn.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    not if its behind a login wall.
- fragmede 2y ago
  The LinkedIn vs HiQ case makes it so that scraping data behind a login screen is not okay but publicly accessible pages are fair game.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Was this the main reasoning for moving everything behind login more than data hoarding of the viewers?
    - fragmede 2y ago
      My personal belief is yes. Legal talks to management after the case concludes, tells them this is the new reality, and management tells product to make the change. At no time is management obligated or even remotely motivated to tell end users the real reason for making the change, because users believing that the platform is just a greedy corporation is better than them realizing that the platform will just roll over if the police presents them with a subpoena to snitch on a user.
TinkersW 2y ago
[flagged]
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  Huge social media sites are not going to be legible without some sort of preference function from the individual. Whether that's follows, hashtags/keywords, or engagement-oriented algorithms, that's the way. If you're not the kind of person who enjoys socializing In The Large that's fine. That's what topical sites (like Reddit, HN) or group chats are for.
- krapp 2y ago
  People are still making lame jokes about how "confusing" the LGBT acronym is? Get some new material.
atemerev 2y ago
Scraping data is not illegal. Everything a human can see, can be legally scraped.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
openrisk 2y ago
> Building and querying the quadtree is intrinsically heirarchical Glad to see I am not the only one having problems with hierarchy. Interesting work at many levels (no, no pun): starting with the bluesky data availability, the processing and the visualization algorithms. But its not quite clear where to place these visualizations in the data science spectrum. Conventional numerical graphics have (over time) developed a sophisticated grammar that allows fairly precise reasoning and inference. So they are heavily used in scientific publications, in the financial sector etc. for real information transmission (People might even reverse engineer a plot to recover data!). With networks and graphs, besides a general feel for the topology / connectivity or clustering its kinda hard to pin down what is the transmitted information. Not clear if useful grammars covering such large graphs are yet to be invented or if this is the nature of the beast.
josefresco 2y ago
I must be one of those tiny dots just floating in nothingness because my BSKY feed is a dead zone. I've posted, I've replied, I've liked and tried to be an active participant but nothing seems to stick. There's only so many posts I can publish "for myself" before I lose interest. Contrast this with early Twitter where everyone was just super excited, and eager to follow new people. I don't get it, shouldn't a new social network be full of people looking to create new... social networks?
- fsflover 2y ago
  Did you try Mastodon? Many have a better experience there.
  - josteink 2y ago
    Mastadon has a massive problem with furries, people with loli anime-avatars or people who fit the «purple haired» stereotype. It’s very off-putting and alienating for normal people.
    - fsflover 2y ago
      It strongly depends on the instance. You don't have to read the global timeline.
      - chefandy 2y ago
        The tough thing is that for the vast majority of end users, the interface that they see is the software or service. So if their instance has a bunch of disgusting pornography, as far as they’re concerned, mastodon has a bunch of disgusting pornography. For a lot of folks, the browser/server abstraction for regular websites and how that differs from native apps is about as far as they’re willing to go in their understanding of Internet architecture and for many, it’s too far. Requiring people understand that not all mastodon is mastodon despite it being kind of the same, in order to avoid explicit hentai, is a non-starter. My grandparents are dead, but they would probably take their computer out back and set it on fire if that shit flashed up on their screen. They sure wouldn’t have used it as an opportunity to get all of the base knowledge they needed to even realize they had to instance shop. Facebook is just riiiiight over there.
Applejinx 2y ago
"Bot rings show up clearly exposed, for one." I like the sound of that. Surely there's usefulness in that observation.
loevborg 2y ago
I'm part of the wave of users who migrated to bluesky last week. I have to say I really like it so far, which surprised me a bit given that I had been underwhelmed by mastodon before. I already spend more time in bluesky than in twitter. For those (like me) who don't know what bluesky is, it's basically a carbon copy of twitter circa 2015, down to an almost identical UI. Except that there's no monetization, no ads, no growth hacking, which means that in the main features are there to serve the user. My favorite example is the simple expo/react native based mobile app, which lets you open links in safari rather than a useless in-app browser.
- testfoobar 2y ago
  How does it compare to Threads?
  - wittekm 2y ago
    Anecdotally, I see a lot more “normal” human to human engagement than the addressed-to-millions engagement bait I see on Threads.
  - msluyter 2y ago
    At some point Threads started to suppress (or at least, not boost?) political content or news. Which sort of crippled it as a "current events + hot takes" Twitter/X competitor. Bluesky doesn't appear to have this limitation (though perhaps for some this is a feature).
    - kristofferR 2y ago
      https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-our-approach-to-political-content-on-instagram-and-threads https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-ou...
  - Pxtl 2y ago
    The loudest complaint I see about threads (lack of hyperlinks) doesn't apply there. Also, Threads seems covered in growth-hacking dark patterns, like the notification/activity screen being flooded with "picked for you". edit: my big worry about BSky is the lack of any coherent monetization plan. This isn't community-funded stuff like Mastodon, it's VC-funded software - there will be a need for revenue at some point and then what happens?
nomdep 2y ago
> “I filtered out accounts that follow more than 50k accounts, or follow less than 5 accounts and have less than 5 followers, leaving 7.7 million nodes.” So not quite 13M but almost half of them, pretty cool nonetheless
IAmGraydon 2y ago
As a broader comment about Bluesky, it seems to me that it's heavily left-leaning, while Twitter/X is obviously leaning more and more to the right. Amazingly, it seems that the BlueSky/X dichotomy is another emergent manifestation of a fracturing and continually more polarized society. In my opinion, what we will ultimately end up with is two echo chambers, each catering to opposite ends of the spectrum, each radicalizing their respective userbase, and each further amplifying the divide in society today.
- purplethinking 2y ago
  I have no interest in being in a left-leaning bubble. I get both sides on X, so far. People think X has been leaning more and more to the right, but in truth it's just not being censored (sorry, moderated) anymore, leading to more right-leaning content. Leftists can't really tolerate any difference of opinion so they move to other platforms, it's sad. But I think they'll be bored and eventually come back for some more drama.
  - MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
    What specific type of content was being censored before Elon took over that is being allowed now?
    - samatman 2y ago
      I seem to recall at some point that that old Twitter banned the account of the sitting President of the United States. Later, Twitter banned a comedy account, the Babylon Bee. That pissed Elon off enough to buy it. Both are back on Twitter now, both the comedy account, and the politician who will be President for a second term in January, having won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. That's just two examples, but I would call them salient ones.
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      In the particular little culture war concerning gender identity, pre Elon you would get banned for "deadnaming" and criticizing the health claims of gender clinics (aka transphobia) It's flipped now, Elon has tweeted that using cis to describe not-trans people is a slur. Which seems like going the other way on "free speech absolutism" but whatever.
nightski 2y ago
I created a new account and the feed was flooded with anti-X, anti-gop, anti-religion content. Don't get me wrong, it's not that any of those particularly bother me but it doesn't seem any different than X except without the people I follow.
- ZacnyLos 2y ago
  On Mastodon there are no longer people dragged by the crowd, only those who have something interesting to say remain.
kristofferR 2y ago
How do you guys crosspost to X, Threads, Mastadon and Bluesky?
- ZacnyLos 2y ago
  Using Mastodon you can follow people from Bluesky and Threads if they only turn on sharing or use Bridgy Fed option as well. Mastodon is the most versatile piece of software.
ZacnyLos 2y ago
Fortunately using Bridgy Fed we can connect BlueSky with Fediverse and IndieWeb. https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/ https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/
- rustyboy 2y ago
  can I get a ELI10 on this - If I host a mastodon server, would I need to run this software along side it then and then everyone on my server could see these other platforms posts and such?
  - extraduder_ire 2y ago
    Accounts on any supported platform can follow the bot on their platform, and their posts get bridged to all the other ones as a subdomain of the bridgy bot. e.g. a mastodon instance with a handle for every bridged account. It changed to require opting in to bridging because many mastodon users got very mad about it.
metadat 2y ago
> What happens if we throw the BlueSky matrix into UMAP? Well, we can't, at least not directly. Even though UMAP technically accepts sparse matrices, our scale is just to big for my home server. Instead, we can settle for using some other technique to derive embeddings for every user, in a medium-sized dimension like 32, and then feed that into UMAP. Easy! How, exactly, are the embeddings derived?
ZacnyLos 2y ago
Mastodon seems to be the most versatile app of all of them. With Mastodon account you can follow people from BlueSky (if they use BridgyFed) and people from Threads (if they turn on fediverse sharing).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
swat535 2y ago
It looks like the Internet is now being compartmentalized based on one's political affiliation and groups. X is turning out to be where Conservatives are going to be living, Bluesky, Reddit and Treads will be for Liberals. These platform don't outright ban opposing views but I think moderation policies and the users will shift these groups into one or the other. I'm not sure if one can have a platform where respectful discourse can take place. The only site I've seen so far is HN and its due to its small community and the relentless effort by Dan. The days of having everyone connected on the same platform is now dead, which might ironically usher a revival of the old, non-centralized web.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Promise of bluesky is that different front ends can have different moderation policies, and you have account portability should you be prevented from interacting with bsky.app (provided you were self hosting your pod. I don't actually know if you can export your data if you are "banned" from the main instance, I'll have to look into that)
- asdf123wtf 2y ago
  Honestly, I'd get the F off twitter, because it's now in control of a state actor. Any barriers, legal or otherwise, that existed between twitter and the state should be assumed gone once the new administration transitions in, especially considering it's an administration that has promised to abuse state power to target it's opposition.
gravico 2y ago
As a platform trying to connect aspiring founders with successful experts, is it worth creating a Bluesky grouping consisting of founders, ceo's and successful experts wanting to help aspiring founder. Goal is to gain traction for https://www.gravi.co https://www.gravi.co
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  It would be interesting to see a community onboarded where everyone's username is a subdomain @name.gravi.co, so people know they're officially associated. There's lots of software folk there so it would probably be a good place to try.
  - gravico 2y ago
    Thanks, that's the plan where each expert has a dedicated subdomain (e.g., jazzyjackson.gravi.co), allowing them to showcase their profile and offer bookable consultancy slots for entrepreneurs seeking personalised advice, focusing on UK and Europe but tempted to target US which is a more mature and willing to explore and experiment market.
akomtu 2y ago
It's going to look even more mesmerizing if you imagine how tweets propagate in this cloud. It would look somewhat alive.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
consumer451 2y ago
Bluesky hit 15M this morning, and it is also the top free app in the US App Store. Does anyone know if it is the first time that a truly open source app has hit that top spot?
skwee357 2y ago
Signed up due to the hype. My feed is filled with "Welp, he stole my meme" / "Would you prefer Go or Rust?" / anime images. Social media is dead
elforce002 2y ago
To be honest, bluesky will become the left version of "Truth social". That's good for them in the long run (ad money) but it'll be another echo chamber. I follow both left-leaning and right-leaning people on Twitter and I don't see the "balance" going one way or another. The other thing is reach. Twitter, Fb, Instagram are global brands. It'll be really, and I mean difficult to move the rest of the world to other platforms (TikTok is the exception because they went ahead with video from the get-go).
- bbzealot 2y ago
  How can a platform owned by a far-right man with a clear political agenda be the place for "political balance"? It's inevitable that left-leaning people will increasingly leave Twitter, as long as it is run by Musk
  - elforce002 2y ago
    Musk was left-leaning not so long ago. I follow left-leaning media (WYT, Pod Save America, etc...) and right-leaning media (Ben Shapiro, etc...) equally and see both posts without any issues. If the left-leaning people leave Twitter, the new platform will become an echo chamber the same way Reddit, gab, parler, and Truth Social are.
    - bbzealot 2y ago
      > Musk was left-leaning not so long ago So what? He's been clearly far right leaning since before he purchased Twitter. He's been one of the main supporters of the Trump campaign and he's vocal about his political ideas. Twitter has no credibility as a neutral platform as long as it's run by him
      - elforce002 2y ago
        I beg to differ. It's important because I can equally see both left and right posts. If you consume more left-leaning posts, you'll get more of that content. My feed is Web Dev, Machine Learning, Mobile Dev, etc... you have to be hardcore right to get anything related to that (same goes if you consume left-leaning posts). In the end, people will choose their echo chamber no matter if they know it's an echo chamber. I try to be as impartial as possible. I use Twitter, Reddit (specific subs), and occasionally, IG. I have a tiktok acct but I rarely use it.

261 points by joelg 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

> can't make a map of all of twitter no, but nothing can stop you & a bunch of people from exporting your tweet archive and visualizing that!

Retr0id 2y ago
Hard to get 13M people to do it, and harder to stop some subset of those 13M people polluting your dataset with fake data.
- _ea1k 2y ago
  Yep, and there will be self selection biases even among people who don't export fake data.

OmarShehata 2y ago

I'd love to see a more NLP look at this data, Google trends style. What topics of discourse come up regularly, what spikes during certain time periods? Can you summarize what economists are discussing? Can you find people talking about the same things but are not in each other's networks?

cwal37 2y ago

Bluesky has really exploded in certain niches over the past week, I think my followers have gone up 5-6x since Saturday. I'd been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now there's some real heat to it as things pick up. Hopefully this surge is real, has certianly gotten me to be much more active.

microtonal 2y ago
Yeah, I've had an account for quite a while now (from before registrations were open), but it was largely a ghost town. The last few days there is a lot more stuff happening in my feed. And so far free of all the drama, bots, etc.
unpopularopp 2y ago
I yet to find "utility" accounts on Bluesky. I use Twitter to follow news from games, game studios and publishers, news sites, bands, NASA etc. There is nothing like there yet and I don't care about random people (as I don't care about them on Twitter either) I check time to time but basically it's 0/50
- minimaxir 2y ago
  It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Fortunately it appears that utility accounts are slowly popping up now that there's an audience.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  If you are looking for stuff from big publishers then yeah it's gonna be a bit slow/empty but there are a lot of small/indie devs on bluesky and it's awesome being able to interact with them directly without all the spam that usually came with posts on twitter.
- omoikane 2y ago
  For NASA, looks like someone has made an unofficial mirror account: https://bsky.app/profile/nasa.extwitter.link https://bsky.app/profile/nasa.extwitter.link Also, some game companies do maintain a presence on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/sega.jp https://bsky.app/profile/sega.jp https://bsky.app/profile/panic.com https://bsky.app/profile/panic.com
- threeseed 2y ago
  You will find a lot of games, studios and bands on Threads. Since it leverages Instagram and has pretty fantastic photo features.
- 2y ago

andreygrehov 2y ago

Is the "scraper" still running? If so, how many users are there today?

joelg 2y ago
there are a other few places tracking those stats too; I just counted 14487454 in my database :)

kmelve 2y ago

Pretty cool! The BlueSky API is on point. A colleague of mine put together this visualization based on the firehose: https://bigmood.blue/ https://bigmood.blue/ Source: https://bsky.app/profile/even.westvang.com/post/3laob7tefxk23 https://bsky.app/profile/even.westvang.com/post/3laob7tefxk2...

tcdent 2y ago

[flagged]

tomrod 2y ago
We've had enough of that, thank you. What I've found is you'll find open discussion and real free speech versus whatever Musk tried to implement at Twitter.
- degosuke 2y ago
  I'm not up to speed. Are there currently any instances where free speech was limited on x/twitter? Genuinely curious
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Any of the people/journalists that were reporting on the inner workings of Twitter that Musk didn't like so he shut it down would be something that jumps to mind.
  - philodelta 2y ago
    Musk very clearly actively sticks his fingers in the pie to steer narratives. Easy example, one of his children came out as trans (to Elon's apparent dismay), and now "cisgender" is flagged as a slur/hate-speech. There is other, anecdotal evidence that certain posters (ridiculously, Musk included) have their posts elevated above baseline visibility, but I don't have any statistics to back that up. Other flavorful unsolicited changes to the platform, such as changing blocking to allow blocked people to still see your posts, seem again like self-serving dictates from the top. Perhaps generally not censorship, but heavily biased moderation very clearly steered by the agenda of a single man.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    Several. Consider ElonJet as a silly but representative example of where the limits of free speech are considered for the far right. Hate speech and harassment is totally fine, but not critique. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet

willcodeforfoo 2y ago

Love this kind of post! I was surprised to see you really can drink from the firehose: brew install websocat websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos ...haven't tried to decode it, though.

alpb 2y ago
Twitter used to have a Firehose API, too. Over time they closed it, and made it only available to large users like Google Search with real-time indexing needs.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  Twitter had a really outstanding search and streaming API, but after Musk bought it they put it behind a $60k/year paywall. You can see a corresponding and abrupt falloff in academic network research papers, with newer ones that revolve around Twitter largely limited to cannibalizing old datasets. With luck bsky keeps growing and researchers invest effort in studying a more open-by-design platform.
tomrod 2y ago
I hadn't come across this before, looking forward to exploring a new tool. Thanks!
ericvolp12 2y ago
Give Jetstream a try instead, it's all JSON for you already: websocat wss://jetstream2.us-west.bsky.network/subscribe

zdimension 2y ago

Very nice. Modern GPUs really are fast as drawing points. It's pretty similar to a project I've been working on for the past year, scraping Facebook instead of BlueSky (which is a bit harder since FB doesn't expose an API for that). I currently have about 140 million nodes on my scraped graph and a GUI with pathfinding and stuff like that. It's a shame though because as nice as the thing is, I'm not sure I can publish it online, given it contains names of people. I don't think the GDPR would be very happy. Which is why I'm a bit surprised you published this, aren't you afraid of people, uh, disliking the fact that they're present in your dataset?

jchw 2y ago
AT proto is an open network. Everything you do is public by default. e.g. anyone else can just drink from the firehose.
- zdimension 2y ago
  Yeah, but that doesn't solve the data privacy problem. Not that I care, I'd love to be able to do all sorts of stuff with scraped datasets.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    One would hope the people on bluesky understand that they're posting publically to a centralized database. What data privacy problem are you concerned with?
    - zdimension 2y ago
      As I understand it, the moment you're processing someone's personally identifiable information, you're in the red zone, GDPR-wise. The users consented to publish their info on BlueSky, but not on OP's website. I get the idea behind the GDPR and it's nice to protect consumers but I'm scared for hobby projects like this.
      - 2y ago

Etheryte 2y ago

Hard to overstate just how much I like this. Not only does the end result convey information in many dimensions, it's also extremely appealing visually. The graininess that stems from rendering such a large number of nodes really adds a nice touch here, something that you don't often see in other graph visualizations.

andreygrehov 2y ago

The visualization looks absolutely fantastic. Great work. Would love to dive deeper into the tech behind it. I'll just share some irony. They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X/Twitter.

jamwil 2y ago
Hate speech is derogatory or harmful speech targeted at a marginalized community. Hating a company or product is not the same thing.
- andreygrehov 2y ago
  I just clicked "Discover" to see popular posts. https://bsky.app/profile/lepapillonblue.bsky.social/post/3largk2jkuq27 https://bsky.app/profile/lepapillonblue.bsky.social/post/3la... https://bsky.app/profile/sethabramson.bsky.social/post/3larjiscoc22y https://bsky.app/profile/sethabramson.bsky.social/post/3larj... https://bsky.app/profile/browneyedsusan.bsky.social/post/3lar3j7fn2s2y https://bsky.app/profile/browneyedsusan.bsky.social/post/3la...
  - minimaxir 2y ago
    None of that is remotely close to hate speech. President Trump is not a marginalized community.
    - andreygrehov 2y ago
      Hate speech or not, there is nothing pleasant about it. The irony is that the 'holier-than-thou' crowd, who are against hate and for love all over the world, overwhelmingly post negative political comments and are rooting for X/Twitter to collapse. This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.
      - rsynnott 2y ago

declan_roberts 2y ago

Bluesky to me still seems like a place completely dominated by software type (HN crowd). I know there are obvious exceptions there's no need for you to list them. Threads has extreme normies, bluesky has the nerds, and twitter seems to have just the right mixture of both.

YetAnotherNick 2y ago
Bluesky seems to be also very common among artists.
- kps 2y ago
  The mid-October bump was artists discovering that posting on Twitter allows them to use posts for training AI. https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-year.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-year.html
  - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    If Bluesky is decentralized, can't twitter still train on Bluesky posts?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      There’s arguably a moral difference between having your stuff stolen, and giving it up as part of the TOS. Most artists, you’d assume, would prefer the former.
      - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
        Bluesky's TOS[1]: > You grant us permission to: Use User Content to develop, provide, and improve Bluesky Social, the AT Protocol, and any of our future offerings [1]: https://bsky.social/about/support/tos#user-content https://bsky.social/about/support/tos#user-content

parsimo2010 2y ago

That looks really cool. I would also be interested to see examples of what commonality links the clusters of nodes- like are there clusters of people with the same hobby? Are there clusters of people speaking the same language, or living in the same city? Another thought since Bluesky is a pretty inclusive place, are the LGBTQIA+ folks clustering into their own respective labels, or is everyone mixing together? Is any of this behavior similar or different to what we see on other social networks?

treyd 2y ago
Those groups are more on Mastodon.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Nah, lots of LGBT+ people on Bluesky, too. Especially in the last week or so.

bradgessler 2y ago

The best thing about Bluesky is you can use your domain as your username. I'm @bradgessler.com on there, so if people want to "verify" me, they see something more meaningful than a blue checkbox, which is my website. If I ever get blocked, banned, deplatformed, whatever—people would see my domain and be able to go there to determine what's going on. In a sense it's "censorship-evident". I think this will be great for businesses—it's so much more less ambiguous if I can @example.com a business and get a response. I put a starter pack together of SaaS built on Rails that's already doing this at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u I really like what BlueSky is doing and hope it doesn't get enshitified as the future plays out. Even if it does, it seems like now is a goldilocks moment where things are feeling really good there. I highly recommend spending the 5 minutes it takes to setup an account and point it at your domain.

ZacnyLos 2y ago
Verifying your identity on Mastodon is for everyone as well and based on open web standards. https://joinmastodon.org/verification https://joinmastodon.org/verification
- bradgessler 2y ago
  Problem with Mastodon is you’re forced to associate with the identity of the sever or run your own instance, both of which are very awkward. I’m @bradgessler@ruby.social, but I’m more than a Ruby dev. I could run a Mastadon instance for bradgessler.com, but I have no desire to spend even 3 minutes figuring out how to set all that up. Maintaining my own instance sounds even worse. Bluesky gets the ergonomics of this right: the usernames feel like they occupy a global namespace and I can point the aliases at my domains in a few minutes without having to worry about a bunch of standards that I don’t really care about. For some reason I can’t explain, it also really bothers me that I have to @ people on Mastadon via @brad@bradgessler.com. I don’t want to say “@“ twice if I’m verbally telling somebody where to find me when presenting and “@me@bradgessler” is weird too. Much easier to say “Follow me @bradgessler.com” Am I lazy? Yes, but most people are. Bluesky strikes a nice balance of control and identity that I’m comfortable with for the amount of time and effort I’m willing to put into it.

typical182 2y ago

Bluesky and atproto seem to be built to be hackable. Someone in the community recently built a searchable directory of Bluesky "Starter Packs" (which are a way for a user to publish a set of interesting people & feeds to follow, primarily to help newcomers bootstrap their experience): https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all Dan Abramov posted about it earlier today, saying he liked it and: "the fact that it can be done in the ecosystem is awesome. let the ecosystem cook" [1] And maybe more poignantly: "seeing random projects pop up in the atproto ecosystem reminds me just how much public web common were stifled by social companies closing down their APIs. an entire landscape of tools given up on and abandoned" [2] [1] https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3sdna222d https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3sdna222d [2] https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3xpuu4c2d https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3xpuu4c2d

mhartz 2y ago
Wasn't this also sort of a feature with Twitter? iirc the retweet and other now popular features were originally hacked together by users
- frabcus 2y ago
  Retweet was original using the text "RT". Hashtags were also invented by Twitter users.
  - FranklinMaillot 2y ago
    Wasn't the @ also invented by users? I remember it was fascinating to watch this network self organize and create conventions of its own, that are now used everywhere.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Also hashtags. Though I think some of this stuff came from other social networks.
  - 2y ago

SubiculumCode 2y ago

A lot of high profile commentators were waiting until after the election to move to Bluesky. They felt that they'd be giving up their influence if they left then, but now that the election is over they have time to rebuild onto a new platform. Bluesky seems quite nice. I was on Mastadon for a while, but after the initial burst of activity, its silo-like orientation led to stagnant servers. That is, it neither fully embraced the community-first services that Discord provides, nor the easy-discoverability of open-platform of Twitter/X/. Also, this may seem silly, but I like the butterfly logo.

pohl 2y ago
There's another narrative that I've heard about the recent flood of former-X users into Bluesky: a new Terms of Service document goes into effect in about 4 days, giving X ownership of your content with respect to its use in training LLMs.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  I thought Grok has been using Twitter content this whole time, are they just getting around to updating their ToS? I can see some amount of protest, people who are anti-AI/pro-copyright might find a better niche on bsky, but everything you post there is public so it's legal for anyone to scrape and train with

notconsidering 2y ago

[dead]

dylan604 2y ago

"We can't make a map of all of Twitter, because the data isn't available and scraping it would be difficult and illegal." What makes scraping illegal?

barbazoo 2y ago
Perhaps even the threat of being sued might be enough to even consider doing this.
atemerev 2y ago
Nothing. A precedent determining that scraping is legal is already established.
- minimaxir 2y ago
  "legal" doesn't imply that Twitter/X won't send a C&D due to scraping that is expensive for a normal person to fight. Moreso if Twitter/X invokes the CFAA which has been common for scraping cases post HiQ vs. LinkedIn.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  not if its behind a login wall.
fragmede 2y ago
The LinkedIn vs HiQ case makes it so that scraping data behind a login screen is not okay but publicly accessible pages are fair game.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Was this the main reasoning for moving everything behind login more than data hoarding of the viewers?
  - fragmede 2y ago
    My personal belief is yes. Legal talks to management after the case concludes, tells them this is the new reality, and management tells product to make the change. At no time is management obligated or even remotely motivated to tell end users the real reason for making the change, because users believing that the platform is just a greedy corporation is better than them realizing that the platform will just roll over if the police presents them with a subpoena to snitch on a user.

TinkersW 2y ago

[flagged]

Karrot_Kream 2y ago
Huge social media sites are not going to be legible without some sort of preference function from the individual. Whether that's follows, hashtags/keywords, or engagement-oriented algorithms, that's the way. If you're not the kind of person who enjoys socializing In The Large that's fine. That's what topical sites (like Reddit, HN) or group chats are for.
krapp 2y ago
People are still making lame jokes about how "confusing" the LGBT acronym is? Get some new material.

atemerev 2y ago

Scraping data is not illegal. Everything a human can see, can be legally scraped.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

openrisk 2y ago

> Building and querying the quadtree is intrinsically heirarchical Glad to see I am not the only one having problems with hierarchy. Interesting work at many levels (no, no pun): starting with the bluesky data availability, the processing and the visualization algorithms. But its not quite clear where to place these visualizations in the data science spectrum. Conventional numerical graphics have (over time) developed a sophisticated grammar that allows fairly precise reasoning and inference. So they are heavily used in scientific publications, in the financial sector etc. for real information transmission (People might even reverse engineer a plot to recover data!). With networks and graphs, besides a general feel for the topology / connectivity or clustering its kinda hard to pin down what is the transmitted information. Not clear if useful grammars covering such large graphs are yet to be invented or if this is the nature of the beast.

josefresco 2y ago

I must be one of those tiny dots just floating in nothingness because my BSKY feed is a dead zone. I've posted, I've replied, I've liked and tried to be an active participant but nothing seems to stick. There's only so many posts I can publish "for myself" before I lose interest. Contrast this with early Twitter where everyone was just super excited, and eager to follow new people. I don't get it, shouldn't a new social network be full of people looking to create new... social networks?

fsflover 2y ago
Did you try Mastodon? Many have a better experience there.
- josteink 2y ago
  Mastadon has a massive problem with furries, people with loli anime-avatars or people who fit the «purple haired» stereotype. It’s very off-putting and alienating for normal people.
  - fsflover 2y ago
    It strongly depends on the instance. You don't have to read the global timeline.
    - chefandy 2y ago
      The tough thing is that for the vast majority of end users, the interface that they see is the software or service. So if their instance has a bunch of disgusting pornography, as far as they’re concerned, mastodon has a bunch of disgusting pornography. For a lot of folks, the browser/server abstraction for regular websites and how that differs from native apps is about as far as they’re willing to go in their understanding of Internet architecture and for many, it’s too far. Requiring people understand that not all mastodon is mastodon despite it being kind of the same, in order to avoid explicit hentai, is a non-starter. My grandparents are dead, but they would probably take their computer out back and set it on fire if that shit flashed up on their screen. They sure wouldn’t have used it as an opportunity to get all of the base knowledge they needed to even realize they had to instance shop. Facebook is just riiiiight over there.

Applejinx 2y ago

"Bot rings show up clearly exposed, for one." I like the sound of that. Surely there's usefulness in that observation.

loevborg 2y ago

I'm part of the wave of users who migrated to bluesky last week. I have to say I really like it so far, which surprised me a bit given that I had been underwhelmed by mastodon before. I already spend more time in bluesky than in twitter. For those (like me) who don't know what bluesky is, it's basically a carbon copy of twitter circa 2015, down to an almost identical UI. Except that there's no monetization, no ads, no growth hacking, which means that in the main features are there to serve the user. My favorite example is the simple expo/react native based mobile app, which lets you open links in safari rather than a useless in-app browser.

testfoobar 2y ago
How does it compare to Threads?
- wittekm 2y ago
  Anecdotally, I see a lot more “normal” human to human engagement than the addressed-to-millions engagement bait I see on Threads.
- msluyter 2y ago
  At some point Threads started to suppress (or at least, not boost?) political content or news. Which sort of crippled it as a "current events + hot takes" Twitter/X competitor. Bluesky doesn't appear to have this limitation (though perhaps for some this is a feature).
  - kristofferR 2y ago
    https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-our-approach-to-political-content-on-instagram-and-threads https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-ou...
- Pxtl 2y ago
  The loudest complaint I see about threads (lack of hyperlinks) doesn't apply there. Also, Threads seems covered in growth-hacking dark patterns, like the notification/activity screen being flooded with "picked for you". edit: my big worry about BSky is the lack of any coherent monetization plan. This isn't community-funded stuff like Mastodon, it's VC-funded software - there will be a need for revenue at some point and then what happens?

nomdep 2y ago

> “I filtered out accounts that follow more than 50k accounts, or follow less than 5 accounts and have less than 5 followers, leaving 7.7 million nodes.” So not quite 13M but almost half of them, pretty cool nonetheless

IAmGraydon 2y ago

As a broader comment about Bluesky, it seems to me that it's heavily left-leaning, while Twitter/X is obviously leaning more and more to the right. Amazingly, it seems that the BlueSky/X dichotomy is another emergent manifestation of a fracturing and continually more polarized society. In my opinion, what we will ultimately end up with is two echo chambers, each catering to opposite ends of the spectrum, each radicalizing their respective userbase, and each further amplifying the divide in society today.

purplethinking 2y ago
I have no interest in being in a left-leaning bubble. I get both sides on X, so far. People think X has been leaning more and more to the right, but in truth it's just not being censored (sorry, moderated) anymore, leading to more right-leaning content. Leftists can't really tolerate any difference of opinion so they move to other platforms, it's sad. But I think they'll be bored and eventually come back for some more drama.
- MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
  What specific type of content was being censored before Elon took over that is being allowed now?
  - samatman 2y ago
    I seem to recall at some point that that old Twitter banned the account of the sitting President of the United States. Later, Twitter banned a comedy account, the Babylon Bee. That pissed Elon off enough to buy it. Both are back on Twitter now, both the comedy account, and the politician who will be President for a second term in January, having won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. That's just two examples, but I would call them salient ones.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    In the particular little culture war concerning gender identity, pre Elon you would get banned for "deadnaming" and criticizing the health claims of gender clinics (aka transphobia) It's flipped now, Elon has tweeted that using cis to describe not-trans people is a slur. Which seems like going the other way on "free speech absolutism" but whatever.

nightski 2y ago

I created a new account and the feed was flooded with anti-X, anti-gop, anti-religion content. Don't get me wrong, it's not that any of those particularly bother me but it doesn't seem any different than X except without the people I follow.

ZacnyLos 2y ago
On Mastodon there are no longer people dragged by the crowd, only those who have something interesting to say remain.

kristofferR 2y ago

How do you guys crosspost to X, Threads, Mastadon and Bluesky?

ZacnyLos 2y ago
Using Mastodon you can follow people from Bluesky and Threads if they only turn on sharing or use Bridgy Fed option as well. Mastodon is the most versatile piece of software.

ZacnyLos 2y ago

Fortunately using Bridgy Fed we can connect BlueSky with Fediverse and IndieWeb. https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/ https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/

rustyboy 2y ago
can I get a ELI10 on this - If I host a mastodon server, would I need to run this software along side it then and then everyone on my server could see these other platforms posts and such?
- extraduder_ire 2y ago
  Accounts on any supported platform can follow the bot on their platform, and their posts get bridged to all the other ones as a subdomain of the bridgy bot. e.g. a mastodon instance with a handle for every bridged account. It changed to require opting in to bridging because many mastodon users got very mad about it.

metadat 2y ago

> What happens if we throw the BlueSky matrix into UMAP? Well, we can't, at least not directly. Even though UMAP technically accepts sparse matrices, our scale is just to big for my home server. Instead, we can settle for using some other technique to derive embeddings for every user, in a medium-sized dimension like 32, and then feed that into UMAP. Easy! How, exactly, are the embeddings derived?

ZacnyLos 2y ago

Mastodon seems to be the most versatile app of all of them. With Mastodon account you can follow people from BlueSky (if they use BridgyFed) and people from Threads (if they turn on fediverse sharing).

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

swat535 2y ago

It looks like the Internet is now being compartmentalized based on one's political affiliation and groups. X is turning out to be where Conservatives are going to be living, Bluesky, Reddit and Treads will be for Liberals. These platform don't outright ban opposing views but I think moderation policies and the users will shift these groups into one or the other. I'm not sure if one can have a platform where respectful discourse can take place. The only site I've seen so far is HN and its due to its small community and the relentless effort by Dan. The days of having everyone connected on the same platform is now dead, which might ironically usher a revival of the old, non-centralized web.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
Promise of bluesky is that different front ends can have different moderation policies, and you have account portability should you be prevented from interacting with bsky.app (provided you were self hosting your pod. I don't actually know if you can export your data if you are "banned" from the main instance, I'll have to look into that)
asdf123wtf 2y ago
Honestly, I'd get the F off twitter, because it's now in control of a state actor. Any barriers, legal or otherwise, that existed between twitter and the state should be assumed gone once the new administration transitions in, especially considering it's an administration that has promised to abuse state power to target it's opposition.

gravico 2y ago

As a platform trying to connect aspiring founders with successful experts, is it worth creating a Bluesky grouping consisting of founders, ceo's and successful experts wanting to help aspiring founder. Goal is to gain traction for https://www.gravi.co https://www.gravi.co

jazzyjackson 2y ago
It would be interesting to see a community onboarded where everyone's username is a subdomain @name.gravi.co, so people know they're officially associated. There's lots of software folk there so it would probably be a good place to try.
- gravico 2y ago
  Thanks, that's the plan where each expert has a dedicated subdomain (e.g., jazzyjackson.gravi.co), allowing them to showcase their profile and offer bookable consultancy slots for entrepreneurs seeking personalised advice, focusing on UK and Europe but tempted to target US which is a more mature and willing to explore and experiment market.

akomtu 2y ago

It's going to look even more mesmerizing if you imagine how tweets propagate in this cloud. It would look somewhat alive.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

consumer451 2y ago

Bluesky hit 15M this morning, and it is also the top free app in the US App Store. Does anyone know if it is the first time that a truly open source app has hit that top spot?

skwee357 2y ago

Signed up due to the hype. My feed is filled with "Welp, he stole my meme" / "Would you prefer Go or Rust?" / anime images. Social media is dead

elforce002 2y ago

To be honest, bluesky will become the left version of "Truth social". That's good for them in the long run (ad money) but it'll be another echo chamber. I follow both left-leaning and right-leaning people on Twitter and I don't see the "balance" going one way or another. The other thing is reach. Twitter, Fb, Instagram are global brands. It'll be really, and I mean difficult to move the rest of the world to other platforms (TikTok is the exception because they went ahead with video from the get-go).

bbzealot 2y ago
How can a platform owned by a far-right man with a clear political agenda be the place for "political balance"? It's inevitable that left-leaning people will increasingly leave Twitter, as long as it is run by Musk
- elforce002 2y ago
  Musk was left-leaning not so long ago. I follow left-leaning media (WYT, Pod Save America, etc...) and right-leaning media (Ben Shapiro, etc...) equally and see both posts without any issues. If the left-leaning people leave Twitter, the new platform will become an echo chamber the same way Reddit, gab, parler, and Truth Social are.
  - bbzealot 2y ago
    > Musk was left-leaning not so long ago So what? He's been clearly far right leaning since before he purchased Twitter. He's been one of the main supporters of the Trump campaign and he's vocal about his political ideas. Twitter has no credibility as a neutral platform as long as it's run by him
    - elforce002 2y ago
      I beg to differ. It's important because I can equally see both left and right posts. If you consume more left-leaning posts, you'll get more of that content. My feed is Web Dev, Machine Learning, Mobile Dev, etc... you have to be hardcore right to get anything related to that (same goes if you consume left-leaning posts). In the end, people will choose their echo chamber no matter if they know it's an echo chamber. I try to be as impartial as possible. I use Twitter, Reddit (specific subs), and occasionally, IG. I have a tiktok acct but I rarely use it.