57 ms·

Maybe Bluesky has "won"

• nabla9 2y ago
  Threads has 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky has now 15 million total users (how many active?) Mastodon monthly active usage has dropped below 1 million.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • paulpauper 2y ago
    Many of these alternatives are piggybacking off the parent site. Google at pone point made anyone with a Gmail account a default user for its own social network.
  • verdverm 2y ago
    It's more about the vision and momentum Threads is not trying to be a Twitter replacement and is another brand in the Zuck conglomerate What makes Bluesky different to me is ATProto and the possibilities for a new social media fabric, that they learned from some difficulties with ActivityPub to build something better https://atproto.com https://atproto.com
    • andrewshadura 2y ago
      The problem with atproto is that it's not better.
  • MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    Everyone who has an Instagram account is technically a Threads user as far as I can tell.
    • daedrdev 2y ago
      Is instagram usage counted in active threads users? I doubt it
      • chimeracoder 2y ago
        > Is instagram usage counted in active threads users? I doubt it It is if they have a Threads account and interact with any Threads content on the Instagram app, which is extremely easy to do even accidentally, because they shove it into the Instagram feed and make it look like Instagram content. I would not be surprised if a large chunk - maybe even the majority - of "Threads users" interact with it exclusively through the Instagram app, with many of them not even fully aware that it's nominally a separate product.
        • zimpenfish 2y ago
          > they shove it into the Instagram feed and make it look like Instagram content. And also into your notifications now.
    • jsheard 2y ago
      They probably are juicing the numbers that way, but the dedicated Threads app is pretty high on the app store charts so evidently people are going out of their way to get it. YMMV depending on your region but my Play Store "social" chart is currently showing Bluesky at #1, then TikTok, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Reddit at #7.
      • mikeyouse 2y ago
        They are definitely “growth hacking” as much as possible - I regularly would see 1/3 of a Threads comment in my FB and IG feed and when you click to expand it takes you to the App Store to download the Threads app. I’m not interested so I just back out but I’m sure it works wonders to get their numbers up.
    • vitorgrs 2y ago
      Nop. You need to download Threads app and create an account (using your Instagram). Of course Instagram helps, because they keep showing Threads posts on Instagram, notifications, etc, so people download and create an account, but is not automatic.
  • micromacrofoot 2y ago
    is that Threads, or is that Instagram and Threads? Kind of a cheat without calling that out
  • lynndotpy 2y ago
    I believe Threads active users are artificially conflated with Instagram and Facebook. In all my circles, I don't know anyone who uses Threads
    • cogman10 2y ago
      That's my guess. By having either of those accounts you automatically got a threads account.
      • changing1999 2y ago
        True. But you don't become an active monthly user. Unless there are some shenanigans happening, which is highly likely. I think I visited Threads by accident several times by clicking posts in IG, that were apparently Threads posts embedded directly into IG as a growth hack (my speculation).
      • kiitos 2y ago
        You have to create a Threads account explicitly, it's not automatic from an Instagram or Facebook account.
    • criley2 2y ago
      In all my circles, I don't know a single "X" user. Not even one. Anecdotes are funny like that. Facebook monthly active users: >3 billion Instagram monthly active users: >2 billion Threads monthly active users: ~275 million If they're cheating, they're doing a poor job of it.
      • emidoots 2y ago
        When you post on Instagram, there are opt-out features that will 'automatically share to your Threads account too' and you can see Threads notifications in the Instagram app and such .. so I think it's reasonable to assume they are leveraging the Instagram user-base a bit.
        • changing1999 2y ago
  • moralestapia 2y ago
    X is at 600 million MAU, for reference. Edit: Thanks @JumpCrisscross.
    • moogly 2y ago
      And minus bots?
      • moralestapia 2y ago
        No idea but bots are not exclusive to X.
        • moogly 2y ago
          Nope, but I'd wager the share is way higher than on the other services as of right now.
          • moralestapia 2y ago
            Hmm ... yeah but that's wandering into "the supposition of a supposition" territory.
        • lavezzi 2y ago
          But they are exclusively the majority on X
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      600mm*
    • threeseed 2y ago
      The trend is what is important. Threads is growing at 1m new users a day. And at least here in Australia, X is ranked #69 on the App Store. Threads #2. Year from now, Threads could well be bigger.
      • redox99 2y ago
  • frgtpsswrdlame 2y ago
    Yeah but what made Twitter twitter wasn't really the usercount, it was the mix of established voices and complete randos mixing. If the journalists and economists and politicians go to Bluesky, it will win. I definitely don't think that's a given but it seems much more plausible now than it did a few months ago.
    • Gigachad 2y ago
      Bluesky is increasingly getting that way. Every time I check it this week I'm seeing new content from recognizable people. I think at some point there will be a tipping point where Bluesky will have more content and just win outside of alt right circles.
      • briandear 2y ago
        Until they start censoring. Some orgs (like Guardian,) don’t like getting fact checked in real time. Old Twitter is far worse than new Twitter. In the recent old days, you’d get suspended for even debating Covid vaccine safety. Couldn’t even debate it! They even colluded with the U.S. government to silence dissent. Crazy.
        • blitzar 2y ago
          You are correct, that was a disgraceful thing for thing for the Trump 1.0 administration to do.
    • spacebanana7 2y ago
      Kim Kardashian is much more important to a social network than any journalist, politician or economist. Perhaps more so than all of them combined. There are many interest verticals on Twitter like politics, sports, celebrity, influencer, porn etc.
  • rvz 2y ago
    > Bluesky has now 15 million total users (how many active?) That is a very good question. One of the Bluesky developers gave the figure at around 2.25M DAUs [0] This chart shows that they now have 3.74M DAUs and have 9.3M MAUs [1] Mastodon does not give their DAUs, but their MAUs are down to less than 1M users. [2] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953421 [1] https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/index.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d... [2] https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers
  • threeseed 2y ago
    Threads is closer to 300m now. According to Mosseri it is now adding 1m new users a day.
    • jyxent 2y ago
      Bluesky has also added 1m new users for each of the past 2 days.
  • anonymousiam 2y ago
    You forgot to list one: X/Twitter has over 500 million monthly active users.
    • lavezzi 2y ago
      480 million of those are likely bots
      • an_guy 2y ago
        Do you have any source for that statement?
  • Retr0id 2y ago
    The 15 million figure is several hours out of date, it's currently over 17m. (https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats) 9.4m active this month (and counting), according to https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/index.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
  • hbn 2y ago
    Threads artificially juicing their numbers with Instagram integration. I can't remember what it was but recently when posting to Instagram it offered me an option to enable all my posts to automatically cross-post to Threads, very possibly defaulted to "on" too.
  • bakugo 2y ago
    I literally forget Threads exists for months at a time. Nobody I know uses it, or has even acknowledged its existence. I see people on other social media talking about their Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and directing people there, but I have never seen anyone do it for Threads. I have never seen anyone share a link to Threads, I don't even remember what its domain name is. I have never seen Threads included in those little sets of social media icon links that all brand websites have. I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe Threads has actual users who care about it and aren't just clueless Facebook/Instagram users who were not-so-subtly encouraged to also use Threads by those apps.
  • pityJuke 2y ago
    Threads is big in the same way that Facebook is big. No juice, as they say.
• davidw 2y ago
  It's early days, I think. So far I see good sides of both Threads and Blue Sky. Threads has a lot more users, but I see more 'subject matter expert' kinds of people on Blue Sky as well as smaller more intimate communities. But we'll see what happens if that dynamic attracts more people and it stops being quite so cozy.
  • astrange 2y ago
    Threads seems unusable unless they change the algorithm. It defaults to For You and For You is 50% Instagram-style engagement bait, 50% people you've never heard of complaining about things you've never heard of, and 0% people you're actually following. If they fix that it could indeed be quite good, but it still feels too much like "broadcasting" vs "conversation", and I'm personally not ready to be popular like that. Bluesky does have a little toxic positivity but it's much better, and it's possible to chat with friends on it. (When I try enabling the algorithm features they still won't stop showing me gay porn though.)
    • davidw 2y ago
      If you follow and engage with enough people, the engagement bait stuff goes away, for the most part.
      • astrange 2y ago
        I follow a decent number of tech people and I do see some of their posts, but then it runs out. In particular all the people I follow go to bed at US nighttime and then it's all bait until they wake up. Also, half the people I follow are getting baited by the "random people complaining" posts - so I just see their replies to it!
  • deadbabe 2y ago
    I’m tired of threads. In the beginning it was nice but now it just gives me engagement fatigue. So much shallow content provoking replies and adding nothing to your life. It actually makes me feel worse. And now they will be adding ads. That’s it. I’m out.
• pjc50 2y ago
  I think Bluesky has won the "cool" factor; remains to be seen how effective that is at pulling other users across while maintaining its culture. There's probably a good chunk of people who just drop Twitter without picking up another social media in replacement.
  • bsimpson 2y ago
    For the longest time, I didn't get the appeal of Twitter. I started using it a bit more when I was still in the habit of using social feeds, and Facebook's was getting actively bad. I haven't used Twitter much lately since it got bought, and I haven't missed it. A lot of the time when I did use it, it was for customer support. I feel bad for my followers who had to see my gripes about whatever behemoth sold me crap.
• poniko 2y ago
  Too early to call, the momentum must also become normal. I can see a future where threads is mainstream and bluesky attracts news/politics.
  • geek_at 2y ago
    Just saw a YouTube video from legaleagle, a lawyer and in his videos he usually cites Twitter posts but the recent ones have bluesky posts which made me think bluesky has gone mainstream so I spun up a VM and hosted my PDS for me and a few friends I like the feeling and style of the app, it's very comfortable coming from Twitter
  • mrweasel 2y ago
    It came as a bit of surprise this morning when an radio interview with a politician concluded with mentioning her Bluesky account, not Twitter or Facebook. Still I feel like Facebook/Instagram, and certainly X/Twitter has done a lot of damage, which has cause many of us to be sceptical about ever opening another social media account.
• jimbob45 2y ago
  All of the major platforms experience major outflow after elections, no? Logically, Twitter would lose more users given that they have a larger user base to start with. What’s the next major event where we can reliably measure to see which platform is actually ahead?
  • the_third_wave 2y ago
    That depends on what you use as criterium to decide which platform is ahead. For me the best criterium is how much diversity of opinion - the only type of diversity which really matters - is allowed on the platform and how much real interaction (i.e. not just shit fights) between those groups occurs. Currently X comes out on top in the former category while none of them scores anything worth mentioning on the latter.
• jsemrau 2y ago
  I'd argue longform content has done more for opinion-making than microblogs in the 2024 election. And to be honest, I like that. Irrespective of the politics the podcasts with JD Vance and even Trump at Theo Von were remarkable. Seeing Trump genuinely care about Theo's drug history was a strange but impactful moment.
  • unclad5968 2y ago
    It certainly made them feel more human to me. I wish Kamala would have done the same just so people could see her have a real conversation. I have no idea how that would go.
• b0sk 2y ago
  Bluesky's issue is the Discover feed is not good. After a few days of activity, the suggestions are mostly random and nowhere close to the stuff I want. Twitter was very good - it makes sense because the graph is rich.
  • matsemann 2y ago
    Lots of other feeds, though. Which I think is a cool feature. I follow a feed for theme I'm interested in, which is nicer than following people that post about lots of various things, not all which I'm interested in.
• Geep5 2y ago
  I still think Nostr will eventually be the go-to.
  • ibz 2y ago
    That's how it looks like currently. Nostr is the open protocol whereas Bluesky is the more open platform.
    • verdverm 2y ago
      Bluesky is building ATProto (https://atproto.com https://atproto.com) which is an open protocol that you can build many types of social apps on top of
  • jazzyjackson 2y ago
    isn't it exclusively inhabited by bitcoiners? and relies on never leaking your private key, with no recourse for key rotation? or am I out of date
    • Heliodex 2y ago
      We had NIP-26 Delegated Event Signing, so you could set up multiple private keys with short expiration times delegated from a root key, then if one of the delegated keys was leaked you could just wait for it to expire. This ended up being considered a bad idea as clients that supported it would have to display any notes as if they were sent from the root key, and clients that didn't support it wouldn't be able to keep track of anyone using delegation.
      • jazzyjackson 2y ago
        I was really impressed with a presentation I attended at the internet identity workshop detailing KERI, Key Event Receipt Infrastructure. I wish someone would integrate it into a social network so I don't have to do it myself. Landing page: https://keri.one/ https://keri.one/ Whitepaper: https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/whitepapers/KERI_WP_2.x.web.pdf https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/whitepape...
• ta8645 2y ago
  I'm still hoping that X wins. I'm hoping that we learn how to coexist with a diversity of viewpoints. It seems counterproductive to partition everyone up into their own little gardens, without any viable opposition to the dominant views.
  • williamtrask 2y ago
    For a nice book on the tech-philosophy of this question (recently endorsed by the Dalai Lama, you might enjoy: https://www.plurality.net/ https://www.plurality.net/
  • krisboyz781 2y ago
    [dead]
  • croes 2y ago
    Not everything that is written on Twitter is a viewpoint and those things became mire and more sind Musk bought it.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • tootie 2y ago
    It is functionally impossible to run an unmoderated message board that doesn't devolve. Holding out hope that "we" learn where "we" is everyone in the world is not going to happen in 1000 years. The only way for a forum to remain civil and useful is for careful moderation to remove troublemakers and it is equally impossible to do that without ever making a mistake.
    • ta8645 2y ago
      You're presenting a false dichotomy. Of course, there will be mistakes. And of course there needs to be moderation. But I support the moderation similar to HN, it's about politeness and respect. As long as you're respectful, you can say your piece. Also, X does provide community based fact checking too, which works best when there are representatives from all sides participating.
• Animats 2y ago
  If you have a business with a lot of customers who need a support forum, does it make sense to run a Bluesky server? How does censorship work?
  • Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    Setting up a PDS isn't too hard but still requires a dedicated IT person right now IMO. If you have a lot of customers I think it's worth it (aka you can justify spending budget on keeping the PDS up.) If you're small, it's not worth it yet I don't think. Censorship/moderation is based on labellers that label posts for content. The default App View has opt-out moderation based on the default Bluesky moderation labelers. You can also opt-into other labellers if you like. You can run your own labeller to get your own moderation. I run my own labeller and my own feeds so I can customize my experience but none of it is in a state that others could really fork the code. It's not too hard to start reading the jetstream (a version of the firehose that's easier to parse/read) though.
    • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      > Censorship/moderation is based on labellers that label posts for content. The default App View has opt-out moderation based on the default Bluesky moderation labelers. You can also opt-into other labellers if you like. Does this mean there is one set of moderation/censorship that you get by default, but you can turn it off and get a fully unfiltered version of the service? Or is it like clicking “reveal” on every hidden post individually? Are the additional “labeller” on top of the default or can you replace it entirely?
  • cassepipe 2y ago
    Doesn't it make more sense to go for Stack Overflow / Reddit model instead for a support forum ? The best responses will bubble up and that really the main innovation that makes a forum more practical. What about hosting a Lemmy instance or and if you have the money, Stack Overflow for Teams ?
• throwaway48476 2y ago
  n=1 but I've never seen a bluesky content link in the wild. I've seen lots of people talking about bluesky or moving to bluesky though.
  • Retr0id 2y ago
    They make it to the HN front page every so often https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bsky.app https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bsky.app
    • alecco 2y ago
      The top links are mostly from the past week. And a lot of links are about Bluesky itself.
      • Retr0id 2y ago
        That's about what I'd expect from a network that's also undergone exponential growth in the past ~week, while still being much smaller than e.g. twitter in absolute terms.
      • ihuman 2y ago
        Only a few of the top links are from the past week https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • minimaxir 2y ago
    It takes a bit for content to go viral. Bluesky was mostly irrelevant until just over a week ago. Since then I've seen plenty of Bluesky embeds in articles where there wouild have been Twitter/X embeds.
    • Kiro 2y ago
• Retr0id 2y ago
  > This is because the data in the network is all cryptographically signed based on what came before it. The protocol does this using the Merkle tree structure, which is also how Git stores data. The issue with this is: if you want to look at one piece of content in the system, you also need to know about everything that happened before. This isn't quite accurate. You only need the MST blocks in the merkle path(s) back to the root, for the subset of records that you care about. For a single record, that's O(logn) blocks on average, where n is the total number of records in the repo. For a full checkout, the MST block count is ~33% of the number records in the repo, on average. (MST = Merkle Search Tree, which is a special type of merkle tree, distinct from the one used by git - https://inria.hal.science/hal-02303490/document https://inria.hal.science/hal-02303490/document ) > Also, it would be great to edit posts! I believe this is tricky because of the Merkle tree structure mentioned above It's not so tricky at the MST level, and it already happens there when you edit your bio for example. What is tricky (relatively) is figuring out how to represent post edits at the UI/UX level. For context, I'm working on my own PDS implementation in Python, with corresponding library for working with the MST (both fairly WIP): https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/millipds https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/millipds https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/atmst https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/atmst
  • adastra22 2y ago
    Sounds like they are confusing Merkle blocks with block chain.
    • Retr0id 2y ago
      An earlier version of the repo commit format (v2) had a "prev" field, which referenced the previous commit by hash. This is vaguely blockchain-ish in that you could follow the chain all the way back to the first commit*, but even then, you still didn't need the prior versions to verify the current version. In "repo v3", the prev field still exists but is optional, and in practice it isn't used. *unless the repo had been "rebased"
• kettlecorn 2y ago
  The competitive advantage to BlueSky, over Twitter / X, is that there's tremendous value in connecting intelligent and kind people while maintaining a certain quality standard. Twitter / X, for political reasons, allowed extremely toxic behavior while at the same time disempowered communities from moderating themselves. If you force each individual user to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person it's a losing battle and low quality speech will overwhelm conversations. X folks know that but did it anyways. It's also becoming more and more clear that we need a relatively neutral medium for free speech. Musk claimed to be building that on X but then did exactly the opposite. It's very hard to trust the algorithm isn't being manipulated in one way or another. On BlueSky it's incredible how much value is already being produced by connecting intelligent and creative folks as compared to what Twitter became.
  • celdon25 2y ago
    Something tells me you tend to attract harsh disagreements that may be interpreted as “toxic”. Maybe do some reflection?
    • kettlecorn 2y ago
      Not true. If someone can make a point honestly and in good faith I do my best to respect it even it's "harsh". I myself am no stranger to being very blunt when trying to make a case for something. What I consider "toxic" is using slurs, trying to make people angry, bad faith arguments, spamming replies without giving them much thought, etc.
  • caekislove 2y ago
    Get real. It's a liberal echo chamber. 90%+ of the posts there are anti-Trump and/or anti-Musk.
    • vehemenz 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • 2y ago
• alecco 2y ago
  If interesting people start posting interesting things on Bluesky we'll start going there. But, so far, we only see people posing and shoving it down our throats. Just like this post. We get it, you hate Musk and want to see X/twitter dead. Fine. I'm not on Twitter and used to be on Mastodon so the idea of Bluesky per se sounds interesting. But so far it looks like a forced, desperate attempt by a very political group of people. And that's the opposite of what people like me would like to spend time on.
  • gjsman-1000 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • caekislove 2y ago
      If "Twitter, but decentralized" was compelling to the average social media user, Mastodon would have eaten the world years ago.
      • epistasis 2y ago
        90% of social media is the crowd of people using it. A new social media site will take over with having better people, which might be caused by getting better features but unlikely. Or, it could be that the dominant social media site makes blunders that push its users away, like Digg did. Twitter used to be unbeatable for me in 1) areas with technical expertise or, 2) following the latest in news. Using Twitter to get the latest on news has only recently been destroyed, as evidenced by its failure as an information source during the recent hurricanes in the US. And most technical users are now reevaluating the crap they have to put up with every day that they didn't have to a while back, and finding X lacking. And in science, this is especially with a new administration that is dedicated to science suppression (e.g. RFK Jr) and X is run by a wanna-be oligarch that wants a part in the administration controlling their social media without regard to free speech. (For example, blanket banning of "cis" made lots of discusion really hard. "Cis" is a technical word that is used all the time in my field unrelated to the culture war, and not being able to use it was infuriating and really made a lot of people angry that they were mere pawns in a stupid culture war. It is not a curse word or a slur or hateful word and nobody's life was made better by banning its use, but many discussions became silly.) Mastodon is more clunky than Bluesky, too clunky to get working for most, though a lot of scientists got close. Bluesky is easier and is getting the community now.
• numbers_guy 2y ago
  It's a bigger echo chamber than X. What's the point? I go online to try to get a general idea of the landscape of views and opinions. I think a general problem with the current political landscape right now is that people literally cannot tolerate reading something they disagree with, because they convinced themselves that the other side is so morally flawed, they can just immediately write them off without further consideration. But irrespective of that, how are you supposed to understand what is going on if you only read content by people who think the same way you do?
  • rconti 2y ago
    Well, the algorithm only pushes engagement bait so it's selecting for morally flawed takes rather than nuanced takes.
    • numbers_guy 2y ago
      I don't let the algorithm dictate who I follow. I pretty much know the big names in all the areas that I want to keep up to date with. And for every big name I know their main rivals, so I can have a complete picture. It's that simple. If Bluesky manages to attract the same diversity of opinions I might start using it.
  • matsemann 2y ago
    > What's the point? I go online to try to get a general idea of the landscape of views and opinions. Not everyone uses it solely for political stuff, though. I'd like to just be in a community related to my hobby without death threats and constant abuse. We moved to bsky a year ago, been so nice.
• wnevets 2y ago
  Threads has gone out of its way to make real time engagement impossible. Seeing post about sporting events that ended 3 days ago on your front page is terrible UX. If I was a conspiratorial type person I would believe zuck & elon colluded not to compete in that space.
  • threeseed 2y ago
    They announced today they are rolling out Lists which will be chronological. So you would be able to build communities around specific topics.
    • wnevets 2y ago
      even that is an avoidance of a real time feed that twitter has had since the beginning and bluesky has now.
      • threeseed 2y ago
        It has had a real time, chronological feed since day one i.e. Following.
        • wnevets 2y ago
          Which has limited value during real time events. If you are not preemptively following people who are interested in or involved with that event then you lose out on following that event in real time.
• okhuman 2y ago
  There will be no great migration like we saw in 2010 with users shifting from Digg to Reddit but, instead, only the slow trickling escapes of users to more dispersed communities. Here the human condition can flourish in a more localized way, with more participation (less lurking). No more winner takes all.
  • hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
    The real issue is that none of these alternatives (Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky) offer anything other than "we're not Twitter". Digg to Reddit was a unique case, because Digg very specifically fucked up their site, badly, with the V4 update. Reddit was in a great spot to pick up users from Digg because of not only having a similar overarching purpose as a link aggregator, but additional features like subreddits which enabled more smaller and casual link sharing and comment sections. It was a clear upgrade from Digg V4. I do think that Reddit would have eventually overtaken Digg anyway, and V4 only sped up the process. Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now. If you're on there to look at funny memes, cat pictures, celebrity news and pornography -- which encapsulates about 98% of Twitter use cases -- it still functions much better than the alternatives. The migrations are happening for meta reasons, either political or ToS-related (specifically, X claiming they can use images you post for AI training). This isn't a recipe for long-term success, it's a precursor for people making bunch of noise for a month and then heading back to Twitter. As someone who doesn't really participate in these large social networks -- even modern HN is way too mainstream for me honestly -- I do think it's a good thing people get off them, though. Smaller communities are a good thing. Shouting your loudest, hottest political takes on Twitter so you can pat yourself on the back for 10k likes is a fast track to mental health issues.
    • astrange 2y ago
      > Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now. The Bluesky app both performs better and uses much less battery than Twitter does. I think because it uses Google ads now, but not sure. Twitter also has disk space leaks - I regularly find the app has gone up to 3GB or so. (And it's not from image caching, seems to be an SQLite db of all accounts I've seen posts from.)
• Tenoke 2y ago
  It's definitely the best contender, and I've been trying to use it but so far there's less people, my feed there is much blander, there's missing features that I miss from Twitter, and everyone seems to be posting about Twitter itself all the time.
  • mattmcknight 2y ago
    That's exactly what Threads seemed like when I dipped in, so many complaints about non-Meta tech companies.
• sergiotapia 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    You know this would be a lot more effective of a pitch if you didn't go with the free speech canard. The only change recently (aside from community notes, which is ok) is the notable surge in porn, crypto, and ads and the corresponding drop in quality of advertisers.
    • sergiotapia 2y ago
      Free speech is infinitely important to me and the future country my kids live in.
      • PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        [flagged]
        • bpbp-mango 2y ago
          Being able to openly endorse Nazis is free space though, no?
          • verdverm 2y ago
            Is it not also my freedom to not have to listen to certain speech? I ought to be able to filter it out What sets Bluesky apart for me is that their ATProto and their default app allow for user choice in moderation. No longer do we have a platform deciding the one-size fits all for their users. We can have competition without switching costs with ATProto
          • deleted 2y ago
            [deleted]
• jl6 2y ago
  The true rival to X is not using social media at all. If you’re mad at your Skinner box, switching bubbles won’t improve your life.
  • mepian 2y ago
    HN is also social media…
    • alexjplant 2y ago
      Only by the loosest possible definition that would also encompass forums, IRC, game lobby chatrooms, etc. There's a clear and practical distinction between communities driven by a specific interest like this one and platforms like Xitter. Saying that HN is social media is like saying that a taco is a sandwich.
      • Karrot_Kream 2y ago
        Disagree. That's what HN and IRC fans tell themselves to draw an artificial distinction between networks they like and networks they don't. I don't see a huge meaningful difference except in scale and content breadth.
        • alexjplant 2y ago
          There are _huge_ differences. Compare HN to Xitter et al: - Barrier to entry is higher and participation is tiered by karma - Moderation and community participation guidelines are heavier-handed and more defined - You can't embed media or have a profile picture - There's virtually no advertising anywhere - You can't delete posts after a few hours which means no way to nuke your presence after the fact - No hashtags - Far less algorithmic manipulation of user attention (infinite scrolling, per-user algorithmic feed, etc) - Encouragement of longer-form discussion because of a lack of (at this point historical, from what I understand) character limits on posts - Likes/upvote counts aren't visible to other users - No official app with telemetry and push notifications; in fact, no notifications _period_ for things like replies - No friend or follow mechanism My taco comment stands. Both a sandwich and a taco comprise flat, oblong starches with ingredients in the middle. One or two people have called them the same. In practice virtually nobody would confuse the two or substitute one for the other. People are migrating from Xitter to Bluesky but almost none are migrating to HN.
• skwee357 2y ago
  I find it funny how hard people try to push the “BlueSky is better than twitter” narrative. So hard, that my entire BlueSky feed is filled with Twitter refugees who shit post about twitter being bad. Maybe instead of having yet another echo chamber of short form content, we should embrace long form, well written content with wide range of opinions.
  • minimaxir 2y ago
    Social networks have been algorithmically deprioritizing long form/well-written content, with Twitter/X being the most egregious offender. Atleast Bluesky has a chronological feed without shenanigans.
    • skwee357 2y ago
      I don’t think the problem is the algorithmic or chronological feed. I think the problem is that short form content simply should not exit. I don’t care what people eat for breakfast, or reading the same motivation quote over and over again. I want to have discussions, with different opinions. And current microblogging platforms do not provide that. Hence it doesn’t matter who “wins”. IMHO they are all net negative for humanity
• mrtksn 2y ago
  A year ago, Bluesky was an empty place, I wanted to use it but there wasn't anything. Now its bustling, there are interesting posts and they receive thousands of likes. On the other hand Twitter still feels like where things are actually happening but more and more feels like they are about to start terminating anyone with eyeglasses. I was there when the Digg exodus happened, it doesn't feel like that. It's something else. It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.
  • somethoughts 2y ago
    It'll be interesting if Twitter/X does drift rightward amongst contributors and still keeps its For You feed oriented toward "engagement" and view counts, whether or not it will just end up leading to infighting between far right and moderate right views.
    • mrtksn 2y ago
      I think so, extreme ideologues like communists, islamists or any other hardcore ideologues fight among each other and in their own tribes all the time because they are actually divided quite a bit on the implementation details. Once the thing they rage against is gone, they will have to rage against each other. The anti-jewish Trump supporters already begin dropping out with disappointment.
      • ndarray 2y ago
        Leftists know a thing or two about infighting. If X becomes the right wing space and bluesky the left wing one, they can soon point at each other for "look, the other side doesn't even get along" gotchas.
        • somethoughts 2y ago
          I think the difference as I see it is that Twitter/X is oriented around increasing levels of "engagement" and encouraging contributors to focus on going viral in hopes of going even more viral by reaching the "For You" feed. Bluesky seems a bit more like a 140 Characters mashed with Reddit with subtopics/submods of feeds as the focus. Also it seems to highlight the custom feeds feature which you can manage yourself. Twitter/X has such features but for the most part you are nudged away from these to improve "engagement" metrics. That said its highly possible that could change over time based on the long term vision.
• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  bluesky is reselling domains? Not sure that's still the case. Never saw anything about buying a new one when I was going thru the settings to change a handle. That being said, the change handle to domain process is quite slick with very smooth DNS record based transfer done in a minute.
  • jeffgreco 2y ago
    They do. Since July. https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-namecheap https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-namecheap
    • ChrisArchitect 2y ago
      July 2023. Like I said, don't think that's the case anymore. It's not in the process of handle changing. They simply suggest buying your own domain from any registrar now.
• llm_nerd 2y ago
  Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own. A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform. Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation. Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.
  • throwaway48476 2y ago
    I agree but I fear it would be used as an excuse to no longer interact with the public and turn off all reply comments by default.
  • gjsman-1000 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • anonyfox 2y ago
      Not to disagree with your post, but I'd *love* to support a renaissance of RSS. It was/is essentially peak distribution of content in a proper decentralized manner, putting users first and letting providers use whatever they want freely to generate it. No walled gardens. No restrictions.
      • PaulHoule 2y ago
        And no good tools. RSS readers in 2024 still keep failing with the same failing interfaces that failed in 1999. No, I don't want a portal with a little box for every feed I follow. No, I don't want a listing like an email client. No, I never want it to show me a piece of content twice unless I ask for it. (e.g. as David Byrne says: "say something once, why say it again?") Yes, I expect to subscribe to more RSS feeds than I can read entirely so I expect it to learn my preferences like my YOShInOn agent does. In a cycle of a few days, YOShInOn might find 3000 or so articles in RSS feeds and it chooses 300 to show me which I thumbs up or thumbs down. I knew such a thing was possible when I wrote this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/ but now it is not only possible but easy.
• dayvid 2y ago
  Twitter was a really good mix of viewpoints and people, but it’s people so toxically politicized and right wing that a lot of the interesting accounts have left. It’s a weird thing that could’ve only existed because they weren’t focused on profit.
• mhh__ 2y ago
  The only people I've seen moving to bluesky so far in this latest batch have basically been smug lefty types and lawyers. They're free to do as they please but these are not the early adopters that make a culture good.
  • gjsman-1000 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • palata 2y ago
      Care to check how much time blue collars spend swiping on their phones? On those few daily hours, what makes you think they don't have time to argue online?
    • astrange 2y ago
      There's plenty of right wing posters on Twitter now. They get boosted even. The reason they weren't visible prior to boosting is that they only communicate in death threats, misspelled slurs and the laughing emoji. (Far-leftists esp. tankies also communicate mainly in death threats, but in a much more literary way where they accuse you of misreading a theorist from 1840 first.)
      • briandear 2y ago
        You don’t think the left misspells slurs, communicates in death threats too? That’s not a left right thing, that’s a crazy-normal thing.
        • astrange 2y ago
          There are not leftists trying and failing to call you homosexual, no. They'd call you a member of another obscure political group you've never heard of, or find a way to misinterpret your post in a complicated way to make you look pro-genocide. This is called "education polarization".
    • zemo 2y ago
• nerdjon 2y ago
  Maybe this will finally be the time but every time there has been a “migration” it feels like Twitter still holds onto enough of a stronghold that most people don’t move over so you make the move but you end up back on twitter. Particularly if you are using it as a tool to advertise your company, channel, stream, etc. I would love for this to not be true this time. But I am not holding my breath.
  • cassepipe 2y ago
    I think the last wave was towards Mastodon but most migrants returned because it was too unfamiliar. On the contrary Bluesky seems to be Twitter but without the enshittification . I can see a future for that. The open protocol/network story being a probably small bonus.
• tmvphil 2y ago
  One thing I like about bluesky is it allows you to watch embedded videos from external media sources (e.g. youtube) without leaving the app. Seems like twitter/X was clearly opposed to the loss of control this entailed.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    And it doesn't penalize links off the site.
• jazzyjackson 2y ago
  I don't understand this critique: > I’ll also add that the reason I’m a big fan of a ActivityPub solution like Mastodon is that it’s quite inexpensive to run your own complete stack unless you’re extremely famous. Hosting a Mastodon instance is a one-step process, and you then control everything. To get the same experience with atproto, you’ll need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, and even then you still don’t control everything as of today. When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison. I'm quite interested to find whether there will be niche relays that only index posts from certain pds (or provide a kind of community-chat discord competitor by being one server that hosts the PDSs of the community, and also provides the relay and appview for that community)
  • GavinAnderegg 2y ago
    If you want to run your own social platform, you can do so by running your own Mastodon instance. If you want to do the same with Bluesky, you simply can't at the moment. You'll either need to rely on other parts of the system that you don't control, or you'll need to control the whole system at great expense.
    • jazzyjackson 2y ago
      Aha, agreed that they are not offering anything for the use case of standalone communities. I wish they would, and I think the architecture is there for it, it's just that no one has used a relay in that way yet. I /might/ take it up myself in the next year or two, really I just want phpbb to have a second renassiance - special interest, user moderated forums like reddit but each community able to fork off to their own infrastructure if there's some schism re: moderation or otherwise.
    • programd 2y ago
      You can run your own instance: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds It's a weird install with a hybrid of Docker and systemd, but basically you run a script on a low-end Ubuntu VM and point your DNS at it and you're done. Far less resource intensive then Mastodon. I wish they released an official k8s Helm chart or something, but it's not too hard to roll your own deployment.
• sherburt3 2y ago
  Did everyone in tech run out of new ideas in 2013 or something? There’s something so depressing about the hot new app of 2024 being a Twitter clone.
  • queuebert 2y ago
    And Twitter is just a spiritual clone of .plan
    • beeflet 2y ago
      whats .plan?
  • declan_roberts 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • sherburt3 2y ago
      I didn’t
  • doublerabbit 2y ago
    Anything web platform has never been a new idea. Only evolutions from web technologies becoming more advanced. Facebook is MySpace, Tumblr is live journal, reddit are forums and Discord is Skype. It's all been done. Why create the new when you could recreate the old? But yes; I to crave something new. Can you think of anything new?
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      New, on a web platform? The "ideal" of Mastodon was the first thing I regarded as new. This idea to properly own your communities and conversations and move them around and connect/remove others as you would an email address was novel. In reality, it's nowhere near that ideal. But I still want to see if anyone over the years could make it work. ---- Much less realistically (somehow), I'm still waiting for that moment where we run a full on AAA game in the native browser. I think the tech is now at the point where it exists and is possible. Just not the incentives. But IDK if that's the "new" you were talking about.
• tonfreed 2y ago
  I'll never create a bluesky account because the people who use it ultimately think it's some sort of genius political point to rag on X. Went to GopherconAU last week and one of the organizers very proudly announced that you should "skeet" with their hashtag like the word didn't have another completely inappropriate connotation. I really can't take this sort of internet circlejerk seriously when I have a mortgage to pay and a family to look after.
• quectophoton 2y ago
  Bluesky looks promising. In my bubble it seems like a lot of artists have been moving to it after some Xitter fiasco with AI training or whatnot (idk, I don't keep up with those news). But, this: > Radically open > I think some might be surprised to learn how open Bluesky is. It’s trivially easy to grab an export of any user’s data. It’s also a core assumption of the service that all the data (aside from out-of-protocol stuff like DMs) is completely open. I'm still skeptical of Bluesky having "won" until the average user is completely aware of things like this. I fully expect that there will be some drama about this openness at some point in the future. When this happens, we'll see if people go back to Twitter again (how many times has it been already?); or if they embrace this new social network where your art and posts can be scraped waaaaaay more easily than in Twitter, so they're probably more likely to be used for AI training anyway. Until conversations about these topics happen between non-tech users, I'm mostly just watching how the situation evolves.
  • KaiserPro 2y ago
    Saying bluesky has won seems a bit pre-emptive, especially as its less than 2% the size of threads.
    • Nemo_bis 2y ago
      Yes. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/bluesky-threads-x/ https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/b... stands though there were a few more waves since (starting with the Brazil situation): https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
  • Freedom2 2y ago
    The average user (non-tech oriented) doesn't really think about or care that much about openness. This is the kind of user who posts disclaimers on their Facebook wall saying that Facebook is not allowed to use their content.
  • ks2048 2y ago
    Bluesky released a statement today about data use [0] - saying they will not use your data for "Generative AI" (surely in response to X's recent change to say they will). As you imply, this is a bit meaningless for people who don't want their posts used for AI, because anyone can grab all data pretty easily (at least for now). But, AI aside, this is so much better for a lively ecosystem - 3rd party apps, bots (the fun and useful kind), research, etc. A lots of things simply died when Musk decided effectively end the API program [1]. [0] https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3layuzbti6s2x https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3layuzbti6s2x [1] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-nearly-everyone/ https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-near... == https://archive.ph/ikPOk https://archive.ph/ikPOk
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon. Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters. A common kind of profile on that kind of platform is: "There are good people and bad people and I'm one of the good people" It is very easy to other people and share memes that build group cohesion while driving other people away. Really making progress requires in politics a lot of "I agree with you about 90% but there is 10% that I don't" or "Well, I negotiated something in the backroom that you'd really hate but headed off a situation you would have thought was catastrophic but you won't appreciate that I did it so you and I are both better off if I don't tell you" and other sorts of nuance, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, etc. To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read) I have to have about 20 or so block rules. I see some people with the same kind of profiles on Bluesky but see a lot less othering in my feed because the "Discover" feed on Bluesky filters out a lot of angry content. My rough estimate is that it removes about 75% of the divisive political junk. That (1) Immediately improves my feed, but also (2) Reduces the amount of re-posted angry political content (it's like adding some boron to the coolant in a nuclear reactor) and (3) Since angry political memes don't work anymore people find a different game to play My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable. Those who go are less agreeable than those who stay. On the other hand, a certain amount of suppression of negativity could stop it from spreading and might not even be noticed as "censorship".
  • mandmandam 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • parl_match 2y ago
      See, your post is exactly what OP is talking about.
      • philosopher1234 2y ago
• bsimpson 2y ago
  Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism. In theory, I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn. I haven't had a portfolio in years, because I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it. Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists. (And plenty of precious content that ended up on other services, like Qik, no longer does.) If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low. The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.
  • FactKnower69 2y ago
    >If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low. Good! Higher barrier to entry is exactly why Neocities, Mastodon and [redacted] are so much higher quality than the NPC internet. We need a couple hurdles to keep out the low effort posters.
    • doawoo 2y ago
      Last time I checked that’s called gatekeeping. Neocities is a ton easier to try for “non-engineers”- it even has a discovery feed and a WYSIWYG editor…
      • fragmede 2y ago
        Yeah but is it good gatekeeping or bad gatekeeping? Because having to agree to a code of conduct is a gate, but I don't think we want to remove that one. And anyway, when did gatekeeping pick up such a negative, pejorative tone? The gatekeeper is the one who kept people out of the gate. Some people were kept out for good reasons, others were kept out for bad reasons. Depending on the gate and country politics, nobody or everybody was let in through the gate. That doesn't make gatekeeping inherently bad. Doctors gatekeep who can call themselves a doctor, and while there are broader problems with that, fundamentally, some random fraudster shouldn't be able to call themselves a doctor sell rat poison in a pretty box as cure for cancer. There are some kinds of gatekeeping that are bad, but it's not inherently so.
• rich_sasha 2y ago
  [flagged]
• dang 2y ago
  Recent and related: How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147430 - Nov 2024 (42 comments) 1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144340 - Nov 2024 (109 comments) Ask HN: Bluesky is #1 in the U.S. App Store. Is this a first for open source? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129768 - Nov 2024 (44 comments) Ask HN: Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129171 - Nov 2024 (13 comments) Visualizing 13M Bluesky users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118180 - Nov 2024 (236 comments) Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42112432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42112432 - Nov 2024 (168 comments) How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086596 - Nov 2024 (79 comments) Bluesky Is Not Decentralized - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952994 - Oct 2024 (194 comments) There are lots more...
  • rc00 2y ago
    Is there going to be a plan for this blatant PR campaign and site manipulation? Is this not against HN's terms?
    • consumer451 2y ago
      There is a seismic shift happening, involving millions of users. Also, this is a seemingly great underdog story. First open source app to top the App Store, a tiny scrappy team of protocol nerds takes on the most powerful people in the world... What leads you to believe that people posting about this is not organic? Anecdotally, I have submitted a few stories about Bluesky, and I am paid nothing.
      • bravetraveler 2y ago
        Not the person you're asking, but my answer: VC funding. A bit ironic to say given the website we're on... but the benefits are there for the taking. Also: a decentralized service that isn't, actually, that decentralized. The same reasons I see manipulation, I also see legitimate moves. It's loaded as can be. The iron is extremely hot given Elmo and everything with the election.
• INTPenis 2y ago
  There is nothing to win. Fediverse has always been and will always remain an interesting place for sub-cultures.
• givemeethekeys 2y ago
  A quick look at the Bluesky homepage having never been there before tells me that it's just another Reddit without the r/conservative part.
  • volkk 2y ago
    that's precisely what it is
• fsflover 2y ago
  Beware of enshittification though: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...
• helpfulContrib 2y ago
  When I can engage in conversatons with a wide variety of different viewpoints, without any of those viewpoints being repressed through some censorship mechanism, then I'll agree that the platform has 'won'. But Bluesky is already censoring viewpoints that the collective don't want to see promoted, so its really not much better than X. The issue is, whether or not a collective, reactive crowd, is really the ultimate form of human discourse. I happen to think not, but its sure interesting to see the dynamics of humans flowing from one echo chamber to another ..
• briandear 2y ago
  Bluesky is a left wing echo chamber and most of the world has no idea what it is, nor why should they care. People act like Elon is the devil while using Gmail and googling things. Lol.
• jaredcwhite 2y ago
  I will never, ever use Bluesky. ActivityPub is the present AND future of decentralized social networking on the open web. Bluesky's protocol isn't even a standard and amounts to little more than smoke and mirrors. I'm fine with people backing the wrong horse (again), and I don't have an ounce of FOMO. It's upsetting in a general sense that people will regularly behave in a manner against their own self-interest. But when Bluesky is fully enshittified in a few years and people are wondering what in the hell just happened, the Fediverse will be here waiting to embrace them with open arms.
• MiguelX413 2y ago
  I'm still not gonna use anything besides the Fediverse.
• johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >Currently people can set up their own PDSs, which will host both their identity’s signing keys and their content on Bluesky. Setting this up requires a fair amount of server-level knowledge, but it’s relatively cheap (maybe $15/month USD) and lets people control their own data Man, really? Domains tend to be around that much for a year. I guess it's cheap if you're doing this for marketing purposes, but given that this was marketed towards "developers", I thought there'd be more homespun method to get this up. But aside from that, I don't quite understand the counterargument of Bluesky not being federated/decentralized for custom domains outside of "Bluesky handles DM 's" (to paraphrase). I'm sure most users will more or less choose the centralized approach of Bluesky handling everything, but the fact that you can decentralize off is very valuable (even if it's a different service than ActivityPub) >The whole Twitter mess has taught me not to attach myself too closely with these things anymore. I hung on far too long to Twitter while it made me feel terrible. My goal going forward is to post more to my own site and aggregate to any social channel I currently care about. indeed. Don't put your eggs all in someone else's basket. If you're selling, always try to get people on an email list (the only popular standard of federation as of now) so when that basket is taken that your devout followers can keep in touch. Ideally this decentralization of Bluesky (if you take the time/money to set it up) should let you take most of your ball home, but it may not be as easy to just "move it somewhere else". Mastodon's ideals vs. reality certainly show this.
• eBombzor 2y ago
  Why is this site so unbearably political now? Some of these takes are almost as bad as the stuff you find on the front page of Reddit...
  • kzrdude 2y ago
    It's a hot topic now because of the presidential election?
  • archagon 2y ago
    Because, politically speaking, things are very far from normal right now.
    • ineedaj0b 2y ago
      a return to normal perhaps, majority willed.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    You ever go through the Reddit blackout of 2015 or the API scandal of 2022? It's a common phenomenon. You move to sites and the people who are the most engaged will be talking about the reason they moved and their dissatisfaction. It'll calm down in a month. Maybe. The current atmosphere isn't going away in a month like the API protests.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• chucke1992 2y ago
  I see BlueSky getting some traction regarding some specialized discussions (akin Discord?), but Twitter will continue to be the public space to go.
• tolerance 2y ago
  What I want to know is how did people come to believe that microblogging is a social necessity. How have we allowed for what’s perhaps the most impoverished form of human expression to become a gathering place for ourselves and our institutions.
  • ndarray 2y ago
    It forces the blogger to get to the point. Even most blog posts shared on HN could have been a tweet or two.
    • beeflet 2y ago
      I've got this idea for a toy social media network that costs ~$1 per byte to post. No advertisements. It would be like an experiment in how dense people could make posts. If you wanted to post an animation, you would post a javascript file like dwitter.net Instead of having "upvotes" or "reactions", this function would be the same as replying a single char or two. If multiple people post the same thing (like "" ":)" "L"), it gets collated and boosted as a single message. If you want to flex, you can drop $10,000 to post a 10kiB picture of your dog. Or spend $1000 to write an overly long post. But I imagine long posts would be seen as bougie.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    People don't like reading and pretty much all social media responded to that. At least Twitter was like that from the start.
• rascul 2y ago
  Twitter won because that's where the people I follow are. If/when they move elsewhere, wherever they move to will have won.
• that_guy_iain 2y ago
  I think Bluesky has won the battle to become the replacement for Twitter. A lot of the attempts were all trying some weird gimmick like posting voice notes and stuff. Bluesky has the whole federation stuff without actually having it, which is ok, but for the rest of it. They're clearly just copying features over from Twitter and adding in some of the most requested features for Twitter. This makes me super happy I was on that train early and got the "iain.bsky.social" handle.
• JeremyNT 2y ago
  Bluesky has made a lot of smart choices to both support openness while also retaining the benefits of a monolithic single instance. In reality this makes it easier to use than say Mastodon. So if you take everybody at their word and assume the money doesn't run out, this is sort of the opposite approach to federation. Build out a solid main instance and get federation working "for real" later. But has it won? I guess that remains to be seen. It entirely depends on the users who are willing to move there from x.
  • singpolyma3 2y ago
    The federation is working for real now. People are using it
• camwhite 2y ago
  the article says: "if you want to look up a DID:PLC, you need to query the Bluesky servers. This is important because every user is identified by a DID:PLC, and all interactions need to reference them." which is not strictly true. almost every user is identified by a DID:PLC but DID:WEB is also supported. DID:WEB is not mentioned in the article at all I think this is important because it means that users can opt into being their own source of truth for their "identity" in the ATPROTO system
• EmersonL 2y ago
  I loved Twitter. It was this magic place where I could connect with both friends and legends in my field (programmers). That’s not what it is anymore and it’s impossible to ignore how political it’s become. Bluesky feels like Twitter used to and it’s shockingly refreshing to hear about industry news and friendly updates rather than some “pick-up artist” explaining how women are too privileged these days.
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    The first post when I opened it after reading yours: >The same people who’ve spent the last several years decrying “unqualified DEI hires” are now shoehorning through Cabinet nominations who can’t even pass a basic background test. This is the opposite of what I want in any app I open. It's time we stop chasing engagement for sites and start filtering for content. I want sites that don't promise to be the place to do everything for everyone but one's which I can judge on their censorship to know if I want to join.
    • EmersonL 2y ago
      Bummer, sorry to hear this!
      • llm_trw 2y ago
        It seems like it's complete luck of the draw on what the front page looks like before you sign up. I refreshed once after posting that and it looked amazing enough to come back and post here that it does look great now. Refreshed again and got this at the top: https://bsky.app/profile/rexchapman.bsky.social/post/3lazznsospa2t https://bsky.app/profile/rexchapman.bsky.social/post/3lazzns... here's hoping they stop amplifying the people who made twitter so toxic and make a network that's actually pleasant to be in.
    • archagon 2y ago
      Well, Threads does that[1]. So it seems to mostly be full of menial banter, if that's up your alley. [1]: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-our-approach-to-political-content-on-instagram-and-threads https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-ou...
• GMoromisato 2y ago
  I remember Quora circa 2016 fondly. It had a high number of interesting people writing deep insights into their area of expertise. And then, of course, since they are a venture-backed startup, they tried to grow, and it all went sideways. I think a small, somewhat homogeneous community is very attractive. You get a high ratio of interesting posts and very little toxic behavior. The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. Technology won't solve this problem (because it is not a technology problem). Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community. Maybe the balkanization of social media is the best we can hope for.
  • jltsiren 2y ago
    I think the fundamental issue is running a social network as a for-profit business. Every business model people have tried so far has ruined the platform for the people who originally found it valuable. Online services do scale, which is the root of the problem. It's more profitable to focus on a large number users who get a little value from the platform than on those who find it particularly valuable. No matter whether your revenue comes from ads or subscription fees, you want more users, more impressions, and more activity. Which turns your focus away from whatever the early adopters did when there was only a little activity. Influencers are a convenient red flag. Once they find a platform attractive, it's probably no longer good for activities not centered around them.
    • emseetech 2y ago
      We don't actually want online communities to get too big, from a users' perspective. After a certain size, they become difficult to maintain any sense of responsibility to the established culture, become targets for coordinated manipulation or misuse and end up requiring constant moderation just to be usable. But taking venture capital means you can never restrict growth, even if in the end it kills your service. I'd love to see a Reddit that caps its communities to a thousands or even hundreds. Once that cap is hit, either form a new community or join a waiting list. But it's clear that a hundred passionate users often produces a much better discussion than millions.
• Funes- 2y ago
  The author seems to imply that "winning" here correlates with a measure of posting frequency: >If Bluesky comes out as a “winner” and more posting happens there, I think I’m generally fine with that. At least for now. If that's what the match between microblogging services is about, I wager Bluesky has no chance whatsoever to come out the winner. It sounds like wishful thinking to me. Mere delusion.
• leoc 2y ago
  Relevant information about the links between the AT Protocol and IPFS: https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3l7vjsvufwc2g https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3l7vjsvufwc2g .
• racl101 2y ago
  I'd never heard of this Bluesky until this post election reaction. I'd heard of Mastodon but not Bluesky.
• nikolay 2y ago
  Or more like... Ruby has lost!
• asdfman123 2y ago
  I loved Twitter so much but now I find it literally unbearable. It's not the politics, everyone is aggressively mean and it's just too much. Bluesky is a breath of fresh air.
• g8oz 2y ago
  I encourage people to give Mastodon a fair go. Don't be scared off by the negative stories. It can definitely be a positive experience.
• spike021 2y ago
  As with a lot of things these days, the places you congregate are what you make of it. Putting aside the issues with who owns twitter and some of their recent policy shifts about content, I still have relatively sanitized feeds where I mostly only see friends' content. I'm still making new friends from Japan on it through our shared hobbies. Most of the sports news I follow is still there. Nothing materially has changed about how I use the platform. Bluesky is still pretty empty. Maybe some "nodes" of it are getting busier as people trickle out of twitter but I'm not sure it matters much until theres more saturation of many more things.
• dmead 2y ago
  Can someone explain why Twitter was good? I have an account and I posted like twice. The UI is weird, takes the entire screen to show a thread and it's difficult to follow a conversation. I get the sense that it's just for trying to be witty. The replies are hard to follow for a reason. They aren't the point. It's really a series of unrelated posts you have to keep reading to follow any kind of "zeitgeist". It's like they thought of a good user interface for conversations and did the opposite of that.
• czhu12 2y ago
  As a counter point to the comments that say blue sky doesn’t have as much political content. I just opened the app for maybe the third time and did a cursory sample and 11/20 were political, 4/20 we’re about how bluesky has no political content, and maybe 5 were totally unpolitical. A few screens grabs for proof: https://imgur.com/a/ra8P81G https://imgur.com/a/ra8P81G Please for the love of god someone make a social network that has okay discovery features without political content. I follow 3 people who post about ML papers. Not sure why blue sky shows me posts from Don Lemon and someone called @CallToActivism
• tiffanyh 2y ago
  For all the talk about Bluesky adoption and use here on HN, I don’t think I’ve seen a single Bluesky thread posted here on HN. Very odd.
• deleted 2y ago
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• paulvnickerson 2y ago
  Can somebody please explain to me why anybody would want to leave X for Bluesky other than the fact that Elon Musk undid the previous regime's censorship efforts (which almost always targeted a particular political viewpoint) and himself makes pro-Trump posts? This recent "mass exodus" seems more like people just upset at the outcome of the US election.
  • beanjuiceII 2y ago
    no good reason to leave X, just people acting out (current thing ppl)...and they have to either keep reminding us, or keep coming back trying to get ppl to follow them...unsuccessfully no one really cares. also advertisers like Disney,IBM, comcast, warner bros, discovery, lions gate etc are all coming back to advertising on X now
• ryyr 2y ago
  if U want Out , youneed to Quit cold turkey , replacing it does Nothing at all inthe end
• bastloing 2y ago
  X is paying lots now to content creators. And it seems their advertisers are coming back. Strange how that works.
  • johneth 2y ago
    > X is paying lots now to content creators Sure, but most of that seems to be to engagement farmers who provide little to no value to actual humans. > And it seems their advertisers are coming back. Anything to back up this claim?
    • bastloing 2y ago
      https://www.adweek.com/media/advertisers-returning-to-x/ https://www.adweek.com/media/advertisers-returning-to-x/ Comcast, Disney, and IBM Are Among Advertisers Returning to X After Ad Freeze
• andreygrehov 2y ago
  This is the third Bluesky submission in the past week or so. My previous comments were heavily downvoted, so I don’t expect it will be any different this time. Many people are comparing X and Bluesky, but I think this is a mistake. The two platforms shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence. These are two drastically different platforms. X is a real-time news app, currently holding the #1 spot in the News category on the App Store (e.g., The New York Times is #8). Bluesky, on the other hand, is a social network and the #1 app in the Social Networking category. These are fundamentally different categories, so let’s stop treating them as rivals - they’re solving different problems for different audiences.
  • hollerith 2y ago
    Which app store? Is X also in the Social Networking category and Bluesky also in the News category? If not, why do you assume that which category some intern put the apps in has any evidentiary weight in or relevance to today's conversation?
    • andreygrehov 2y ago
      > Which app store? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple) > Is X also in the Social Networking category and Bluesky also in the News category? No. Each application is in their own category. > If not, why do you assume that which category some intern put the apps in has any evidentiary weight in or relevance to today's conversation? I did not assume anything. I use X as a news app, the CEO of X has stated it's a news app, and its category in the iOS App Store is News. There are no assumptions here.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    It doesn't matter how much Musk pays, trying to sell to to the social concious that twitter is a "news app" is a fool's errand. That said, I do agree that Twitter is a horrible social networking platform. Not even in a snarky way. - I could never follow conversations on whatever the hell response system it sets up. - It's focused on short form comments but tons of people use it as a blogging platform (including its new owner). - The algorithms and filtering are just horrid. It is so bizarre how I can be logged off and not even see user feeds in any meaningful order (ignoring that it filters out NSFW stuff). - They recently made worse with blocking changes. a social networking tool with bad user filering is failing its most basic task. meanwhile they also recently decided to privatized what people liked, so it's all sorts of backwards in its design. But despite all that, Bluesky as a "social network" platform solves #3. For now. Wonderful,I can see tweets in reverse chronological order without being logged in (and for now, the curation is... fine). But people still want imageboards with small character limits so I'll just continue to yell at a (literal, not digital) cloud.
• danieltanfh95 2y ago
  Most of the Vitriole is still contained in twitter/x, bluesky will soon have the same problem and I expect it to be worse/require more active user maintenance due to the decentralised aspect of trying to moderate speech. Bluesky should actively increase the difficulty of onboarding people onto the platform to weed out or reduce the population. Vitriole need a critical mass before it overtakes the entire discussion.
  • verdverm 2y ago
    Bluesky has pluggable moderation and users can subscribe to multiple labellers. What they offer with ATProto is competition in moderation, which is not something we've had in a social media app before https://github.com/bluesky-social/ozone/ https://github.com/bluesky-social/ozone/
• zoom6628 2y ago
  I agree with authors take of writing on your own blog and then posting to network(s) for engagement. If your crowd moves its social platform then you move too. Platform independence and you choose what to "push" just like you choose what to share during IRL conversations. Platforms that own the data are farming the users. FWIW I just exited from twitter - no value.
• est 2y ago
  My only problem with ActivityPub or atproto is that they were not static hostable. For readonly nodes they should be. Otherwise we could see tons of adoptions by bloggers, with some simple Github/Cloudflare Pages setup.
  • Nemo_bis 2y ago
    You can already have an ActivityPub server with your static website generator, there are a few examples (one is based on Hugo). https://maho.dev/2024/02/a-guide-to-implementing-activitypub-in-a-static-site-or-any-website-part-4/ https://maho.dev/2024/02/a-guide-to-implementing-activitypub... https://fedipage.com/ https://fedipage.com/ Obviously they don't implement every part of the protocol nor every feature Mastodon has.
• Uptrenda 2y ago
  Imagine putting all that effort into 'decentralization' and then building literally, the most Orwellian, cucked version of the Internet possible. See the thing with free speech is that a lot of views that might be concerned 'offensive' are in fact defined by society at that point in time. It was once considered offensive to state basic facts about astronomy to the church. It's been that way throughout history that one person's 'offensive' is another's truth. Sometimes objective truth. But usually always an ever-changing target. Now lets say for the sake of argument that a person's speech is just trolling hateful shit. Contributing literally nothing. I argue that quite often you even want to allow this kind of speech because when almost always when you have 'content moderation' it becomes over-moderation. It's a 'slippery slope' where people are unable to keep their own biases out of moderation. Which brings me back to Bluesky. A deranged, leftist hellscape, designed to enforce the largest possible book of unwritten woke social regulations across the site. Literally stacking the deck against Wrong Think. Or an orwellian nightmare. This is what happens to the internet when you let fucktards moderate it. Edit: ty for the downvote soyboy. On downvote sites like this if someone doesn't like your post they downvote it and it becomes a popularity competition even if you're right (which is what you're signalling is a good idea btw.) Bluesky is exactly the same. As is reddit. As is every top 100 website at the moment.
• ineedaj0b 2y ago
  Twitter/X is great. I like it quite a lot. Follow people you like and keep that number under 100. Or if you just started, under 25 and add people slowly. Unfollow people quickly if they annoy you! Or mute them if you still like them but they annoy you temporarily. There's two feeds: for you (the algo) and following. following is the traditional only people you know feed. If you're having trouble with the people on X you might need to reconsider yourself. Why are you not open to many viewpoints? Diversity of thought and people should be welcome and if you hope to change minds, you do need to be able to interact with those people to do so. I did theater when I was younger, and I think a lot of my 'open' friends weren't open per-say they were just weird and like being in the weird group more than being truly open.
  • EasyMark 2y ago
    I can handle other view points, what I won't put up with is disinformation, straight up lies, and racism/sexism. They immediately go in the bin. Unfortunately that's simply not possible in the firehose feed on X since the trash is promoted to the top and I would guess that 90% of blue checks are bots either from American PACs or Russian/CCP/Iran/N. Korea.
    • Fomite 2y ago
      This. I used to have two very ruthlessly curated accounts, and at the moment, trying to keep them like that is a lost cause.
    • z3ncyberpunk 2y ago
      Well then don't get on Bluesky either, which is teeming with disinformation, straight up lies, and racism/sexism.
  • Herbstluft 2y ago
    Not too long ago I would have agreed with you. That was, for a long time a decent way to enjoy Twitter, even when people were already long claiming it was an unpleasant place. But for the current situation you are just misrepresenting the problem. Aggressively maintaining a decent follow list no longer helps. And "other viewpoints" are not the problem. Every somewhat popular tweet has automated replies full of porn bots and clearly automated answers that say basically nothing or just try to provoke or advertise. "Following" has become infuriatingly useless too because it algorithmically sorts in nonsensical ways. The result: many tweets I would have liked to see get completely buried while others get shown to me over and over as I visit the site. I'm so incredibly tired of algorithmic timelines. It used to be a good tool on interesting updates on hobbies I enjoy. Now it just wants to waste my time, and I'm just not interested in screaming matches about daily politics. That includes echo chambers too so it is not about differing opinions even, I don't need people from "my side" telling me again and again what the "enemy" is doing wrong and how I am supposed get angry at that.
• shoulderfake 2y ago
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• pjbster 2y ago
  Mmm. Bluesky is the tits, for sure, but Trump has unfinished business. This is from 2020: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/trump-and-section-230-what-know https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/trump-and-section-230-what-know We can assume that Twitter was a vocal opponent to the repeal at the time and that they have now become somewhat more in favour if it means knocking out their competition whilst they enjoy special protection. All it would take is some catalytic content to kick things off and a compliant state judiciary to get the ball rolling. Bluesky's Terms Of Service explicitly state that they are not liable for the impacts of their user's content. They say they reserve the right to delete content or accounts at any time at their discretion. And then there's this: Indemnity: Summary: If someone brings a legal claim against us based on your actions on Bluesky Social, you are responsible for our defense in, and the consequences of, that claim. It all looks bulletproof on the surface but I just don't know if it will survive under Trump/Musk.
• cristaloleg 2y ago
  Shameless plug: shorter profile links https://blskyl.ink/ https://blskyl.ink/
• sebazzz 2y ago
  I still don’t understand why jack (founder) is also investor in Elons X. I wonder what the endgame is there.
• bardan 2y ago
  It seems very cozy, although filled with people pushing their commercial projects. If people are projecting Bluesky's future on its current cozy state they are fools. The only way to remain cozy is to remain small.
• waihtis 2y ago
  If by "won" you mean the reality-dissociated left have found a new echo chamber then yes. If you are a normal person and made the right conclusion that Trump / Elon are byproducts of forcefed radical leftist policies you'd be better to steer clear from this platform. X is lightweight compared to what Bluesky is about to become.
• portaouflop 2y ago
  Zero interest to invest in another proprietary walled garden social media site. I’ll just put stuff on my personal website.
• mgaunard 2y ago
  I never understood why Twitter ever was a thing.
  • defrost 2y ago
    You might ask the same of Harlem, Jazz, and the Cotton Club: https://press.hulu.com/shows/black-twitter-a-peoples-history/ https://press.hulu.com/shows/black-twitter-a-peoples-history...
• jeswin 2y ago
  Bluesky's biggest asset is the technical leadership team. Using Paul Frazee's (and Daniel Holmgren's - though I never actively used IPFS) work is like living in the far out future. Is it still too early? Time will tell.
• d_theorist 2y ago
  As far as I can tell, the main reason people give for moving off X is that “there’s more hate speech/misinformation/disinformation since Elon took over because he got rid of a lot of trust and safety controls” So, how does moving to a platform with the explicit aim of being decentralised solve this? Even Elon Twitter has more oversight than a decentralised platform with zero control.
• pornel 2y ago
  I'm concerned that Bluesky has taken money from VCs, including Blockchain Capital. The site is still in the honeymoon phase, but they will have to pay 10x of that money back. This is Twitter all over again, including risk of a hostile takeover. I don't think they're stupid enough to just let the allegedly-decentralized protocol to take away their control when billions are at stake. They will keep users captive if they have to.
  • majgr 2y ago
    EU should simply buy it.
• TheAdamist 2y ago
  Nope. But i wish them well. If i read some interesting article that turns out to just be a reblogging of an interesting post on a service, the original embedded article is inevitably from xitter, which if i want to read more generally i can't. Either technical or personal issues usually prevent me from being able to read the original source and additional related tweets.
• nopelynopington 2y ago
  If November taught us anything it's that instead of looking for an x alternative and creating increasingly silo'd echo chambers on the internet, we should instead be trying to disconnect ourselves from social media. The golden age of social is over and it's just a horror show now. Look what it did.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• gethoht 2y ago
  Bluesky definitely has a "this is what twitter used to be vibe" but it's so much more than that. With follow lists and block lists it's really easy to get up to speed and curate your feed. It's also very noticeably less algorithm driven.
• Slava_Propanei 2y ago
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• silexia 2y ago
  Unpopular opinion: X is the best social network now because of Community Notes that tell you after the fact if a post you liked was misinformation and often warns you in real time as well. You can also have long form posts on there now. Reali life breaking news is there first.
• coriconni2019 2y ago
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