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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 o

• 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.
        • an_guy 2y ago
          Bluesky would be way worse than that in terms of engagement once their VC money runs out. Since it would be in their interest to promote more rage baits and echo chamber posts.
    • phatskat 2y ago
      This is what we see in fascism and authoritarianism - the goal is to always make the circle smaller. You start with immutable traits (race, gender, hair color, etc) to chunk out a large part of the population, but once they’re gone, that small circle needs to get smaller. There’s Always a Bigger Fish[1] [1] https://youtu.be/agzNANfNlTs https://youtu.be/agzNANfNlTs
• phillipcarter 2y ago
  > It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture My belief is that there's some very real reasons for that! First, incendiary posts seem to get boosted by the algorithm. It's good for engagement, which keeps people online and hooked, which feeds more ads, and is good for the business. Elon and his CEO of the company know this. Second, the more you look at the replies, the more you find people who are weirdly into Elon Musk. They'll bring him up even in a thread where he's not mentioned and the topic isn't about him. "Thank god Elon saved free speech!" or something rather. Just profoundly weird stuff that I can't help but feel is designed to stroke his ego. Again, I believe the algorithm is intentionally boosting these things. It also serves to create a cult of personality. He's not just the site owner, but he's its "savior". Lastly, the company is clearly in trouble financially. Revenue is down substantially by all accounts, and there's a very high valuation to live up to. They want to get people to pay money, look at ads, and keep them coming back again and again for more. Being community-first and focused on people having the kind of good time they want in their communities just doesn't align with those very difficult business constraints.
• timmg 2y ago
  > 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. Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs." I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.
  • enumjorge 2y ago
    > Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs." The issue with Twitter and a lot of social media is that you don't often encounter opposing views that are nuanced, thoughtful and constructive, but rather hot takes, rants and memes. Even when those share your same worldview they can be tiring, but when they don't, they can drain your mental energy quickly. Perhaps people do want to live in their own bubble, but I wouldn't say we can judge that based on Twitter just because of how toxic it can be.
    • rainsford 2y ago
      I found Twitter to be much better on that front pre-Elon, but the changes he introduced have really incentivized and highlighted the hot takes, rants, and memes. Twitter used to be the kind of place where I could see an interesting comment and then look at the replies to see more interesting comments and maybe a new person to follow. In post-Elon Twitter, replies are inevitably a complete cesspool of boosted blue checks farming engagement or bots. It certainly wasn't perfect before, but it's absolutely become more toxic since Elon purchased it.
  • matsemann 2y ago
    It's not that I want an echo chamber of my own beliefs. Twitter has been plenty challenging for years without an issue. I just want to post and interact with people without getting bombarded with wishes about my death for posting that I biked to work. There is no discourse there anymore, only loads of hate. Painting people that leave as people that enjoy echo chambers is just dishonest.
• _tom_ 2y ago
  It's still an empty place. I just moved over, and I could find NO ONE with my interests (a common hobby). There are / were thousands of people in this group on twitter. I doubt it's even one percent of even what's left on X.
  • Uvix 2y ago
    Bluesky waited too long to open up. They'd have seen a lot more takeup if they'd been available when Twitter started going downhill post-Musk. But they made a lot of their potential userbase write them off, which is going to stunt any possibility of growth.
    • KerrAvon 2y ago
      Neither they nor Masto were ready for the scale at the time. Mastodon had a lot of difficulty -- servers were slow and broken for a while. BlueSky was also not a practical Twitter replacement for a lot of people until a few weeks (!) ago when they finally added video support. Also, have you not seen the latest user growth stats on BlueSky? Apparently it took the total destruction of the United States postwar consensus to achieve people finally abandoning Twitter en masse, but hey, it's happening in the past week or so.
      • Uvix 2y ago
        No, I haven't. That's disappointing. I would have hoped people would have taken BlueSky at their word when they were told they weren't wanted.
        • crazygringo 2y ago
          > I would have hoped people would have taken BlueSky at their word when they were told they weren't wanted. That's an unusual way of viewing it. When you're waitlisted for an app that has limited capacity, you take it as not being "wanted"? Of course they want you! They're just building capacity so that you can have a good experience once they're ready to send you the invite. Don't worry -- you are wanted!
• lupire 2y ago
  Duocultures, not monoculture. Every shard speaks Common Tongue, the inoffensive moderate conversation that is acceptable everywhere. Each shard also has its own local flavor, with local axioms and heresies.
• gorwell 2y ago
  Bluesky is the blue version of Gab. You'll find that it's an ideological echo chamber and gets uninteresting fast. The difference is that this version of Twitter isn't censoring and banning people for wrongthink. The people leaving are self selecting out of the idea gene pool, as opposed to being forced out. Naval wrote it well, "Rigid ideologues move but the persuadable center does not. So they just move into irrelevance."
• nojvek 2y ago
  Twitter is Elon’s megaphone. His tweets are mega boosted. And the ads. Sooooo many scammy ads.