8 ms·

Bluesky just crossed 20M users

87 points by Philpax 2y ago

fsflover 2y ago
Beware of the enshittification though, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42182271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42182271
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I'm worried and I'm not. The natural cycle of communication apps is that people use them for a while and then the vendor stops maintaining and people keep using them for a while until something new comes along and then it is too late for the old app. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market If you were born in 2000 you might be excused for realizing that somebody born in the 1970s may have used Compuserve The Source Unafilliated BBSes Fidonet Various chat applications for UNIX and VMS USENET IRC CuSeeMe ICQ AOL Instant Messenger MSN Instant Messenger Facebook Instant Messenger 10+ off-brand MSFT chat applications (When you have so many even Skype and Teams are off brands!) PalTalk Tivejo (fork of the above with a user registration system that I wrote) Go2Meeting and many other "chat" application. In the last few years Facebook and other big tech companies have been unusually good at slamming the door to competition and perhaps we've seen an influx in "normies" who haven't lived through a normal cycle and who believe it is possible or desirable you're going to stay loyal to a chat application the same way your dad stayed loyal to Old Spice. It has nothing to do with proprietary vs open source, as open source products (say GNOME) are frequently run by people who couldn't care what the users think. It's got less to do with the profit motive than it has to do with penny pinching, in fact non-profits burn out before for-profits because at lest the for-profits have a motivation structure for people to improve things and non-profits by definition do not. It's a fair assumption that Bluesky is going to suck in 10 years just as none of the things above had more than 10 years. Bluesky is going to spend a dollar on me and all the other (roughly) 15 M users they have now and there's no reason you shouldn't enjoy it now any more than you should let awareness of your mortality spoil all the joys you could be having right now. It's an interesting question to what extent an "open" platform can resist this. I like the system of POTS and text messaging which is highly interoperable between carriers but has proven to be co-optable by the likes of Facetime. In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. Email is a nominally open protocol but Gmail's dominance makes it not so if you care about getting your mail delivered.
  - MattJ100 2y ago
    > In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. This is an often-repeated myth. I have a lot of experience with XMPP, and I can tell you that many of today's clients are unrecognisable compared to equivalents 20 years ago. Then IRCv3 is a thing in multiple IRC clients and networks. RSS, well, I'm not sure how much evolution is needed there anyhow. By longevity, the most successful networks have all been open ones. The proprietary ones come and go.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      What I have seen with XMPP is major uptake with law enforcement and military. Lots of custom systems there. RSS is a great protocol to talk about, it's not such a great protocol to use. Right now my RSS reader subscribes to about 110 feeds for 10 cents a month per feed through Feedburner which does all the crawling for me and just hits a websocket when a new article comes in which posts it to SQS. When I want to add new articles to my database I just suck 'em out. It's a bargain for feeds like MDPI and arXiv and the Guardian that have many articles per day but I could not afford to subscribe to the 2000+ indie blogs that I'd like to subscribe to and that YOShInOn could easily find articles I find interesting in. I could write my own RSS crawler and probably will at some point but it is a hassle. I can crawl frequently and make my home internet unusable or I can crawl infrequently and have stale results. Worse yet if a feed changes rapidly I might even miss updates completely. I can define some loss function that lets me find an optional combination of "doesn't poll too fast" and "isn't too stale" for each feed individually but I expect to experience both the consequences of underpolling and overpolling unless I make a definite decision that I am going to underpoll or overpoll by a few order of magnitude. There was so much fighting between RSS and ATOM in terms of the exact syntax of the records but none about the problem of polling and polling and polling and polling. Confront Dave Winer with ActivityPub or AT protocol and it is like you are showing somebody a car and they don't want to hear about the engine and the brakes and all that they just want to know where to hitch the horse.
  - fsflover 2y ago
    You forgot to include email in your list, which is well and alive. Incidentally, it's distributed and open, too.
xyst 2y ago
How many are bots vs real people though
- faefox 2y ago
  This is an article about Bluesky, not X.
- grugagag 2y ago
  Same question applies to all social media. Facebook and X are ridden with them. Youtube as well. I think they are everywhere. I try to stay away as much as I can, I do check the pulse from time to time and seems like there is more and more bot activity.
- criddell 2y ago
  When you look at all the accounts you follow on Bluesky, can you tell which are "real" and which are bots? If not, does it matter?
- jeffwask 2y ago
  Anecdotally, not enough to matter this is a legit phenomenon not an artificial event. Been on BlueSky about a year and in the last month about half of the big accounts I used to follow on Twitter have started showing up in my BlueSky feed. The tech and infosec feeds are starting to be as valuable as pre-Elon Twitter for staying on top of what is happening in the industry or just really interesting and insightful tech discussions. To me this was the biggest loss in leaving Twitter and it feels like a new spring right now. Social networks are about the people and some of Twitters biggest draws for me have left for BlueSky. In the last month the vibrancy and activity in the community feels like it's jumped a to a whole new level. I think the real question is if they can sustain it.
  - taylodl 2y ago
    I left Twitter in 2015 due to inconsistent application of their policies and it becoming a morass of politics and no longer the technical goodness. Is Bluesky like the 2014 Twitter? If so, that would be awesome!
consumer451 2y ago
I wonder what kind of money is being thrown at them right now, or in the near future. Am I way off thinking that there would be?
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  This has been heavily covered https://www.finsmes.com/2024/10/bluesky-raises-15m-in-series-a-funding.html https://www.finsmes.com/2024/10/bluesky-raises-15m-in-series...
  - Diti 2y ago
    Also, Bluesky themselves make some income from their relationship with Namecheap: https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-namecheap https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-namecheap
    - ChrisArchitect 2y ago
      This is not the case any more. None of that exists in the handle creation/change process and they just recommend any registrar in the docs.
      - consumer451 2y ago
        Interesting, I hadn't noticed the Namecheap change. I know their monetization play going forwards is something like Discord Nitro. Pay for extra features.
      - pfraze 2y ago
        It is the case, it's just off site and not promoted anywhere
  - consumer451 2y ago
    Sorry, I should have been more clear. I am aware of their fundraising so far, but that was prior to what feels like their most important growth rate/wave. Does the last week change anything with regard to financial pressure, like potential buyout suitors? I mean Zuck noticed, and is making changes to Threads…
J05ephu5M13r 2y ago
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dewey 2y ago
One of the best features of Bluesky is that it just looks like Twitter. Much easier to explain to people that it's just Twitter with a different name. Over the weekend a lot of journalists in my country (Austria) moved over to Bluesky (Including one with > 600k followers) and with the "starter packs" on Bluesky (Curated list of people you can follow with one click) it was possible to adopt it very quickly and have an active and useful feed without a long onboarding time to make it your own.
- bloopernova 2y ago
  And blocks/ignores work the way you expect. Apparently there are shared block lists too, but I haven't tried those yet.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    How are blocks supposed (and not supposed) to work? My impression was that blocks on Bluesky seem like a great way to censor dissent and criticism which only seems to fuel echo chambers. Blocking someone not only stops them from interacting with you in the future but also seems to hide their criticism from public view.
sbarre 2y ago
For anyone who loved Tweetdeck, there is Deck.blue: https://deck.blue/ https://deck.blue/
- dandellion 2y ago
  App password seems like a pretty bad idea that could easily confuse users and lead them to having their credentials stolen.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    These days, OAuth is supported as well, but deck.blue was built before that existed. The maintainer posted last week that he'll be adding it soon.
justaman 2y ago
It seems that bluesky will be the political left's version of twitter going forward. The same way truth social became a right-wing echo chamber from its inception. I see the world(the US in particular) drawing lines and further devolving online discourse in a time where what we need most is mutual understanding and respect.
- tokinonagare 2y ago
  The elevator pitch for this service is indeed "X for leftists". This is why journalists are flocking to it, and speaking about it, despite it being totally irrelevant, just like X is.
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    I'd put it more like X but with open data, open APIs, and the ability to control your feed & collaboratively improve your experience with 3rd party feeds, moderations, and algorithms. The left thing seems incredibly incidental. This feels like the first time the social networks are offering any serious tools for protection & shielding ourselves from wild content & algorithms, giving us the power to define our social network experience. The right could benefit just as much, build their own good experience. It would need to be built around something other than in your face razzing on people on the left though!
- 3adawi 2y ago
  I don't think think is entirely true, truth social was just MAGA echo-chamber, Bluesky has a much wider net - i see a lot of academia, tech, artists, environmentalists, a lot of small communities there - some have migrated completely over there
amazingamazing 2y ago
More interesting to know is how many viral posts (external to itself) are created. Plenty of mainstream stuff comes out of X for better or worse. Also funny that mastodon seems to be losing to a company. IMO amount of users is irrelevant.
- dewey 2y ago
  > Also funny that mastodon seems to be losing to a company. There's value in both, I could see Bluesky as a Twitter alternative (jouralists, brand accounts, viral posts etc.) while Mastodon is like the oldschool blogs that you follow for very specific niches. That's how I currently use it and it works well. There's enough space for multiple platforms, I wouldn't say Mastodon is "losing".
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Yep. I'm someone that has no interest in filling my feed with Twitter "experts" and knee-jerk news article posts. Mastodon has been great for me and I don't feel any more compelled to try Bluesky than I feel compelled to try X.
- mariusor 2y ago
  I think this shows the value of a central focus point for casual users to embrace. Everyone complains about having to choose a Mastodon instance. And here, due to the nature of the already corporatized nature of Bluesky, there is one such central funnel where people can converge.
deleted 2y ago
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a1o 2y ago
This was in the front page but suddenly isn't.
- Philpax 2y ago
  Posts that receive many upvotes in a short period of time are automatically hidden from the front page until someone can investigate. I think this behaviour might be described here: <https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=readme-ov-file#anti-voting-manipulation https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...>
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
I don't think X or Musk cares. X served it's purpose by nudging the election in it's own small way.
daneel_w 2y ago
I gave "bsky" a whirl just a couple of weeks back but unfortunately the impression was not very good. I ticked only tech-ish topics as my main interests, but practically nothing in my auto-generated feed fell into those topics - the overwhelming majority of what I received was just babble of a clear sociopolitical nature, like an unpleasant case of opinionated force-feeding. Anyone else with the same experience? Do I need to follow a bunch of other users (in the tech sphere) for the "algorithm" to even start leaning towards my preferences?
- pelagicAustral 2y ago
  Yeah, got the same impression, is just the /leftypol/ version of /pol/, just another extremist echo chamber...
- hexator 2y ago
  I would give it a try again, it's quite different in only two short weeks. Also, find feeds to subscribe to on places like reddit (r/webdev had a thread IIRC)
- sundaeofshock 2y ago
  Yes, you do. There are a number of tech focused starter packs out there. You could also look at one of the custom feeds that are curated for tech conversations.
- dandellion 2y ago
  I tried it a few days ago. I'm European and more aligned with the US left than the right. Even then, having almost all of the posts in the entire platform be one-sided political screeching is just too much noise. And it's a pity because Bluesky has better filtering options than Twitter, but the content is so bad that they're pretty much useless. I could never get into Twitter because to me the signal to noise is just abysmal, and Bluesky seems to be more of the same.
- weeco 2y ago
  The discovery feed is indeed pretty shit. You need to find your favorite hashtags / people to follow, like a bunch of things and then it starts getting better. Also you need to change the language in your settings. I'm German and also got a bunch of weird German politic topics despite I never reacted on any non-tech topics. After I removed German in my settings it got much better.
jtdev 2y ago
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blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
People on HN keep spamming and upvoting mundane Bluesky related stories like user counts. It seems like many are trying really hard to make this platform happen as a reaction to the election. The whole thing looks like running away to an echo chamber. When I peeked at what was going on there, it was a bunch of rants against Elon Musk and Trump. I do not use Twitter but this definitely didn’t look like something pleasant to use either.
- Kye 2y ago
  This happened for every major platform that rose during HN's existence. It's normal, and it will pass.
EternalFury 2y ago
I tried it and lasted only 4 days. The platform feels very reactionary, with many users seemingly intent on creating a left-leaning alternative to Truth Social or X. I was searching for an apolitical, more progressive, and intellectual space, but this didn’t meet those expectations. A significant number of users appear to spend their time copying and pasting tweets to comment on them without engaging directly on X, which I find odd. For context, I’m not a Truth Social user, and I haven’t used X for several years. I prefer to keep my political views private, confined to the voting booth. My goal was simply to find a platform for sharing and discussing ideas.
- skepticATX 2y ago
  I think it’ll keep improving as more folks move over. This is just a temporary artifact of X refugees being the first to migrate.
  - EternalFury 2y ago
    I’ll check it again in a year. Their “algorithm” is another polarization device, however. If you click or like anything, your feed fills with extremely similar things. Usually, that makes recovery from a closed mindset impossible.
    - dewey 2y ago
      That's why it's cool that you can bring your own algorithm, for example there's this preset which will give you a feed of your "quiet followers", people who rarely post: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/feed/infreq https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/fe...
  - kazinator 2y ago
    When has a single social thing in human history improved with more folks moving over (beyond a small, early threshold)?
- samsari 2y ago
  > My goal was simply to find a platform for sharing and discussing ideas Which makes it all the stranger that you're complaining about others doing the same.
novaRom 2y ago
Without sarcasm, I’ve never been able to understand how or why real people use Twitter or similar platforms. Do actual human users genuinely scroll through and read all that noise? What motivates someone to do that? Is it comparable to the TikTok trance, where users get hooked by a dopamine rush?
- adlpz 2y ago
  Just talking about my own usage, I follow lots of people in the tech space, indie hackers, AI researchers, etc. By checking Twitter from time to time I learn about new tools, libraries and models, check out cool stuff made by others, etc. It's literally the same reason behind reading HN. A HN with a higher ground noise but much more real-time, interactive and orders of magnitude higher bandwidth. You just need to curate things very hard so make sure you keep enough signal above the nose to be worth it.
- Deegy 2y ago
  If you're prudent about who you follow it can be an enjoyable experience. Just make sure you only follow people you really want to hear from, and make sure your feed is set to 'following'.
- dandellion 2y ago
  Same here, tried following a few people in the field, half of the content I saw was still off-topic, memes or personal stuff. Signal to noise on Bluesky is about as bad as on Twitter, I think it's just that the type of platform and the format are not conductive to good communication. It's the equivalent of panning for hours and hours to find a tiny bit of gold, it's just not worth the time you waste on it.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Also, even if I personally avoid Bluesky and Twitter, they still affect me via their corrosive effect on my society.
- bloopernova 2y ago
  I view it as a community notice board. Twitter was great for getting intermittent announcements. Not so great at facilitating a respectful dialogue.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
grain of salt. There's a lot of ppl just kind of 'over there'... posting....but with varied amounts of substance. Then break down some of those to just posts about 'isn't it great here' because they aren't getting any angry bot replies yet. Meanwhile, some niches might have activity but alot also do not. Not getting engagement on a number of interests and no major accounts over there..... Yes, a handful of journos and news outlets are trying it out, and science ppl.... but who knows without any kind of view counts etc if anything is anything. (pros to that of course) It's just all up in the air. And on top of that still requires a bunch of effort to build up followers again because the 'algorithm' won't start working until you do. (also a lot of misinformed users seem to think it's 'algorithmless' yet Bluesky mentions it right off the start encouraging following and liking to 'teach it'. Feeds & 'starter packs' are nice takes on lists and getting reach but it's like 2010 Twitter all these grifters just making large collections of users with questionable quality control. Sigh. Anyways, still giving it a chance but wary. Like Doctorow wrote a few weeks ago, putting effort into a centralized thing only to have it enshittified later is a tough sell. Oh oh, also as mentioned in another thread, API openness sure is fun, as it was in early Twitter.... Already ported some bot type accounts over with ease. But that's about it. Fun hobby type stuff. We've been here before.
jsnell 2y ago
I don't think there's much value in covering user growth numbers of a site several times a week.
- 3adawi 2y ago
  think it's cool to do the milestones, but i agree not every time a million is added, maybe when BS hits 25m next
puff_pastry 2y ago
I think this medium already proved that it doesn't work. A new social media model needs to emerge - we shouldn't try to rebuild the same old with a fresh coat of paint.
- chomp 2y ago
  Go build your vision, I think it’s clear though that the market demands this specific product.
  - puff_pastry 2y ago
    tbf, I don't have a vision for it. I'm just saying that this model works only because we've seen that the current model works around bots, inflammatory content, and fake news. These are all really hard problems..!
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Bluesky is the first time users have control over their social networking, and that's exciting & so so different. There's 3rd party feeds, algorithms, moderation, & labels that are all open ended tools we've only just begun to put into people's hands to try out. The data architecture starts eith a personal cryptographic data store. Which can have endless different types of data in it. So for example you can have SmokeSignals Events in your feed or FrontPage reddit like in your feed. https://bsky.app/profile/smokesignal.events https://bsky.app/profile/smokesignal.events And it's all open data. So we can analyze thr network & try to spot & root out large influence campaigns, find patterns of behavior that bad actors and sometimes state sponsored actors are pushing on the network. There's so many open possibilities here. I can get how on the surface this looks "the same old with a fresh paint of cost," but the techies are moving here en masse because we believe this is so much more fertile a ground with so much more potential & possibility, we believe it will be a place we can put in energy & ongoingly iterate & improve social networking. And the team has very explicitly designed the system to assume that someday BlueSky may become the problem. It's not fully tested at scale but we have the technical ability to walk away, & keep the social network going, if the BlueSky corporation ever loses our trust. It's sad that there's such a fatalistic nihilistic air about, that judgements are so quick to be called. It's still early days for the AtProtocol/BlueSky, but we already see the protocols not platforms decisions here enabling experiences so far beyond what BlueSky corporation alone could ever hope to provide, and that ever-richening interconnection & potentiation is incredibly alluring & a chance unlike any we've seen in a generation.
amriksohata 2y ago
Echo chamber
ofcourseyoudo 2y ago
I'm very happy all of you dudes in these comments that tried and left Bluesky aren't there
eonmist 2y ago
I have never used this kind of platform before. I tied BlueSly out of curiosity, thinking it would be useful if I selected a topic like "programming". I deleted my account within an hour. Every post that approaches anything technical quickly turns into something worse than lunchroom talk except it's with people you have never met. Furthermore, most posts are the equivalent of selfies with the main subject remotely in the background. It is for people who have time to spend sifting trough huge amounts of low effort posts to find something to react to.
iteratethis 2y ago
A lot of people in this thread are expressing that their main use case for using any social network is to follow experts in their field. Allow me to improve your life by freeing up massive amounts of time. For any given field, say AI or programming, find the best weekly newsletter. Subscribe to a few of them, read them for a few weeks, and cut them down to the smallest number possible. Anything of any importance in the field will be in that newsletter. Designate a fixed moment in your weekly schedule to read/skim them and be done with it. You can now delete the social media app. I used to spent 2 hours per day "following tech news" and such. It's mostly noise and you'll be tempted to hang around and hate-read the social outrage of the day. Somebody has sifted through all that garbage for you and put the gems in a newsletter, for free. Make use of it.

87 points by Philpax 2y ago

Beware of the enshittification though, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42182271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42182271

PaulHoule 2y ago
I'm worried and I'm not. The natural cycle of communication apps is that people use them for a while and then the vendor stops maintaining and people keep using them for a while until something new comes along and then it is too late for the old app. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market If you were born in 2000 you might be excused for realizing that somebody born in the 1970s may have used Compuserve The Source Unafilliated BBSes Fidonet Various chat applications for UNIX and VMS USENET IRC CuSeeMe ICQ AOL Instant Messenger MSN Instant Messenger Facebook Instant Messenger 10+ off-brand MSFT chat applications (When you have so many even Skype and Teams are off brands!) PalTalk Tivejo (fork of the above with a user registration system that I wrote) Go2Meeting and many other "chat" application. In the last few years Facebook and other big tech companies have been unusually good at slamming the door to competition and perhaps we've seen an influx in "normies" who haven't lived through a normal cycle and who believe it is possible or desirable you're going to stay loyal to a chat application the same way your dad stayed loyal to Old Spice. It has nothing to do with proprietary vs open source, as open source products (say GNOME) are frequently run by people who couldn't care what the users think. It's got less to do with the profit motive than it has to do with penny pinching, in fact non-profits burn out before for-profits because at lest the for-profits have a motivation structure for people to improve things and non-profits by definition do not. It's a fair assumption that Bluesky is going to suck in 10 years just as none of the things above had more than 10 years. Bluesky is going to spend a dollar on me and all the other (roughly) 15 M users they have now and there's no reason you shouldn't enjoy it now any more than you should let awareness of your mortality spoil all the joys you could be having right now. It's an interesting question to what extent an "open" platform can resist this. I like the system of POTS and text messaging which is highly interoperable between carriers but has proven to be co-optable by the likes of Facetime. In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. Email is a nominally open protocol but Gmail's dominance makes it not so if you care about getting your mail delivered.
- MattJ100 2y ago
  > In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. This is an often-repeated myth. I have a lot of experience with XMPP, and I can tell you that many of today's clients are unrecognisable compared to equivalents 20 years ago. Then IRCv3 is a thing in multiple IRC clients and networks. RSS, well, I'm not sure how much evolution is needed there anyhow. By longevity, the most successful networks have all been open ones. The proprietary ones come and go.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    What I have seen with XMPP is major uptake with law enforcement and military. Lots of custom systems there. RSS is a great protocol to talk about, it's not such a great protocol to use. Right now my RSS reader subscribes to about 110 feeds for 10 cents a month per feed through Feedburner which does all the crawling for me and just hits a websocket when a new article comes in which posts it to SQS. When I want to add new articles to my database I just suck 'em out. It's a bargain for feeds like MDPI and arXiv and the Guardian that have many articles per day but I could not afford to subscribe to the 2000+ indie blogs that I'd like to subscribe to and that YOShInOn could easily find articles I find interesting in. I could write my own RSS crawler and probably will at some point but it is a hassle. I can crawl frequently and make my home internet unusable or I can crawl infrequently and have stale results. Worse yet if a feed changes rapidly I might even miss updates completely. I can define some loss function that lets me find an optional combination of "doesn't poll too fast" and "isn't too stale" for each feed individually but I expect to experience both the consequences of underpolling and overpolling unless I make a definite decision that I am going to underpoll or overpoll by a few order of magnitude. There was so much fighting between RSS and ATOM in terms of the exact syntax of the records but none about the problem of polling and polling and polling and polling. Confront Dave Winer with ActivityPub or AT protocol and it is like you are showing somebody a car and they don't want to hear about the engine and the brakes and all that they just want to know where to hitch the horse.
- fsflover 2y ago
  You forgot to include email in your list, which is well and alive. Incidentally, it's distributed and open, too.

xyst 2y ago

How many are bots vs real people though

faefox 2y ago
This is an article about Bluesky, not X.
grugagag 2y ago
Same question applies to all social media. Facebook and X are ridden with them. Youtube as well. I think they are everywhere. I try to stay away as much as I can, I do check the pulse from time to time and seems like there is more and more bot activity.
criddell 2y ago
When you look at all the accounts you follow on Bluesky, can you tell which are "real" and which are bots? If not, does it matter?
jeffwask 2y ago
Anecdotally, not enough to matter this is a legit phenomenon not an artificial event. Been on BlueSky about a year and in the last month about half of the big accounts I used to follow on Twitter have started showing up in my BlueSky feed. The tech and infosec feeds are starting to be as valuable as pre-Elon Twitter for staying on top of what is happening in the industry or just really interesting and insightful tech discussions. To me this was the biggest loss in leaving Twitter and it feels like a new spring right now. Social networks are about the people and some of Twitters biggest draws for me have left for BlueSky. In the last month the vibrancy and activity in the community feels like it's jumped a to a whole new level. I think the real question is if they can sustain it.
- taylodl 2y ago
  I left Twitter in 2015 due to inconsistent application of their policies and it becoming a morass of politics and no longer the technical goodness. Is Bluesky like the 2014 Twitter? If so, that would be awesome!

consumer451 2y ago

I wonder what kind of money is being thrown at them right now, or in the near future. Am I way off thinking that there would be?

PaulHoule 2y ago
This has been heavily covered https://www.finsmes.com/2024/10/bluesky-raises-15m-in-series-a-funding.html https://www.finsmes.com/2024/10/bluesky-raises-15m-in-series...
- Diti 2y ago
  Also, Bluesky themselves make some income from their relationship with Namecheap: https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-namecheap https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-namecheap
  - ChrisArchitect 2y ago
    This is not the case any more. None of that exists in the handle creation/change process and they just recommend any registrar in the docs.
    - consumer451 2y ago
      Interesting, I hadn't noticed the Namecheap change. I know their monetization play going forwards is something like Discord Nitro. Pay for extra features.
    - pfraze 2y ago
      It is the case, it's just off site and not promoted anywhere
- consumer451 2y ago
  Sorry, I should have been more clear. I am aware of their fundraising so far, but that was prior to what feels like their most important growth rate/wave. Does the last week change anything with regard to financial pressure, like potential buyout suitors? I mean Zuck noticed, and is making changes to Threads…

J05ephu5M13r 2y ago

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dewey 2y ago

One of the best features of Bluesky is that it just looks like Twitter. Much easier to explain to people that it's just Twitter with a different name. Over the weekend a lot of journalists in my country (Austria) moved over to Bluesky (Including one with > 600k followers) and with the "starter packs" on Bluesky (Curated list of people you can follow with one click) it was possible to adopt it very quickly and have an active and useful feed without a long onboarding time to make it your own.

bloopernova 2y ago
And blocks/ignores work the way you expect. Apparently there are shared block lists too, but I haven't tried those yet.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  How are blocks supposed (and not supposed) to work? My impression was that blocks on Bluesky seem like a great way to censor dissent and criticism which only seems to fuel echo chambers. Blocking someone not only stops them from interacting with you in the future but also seems to hide their criticism from public view.

sbarre 2y ago

For anyone who loved Tweetdeck, there is Deck.blue: https://deck.blue/ https://deck.blue/

dandellion 2y ago
App password seems like a pretty bad idea that could easily confuse users and lead them to having their credentials stolen.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  These days, OAuth is supported as well, but deck.blue was built before that existed. The maintainer posted last week that he'll be adding it soon.

justaman 2y ago

It seems that bluesky will be the political left's version of twitter going forward. The same way truth social became a right-wing echo chamber from its inception. I see the world(the US in particular) drawing lines and further devolving online discourse in a time where what we need most is mutual understanding and respect.

tokinonagare 2y ago
The elevator pitch for this service is indeed "X for leftists". This is why journalists are flocking to it, and speaking about it, despite it being totally irrelevant, just like X is.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  I'd put it more like X but with open data, open APIs, and the ability to control your feed & collaboratively improve your experience with 3rd party feeds, moderations, and algorithms. The left thing seems incredibly incidental. This feels like the first time the social networks are offering any serious tools for protection & shielding ourselves from wild content & algorithms, giving us the power to define our social network experience. The right could benefit just as much, build their own good experience. It would need to be built around something other than in your face razzing on people on the left though!
3adawi 2y ago
I don't think think is entirely true, truth social was just MAGA echo-chamber, Bluesky has a much wider net - i see a lot of academia, tech, artists, environmentalists, a lot of small communities there - some have migrated completely over there

amazingamazing 2y ago

More interesting to know is how many viral posts (external to itself) are created. Plenty of mainstream stuff comes out of X for better or worse. Also funny that mastodon seems to be losing to a company. IMO amount of users is irrelevant.

dewey 2y ago
> Also funny that mastodon seems to be losing to a company. There's value in both, I could see Bluesky as a Twitter alternative (jouralists, brand accounts, viral posts etc.) while Mastodon is like the oldschool blogs that you follow for very specific niches. That's how I currently use it and it works well. There's enough space for multiple platforms, I wouldn't say Mastodon is "losing".
- talldayo 2y ago
  Yep. I'm someone that has no interest in filling my feed with Twitter "experts" and knee-jerk news article posts. Mastodon has been great for me and I don't feel any more compelled to try Bluesky than I feel compelled to try X.
mariusor 2y ago
I think this shows the value of a central focus point for casual users to embrace. Everyone complains about having to choose a Mastodon instance. And here, due to the nature of the already corporatized nature of Bluesky, there is one such central funnel where people can converge.

deleted 2y ago

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a1o 2y ago

This was in the front page but suddenly isn't.

Philpax 2y ago
Posts that receive many upvotes in a short period of time are automatically hidden from the front page until someone can investigate. I think this behaviour might be described here: <https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=readme-ov-file#anti-voting-manipulation https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...>
- deleted 2y ago
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2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

I don't think X or Musk cares. X served it's purpose by nudging the election in it's own small way.

daneel_w 2y ago

I gave "bsky" a whirl just a couple of weeks back but unfortunately the impression was not very good. I ticked only tech-ish topics as my main interests, but practically nothing in my auto-generated feed fell into those topics - the overwhelming majority of what I received was just babble of a clear sociopolitical nature, like an unpleasant case of opinionated force-feeding. Anyone else with the same experience? Do I need to follow a bunch of other users (in the tech sphere) for the "algorithm" to even start leaning towards my preferences?

pelagicAustral 2y ago
Yeah, got the same impression, is just the /leftypol/ version of /pol/, just another extremist echo chamber...
hexator 2y ago
I would give it a try again, it's quite different in only two short weeks. Also, find feeds to subscribe to on places like reddit (r/webdev had a thread IIRC)
sundaeofshock 2y ago
Yes, you do. There are a number of tech focused starter packs out there. You could also look at one of the custom feeds that are curated for tech conversations.
dandellion 2y ago
I tried it a few days ago. I'm European and more aligned with the US left than the right. Even then, having almost all of the posts in the entire platform be one-sided political screeching is just too much noise. And it's a pity because Bluesky has better filtering options than Twitter, but the content is so bad that they're pretty much useless. I could never get into Twitter because to me the signal to noise is just abysmal, and Bluesky seems to be more of the same.
weeco 2y ago
The discovery feed is indeed pretty shit. You need to find your favorite hashtags / people to follow, like a bunch of things and then it starts getting better. Also you need to change the language in your settings. I'm German and also got a bunch of weird German politic topics despite I never reacted on any non-tech topics. After I removed German in my settings it got much better.

jtdev 2y ago

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blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

People on HN keep spamming and upvoting mundane Bluesky related stories like user counts. It seems like many are trying really hard to make this platform happen as a reaction to the election. The whole thing looks like running away to an echo chamber. When I peeked at what was going on there, it was a bunch of rants against Elon Musk and Trump. I do not use Twitter but this definitely didn’t look like something pleasant to use either.

Kye 2y ago
This happened for every major platform that rose during HN's existence. It's normal, and it will pass.

EternalFury 2y ago

I tried it and lasted only 4 days. The platform feels very reactionary, with many users seemingly intent on creating a left-leaning alternative to Truth Social or X. I was searching for an apolitical, more progressive, and intellectual space, but this didn’t meet those expectations. A significant number of users appear to spend their time copying and pasting tweets to comment on them without engaging directly on X, which I find odd. For context, I’m not a Truth Social user, and I haven’t used X for several years. I prefer to keep my political views private, confined to the voting booth. My goal was simply to find a platform for sharing and discussing ideas.

skepticATX 2y ago
I think it’ll keep improving as more folks move over. This is just a temporary artifact of X refugees being the first to migrate.
- EternalFury 2y ago
  I’ll check it again in a year. Their “algorithm” is another polarization device, however. If you click or like anything, your feed fills with extremely similar things. Usually, that makes recovery from a closed mindset impossible.
  - dewey 2y ago
    That's why it's cool that you can bring your own algorithm, for example there's this preset which will give you a feed of your "quiet followers", people who rarely post: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/feed/infreq https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/fe...
- kazinator 2y ago
  When has a single social thing in human history improved with more folks moving over (beyond a small, early threshold)?
samsari 2y ago
> My goal was simply to find a platform for sharing and discussing ideas Which makes it all the stranger that you're complaining about others doing the same.

novaRom 2y ago

Without sarcasm, I’ve never been able to understand how or why real people use Twitter or similar platforms. Do actual human users genuinely scroll through and read all that noise? What motivates someone to do that? Is it comparable to the TikTok trance, where users get hooked by a dopamine rush?

adlpz 2y ago
Just talking about my own usage, I follow lots of people in the tech space, indie hackers, AI researchers, etc. By checking Twitter from time to time I learn about new tools, libraries and models, check out cool stuff made by others, etc. It's literally the same reason behind reading HN. A HN with a higher ground noise but much more real-time, interactive and orders of magnitude higher bandwidth. You just need to curate things very hard so make sure you keep enough signal above the nose to be worth it.
Deegy 2y ago
If you're prudent about who you follow it can be an enjoyable experience. Just make sure you only follow people you really want to hear from, and make sure your feed is set to 'following'.
dandellion 2y ago
Same here, tried following a few people in the field, half of the content I saw was still off-topic, memes or personal stuff. Signal to noise on Bluesky is about as bad as on Twitter, I think it's just that the type of platform and the format are not conductive to good communication. It's the equivalent of panning for hours and hours to find a tiny bit of gold, it's just not worth the time you waste on it.
- hollerith 2y ago
  Also, even if I personally avoid Bluesky and Twitter, they still affect me via their corrosive effect on my society.
bloopernova 2y ago
I view it as a community notice board. Twitter was great for getting intermittent announcements. Not so great at facilitating a respectful dialogue.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

grain of salt. There's a lot of ppl just kind of 'over there'... posting....but with varied amounts of substance. Then break down some of those to just posts about 'isn't it great here' because they aren't getting any angry bot replies yet. Meanwhile, some niches might have activity but alot also do not. Not getting engagement on a number of interests and no major accounts over there..... Yes, a handful of journos and news outlets are trying it out, and science ppl.... but who knows without any kind of view counts etc if anything is anything. (pros to that of course) It's just all up in the air. And on top of that still requires a bunch of effort to build up followers again because the 'algorithm' won't start working until you do. (also a lot of misinformed users seem to think it's 'algorithmless' yet Bluesky mentions it right off the start encouraging following and liking to 'teach it'. Feeds & 'starter packs' are nice takes on lists and getting reach but it's like 2010 Twitter all these grifters just making large collections of users with questionable quality control. Sigh. Anyways, still giving it a chance but wary. Like Doctorow wrote a few weeks ago, putting effort into a centralized thing only to have it enshittified later is a tough sell. Oh oh, also as mentioned in another thread, API openness sure is fun, as it was in early Twitter.... Already ported some bot type accounts over with ease. But that's about it. Fun hobby type stuff. We've been here before.

jsnell 2y ago

I don't think there's much value in covering user growth numbers of a site several times a week.

3adawi 2y ago
think it's cool to do the milestones, but i agree not every time a million is added, maybe when BS hits 25m next

puff_pastry 2y ago

I think this medium already proved that it doesn't work. A new social media model needs to emerge - we shouldn't try to rebuild the same old with a fresh coat of paint.

chomp 2y ago
Go build your vision, I think it’s clear though that the market demands this specific product.
- puff_pastry 2y ago
  tbf, I don't have a vision for it. I'm just saying that this model works only because we've seen that the current model works around bots, inflammatory content, and fake news. These are all really hard problems..!
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Bluesky is the first time users have control over their social networking, and that's exciting & so so different. There's 3rd party feeds, algorithms, moderation, & labels that are all open ended tools we've only just begun to put into people's hands to try out. The data architecture starts eith a personal cryptographic data store. Which can have endless different types of data in it. So for example you can have SmokeSignals Events in your feed or FrontPage reddit like in your feed. https://bsky.app/profile/smokesignal.events https://bsky.app/profile/smokesignal.events And it's all open data. So we can analyze thr network & try to spot & root out large influence campaigns, find patterns of behavior that bad actors and sometimes state sponsored actors are pushing on the network. There's so many open possibilities here. I can get how on the surface this looks "the same old with a fresh paint of cost," but the techies are moving here en masse because we believe this is so much more fertile a ground with so much more potential & possibility, we believe it will be a place we can put in energy & ongoingly iterate & improve social networking. And the team has very explicitly designed the system to assume that someday BlueSky may become the problem. It's not fully tested at scale but we have the technical ability to walk away, & keep the social network going, if the BlueSky corporation ever loses our trust. It's sad that there's such a fatalistic nihilistic air about, that judgements are so quick to be called. It's still early days for the AtProtocol/BlueSky, but we already see the protocols not platforms decisions here enabling experiences so far beyond what BlueSky corporation alone could ever hope to provide, and that ever-richening interconnection & potentiation is incredibly alluring & a chance unlike any we've seen in a generation.

amriksohata 2y ago

Echo chamber

ofcourseyoudo 2y ago

I'm very happy all of you dudes in these comments that tried and left Bluesky aren't there

eonmist 2y ago

I have never used this kind of platform before. I tied BlueSly out of curiosity, thinking it would be useful if I selected a topic like "programming". I deleted my account within an hour. Every post that approaches anything technical quickly turns into something worse than lunchroom talk except it's with people you have never met. Furthermore, most posts are the equivalent of selfies with the main subject remotely in the background. It is for people who have time to spend sifting trough huge amounts of low effort posts to find something to react to.

iteratethis 2y ago

A lot of people in this thread are expressing that their main use case for using any social network is to follow experts in their field. Allow me to improve your life by freeing up massive amounts of time. For any given field, say AI or programming, find the best weekly newsletter. Subscribe to a few of them, read them for a few weeks, and cut them down to the smallest number possible. Anything of any importance in the field will be in that newsletter. Designate a fixed moment in your weekly schedule to read/skim them and be done with it. You can now delete the social media app. I used to spent 2 hours per day "following tech news" and such. It's mostly noise and you'll be tempted to hang around and hate-read the social outrage of the day. Somebody has sifted through all that garbage for you and put the gems in a newsletter, for free. Make use of it.