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Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media
- giancarlostoro 2y agoI really dont understand why we cannot just go back to chronological as a default. This is how I use X/Twitter, and anything else that lets me just go chronological.
- BipolarCapybara 2y agoBecause then your feed is flooded with news channels or posters that tweet every other minute.
- M04R_PYL0N5 2y agoAgreed. They kind of just overthought the experience to try to game engagement and clicks. Chronological should be the default, anything else should be up to the user but I know that doesn't quite make money for the apps the same way...
- Spivak 2y agoTIL priority inbox is trying to keep me in Gmail longer. I could understand feeding people rage-bait content as a method of false engagement but these are people you followed. Most liked/boosted/retweeted among the people you want updates from seems ideal.
- ruined 2y agoedit:n/t
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoA better analogy would have been spam filters.
- ok123456 2y agoshowing you posts that maximize your use of the service is considered "growth hacking"
- coldpie 2y agoIt's because the majority of users are being fed more content than they can consume, whether that's through a large count of follows or global search results or a discovery tab. In that case, you need some method by which to decide what subset of that content to show to the user. Chronological ("show me the latest 50") is one option, but is it the best, for however one defines "best"? The people running these things seem to think it is not the best, for however they define "best", so we see the various discovery algorithms and all their associated pros & cons.
- johannes1234321 2y ago> majority of users are being fed more content than they can consume That is a group of users. Another group of users follows only few active others and therefore sees only little content, but the platforms wants to show them something new all the time, to keep the platform "relevant" (in order to show more ads) This then of course ignore the fact that they probably purposely follow only few.
- MadcapJake 2y agoClearly the service is not designed for people to only engage with a few folks, it's meant to be a zeitgeist firehose. If you're only following a few people it's like using a spreadsheet for tracking household frozen pizza inventory.
- dpkonofa 2y agoThis is a spot-on, although incredibly weird, analogy for it. It only works if you use it. You get out what you put in.
- yamazakiwi 2y agoThe tool might be more sophisticated than you need but following only a few people is totally fine and should not be overrun with algo content just to promote ad revenue to the platform owner. Maybe the people you want to follow are only on said platform so you are required to consume it that way.
- mjcl 2y agoGood news! Bluesky does default to chronological, but also provides other options.
- eddieroger 2y agoAside from the usual "because everyone has different preferences and more people prefer it this way," a lot of what happens on social media is ephemeral, and to many people there is little value to go back and see things that happened a while ago versus something happening right now with higher engagement. It's the difference of seeing what happened versus wanting to be part of it.
- dragonwriter 2y agoBut “chronological” feeds are typically newest-first, so “people don't want to go back to what happened a while ago” isn’t really an argument against them.
- sameoldtune 2y agoI agree, but some people use social media to follow 1000s of other users. Some kind of “hot right now” or “high engagement since you last logged on” setting might be nice for them.
- garciasn 2y agoI think it's super interesting you believe the social companies care about what is 'nice for the user' as opposed to what is nice for the advertisers, audience/data brokers, and the investors. The reason algorithmic ordering is so common is because that's what gives the most runway for advertising, behavior manipulation/tracking, and its downstream financial effects.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> reason algorithmic ordering is so common is because that's what gives the most runway for advertising You’re both right. Algorithmic feeds boost engagement, both by surfacing the most-engaging content and removing the burden of trimming one’s follow list, and also aids in serving ads. (Both by making them easier to sneak in and in the same engine that surfaces engaging organic content being useful for serving engaging ads.)
- ziddoap 2y agoAn experience that is super shitty for the user isn't going to result in any users. If you are trying to take users away from twitter, you're going to focus on some 'nice for the user' things (or, at least, 'nicer than twitter for the user'). Like most things in life, this isn't a binary choice (user or advertiser). They're going to try to optimize for both, striking a balance.
- garciasn 2y agoMarketshare comes first, then revenue optimization comes later.
- notpushkin 2y agoYes. However, an experience that’s okay for the user but also super addictve will result in a lot of users.
- schnable 2y agoSo that it's different when you open the app every 15 minutes.
- JoshTriplett 2y agoThis is, simultaneously, the reason why social networks want to use non-chronological timelines, and exactly the reason to use chronological timelines: so that it discourages perpetual usage. On Fediverse, I can open the page, read the things that are new since the last time, and close it.
- dragonwriter 2y agoIf you follow a decent number of active accounts, a chronological feed is different, too, especially if it is like Twitter/Bluesky (and unlike Facebook) where responses are the same kind of item as top-level posts.
- alwayslikethis 2y agoA problem is that your sources may have substantially different flowrates. One source can fill up the feed by posting a lot, which is a problem with RSS if you use it to subscribe to any high volume blog.
- LordRishav 2y agoWhat is meant by chronological here? Do you mean you follow some people and your Home page just arranges all the posts by those you've followed chronologically? Because that is what Mastodon does. And while I personally prefer it to be this way, this won't work for the user who just wants to see the type of posts they like, not necessarily the people they like. The recent exodus of American and Brazilian people from X is thus divided into those who chose Mastodon and those who chose Bluesky, with the latter having a much larger number. Make of what you will. Best would still be RSS feeds and everyone having their own blog. Just saying.
- nemomarx 2y agoI think blue sky has a default chronological following feed too? Twitter pushing for you instead of following is kinda notably distinct.
- dragonwriter 2y agoTwitter. Facebook, TikTok, all push a For You; Threads doesn't even have a pure following feed,... I think Bluesky/Mastodon are the outliers here, not Twitter.
- ideashower 2y agoIt does default to chronological, though?
- JoshTriplett 2y agoIn addition to all the other reasons social networks are incentivized to feed you content that maximizes how long you spend on the site/app: I think some of this comes from a combination of social networks that mirrored real-world networks (and thus create social incentives to follow people you might otherwise not want to), social networks on which people post a firehose of content, and Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). Some people use Facebook as a primary means of keeping in touch with family. Some people's Facebook networks mirror their family-and-friends networks. It's socially awkward to unfollow your relatives, even if you don't particularly want to see what they post, or can't deal with the volume they post. But it's not socially awkward for Facebook to notice what you do and don't engage with, and try to show you more of what you engage with, regardless of who you follow. If you treat following someone on X, or Fediverse, or Bluesky, as nothing more or less than a means of seeing what they post, then you can carefully and selectively choose who you follow, such that your chronological timeline is a manageable amount of content. You can choose, for instance, to not follow people who post a massive amount of content, or whose content you mostly don't want to see. You can make lists for people whose posts you might want to sample from time to time and not read all of. You can rely on other people you do follow to repost things that are interesting. But if you're following so many people, or such high-volume people, that your chronological timeline is a firehose you can't possibly read all of, then an algorithmic timeline becomes more tempting.
- AlienRobot 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgA4GzRsldI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgA4GzRsldI
- swatcoder 2y agoChronological is ideal for personal feeds -- family and friends, maybe some professionals and curators you follow, your preferred brands, your local public services, maybe keyword/topic subscriptions, etc. A few hundred or a few thousand explicit subscriptions with output sized to match how often you check your feeds and how much you care about missing things when you don't. Like maybe you, that's all I want, so it feels like chronological should just be the default option that all this algorithm and trending business is nonsense. I just want a nice aggregation of the information I know I want from the sources I personally know, appreciate, and can contextualize. But "at scale" you end up with a lot of users who are more interested in idle discovery, seeing what their peers are seeing so they can talk about it, etc -- as well as platform maintainers hearing the siren call of advertising and paid placement as way to offset the high costs of maintaining a multimedia network for millions upon millions of users. Together, this becomes the wind behind algorithmic feeds and paid visibility features, because the algorithmic feeds are something users actually enjoy and breaking away from chronological feeds opens tons of revenue opportunities in an expensive and intensely competitive business. I no longer expect to find my kind of service from any platform that's positioned for the global mainstream. The winds are always going to take that somewhere else, even if it looks promising today.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoThere's a Discover tab. If you want to discover things, use it. Tiktok follows a similar approach for their secondary feeds. I don't want to discover anything on my personal feed unless it comes from one of the sources that I have chosen to follow, and I want information relayed to me in the order in which it is posted. For Discover, I couldn't care less.
- dawnerd 2y agoWell good news, there’s Mastodon for that and there’s increasing interoperability with threads and Bluesky via bridges.
- mattferderer 2y agoI preferred lists as the only usable way to use Twitter, even before the takeover. I like how Bluesky has improved the functionality of your own feeds & being able to share them. If I recall, Elon was promising something similar when he bought Twitter but I don't believe that ever happened. It will be interesting to see how Bluesky is able to continue operating when it needs to generate a profit though. I'm curious what their plans are. The need for profit on social media platforms often results in loss of quality & user experience.
- m3kw9 2y agoI used to use lists but find that the info there diverges and gets noisy overtime, they don’t have a one click way to remove people from lists, so I use them less than I should
- dkobia 2y agoAdvertising incentivizes engagement driven content amplification which is usually best manifested in outrage unfortunately. On Twitter (X), Instagram, TikTok, it seems any minute signal (view, like, scroll, linger) algorithmically retunes your posts to maximize engagement, which is the root of all the problems.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoI can't speak to twitter and instagram, both of which seem to be terribly confused about what sort of content I like, but this works very well for narrowly tailoring TikTok videos to be content I appreciate.
- tking8924 2y agoI do personally wish the role of ad based monetization models were included in these conversations more often. With both traditional media and social media the conversation tends to blame ideology for their shortcomings but in reality it's just, as you noted, a bad incentive model. They aren't ideological, they're just maximizing the amount of your attention they can capture because that maximizes the amount of ad revenue they can bring in. There are certain people in certain, specific, situations that have a strong enough ideological stance to make a decision based on that ideology, counter to the one they're incentivized to make. But the majority of the people in the majority of situations are going to make the incentivized choice. If you want to really change something, you have to change the incentives.
- xena 2y agoCustom feeds are really cool. I made a custom feed that shows every time someone said "sneak peak" instead of "sneak peek" on a livestream: https://bsky.app/profile/stealthmountain.xeiaso.net/feed/sneak-peak https://bsky.app/profile/stealthmountain.xeiaso.net/feed/sne... It's currently running either under my desk or in the living room on my homelab Kubernetes cluster. It's a fun little thing to look into every so often to get a vertical slice of humanity.
- warunsl 2y agoCustom feeds really intrigue me. If I understand the API right, if you are an implementer of a custom feed, you need to expose an endpoint that the bluesky server can hit whenever a user wants to load content for that custom feed. And the endpoint that you implement will return the results. Does this mean that the implementer of this feed will have to take into account the network costs? What I am trying to get at is that if you implement a custom feed, you need to be aware that you are potentially looking at hitting your data caps on your internet provider if a lot of folks start consuming that feed. Do I understand this right? I am aware that there are services that let you create custom feeds. But they are mostly for simple compositions like a feed for the following set of words and/or set of people, etc.
- xena 2y agoYou end up sending back post IDs that get hydrated on the server side, but yeah! There's more complicated feeds, but right now the easy to make feeds are more prevalent because they're easy to make.
- m3kw9 2y agoI use lists but generally I stick to for you and use my head to filter posts that are likely propaganda and stuff I know what they are trying to do. Once you use twitter enough you develop a filter that by pass a lot of bs and makes the whole thing enjoyable
- kps 2y agoI hope this will become true; it's the reason I made an account as soon as possible (not the one that matches my name), have followed hashtag-based feeds with mixed success, and donated to my favourite client (tokimeki.blue). I want to follow topics, in the fashion of Usenet or Reddit, not people. If I'm interested in dandelions, I want to read Jay Expert's posts about dandelions, not their posts about their breakfast (unless it's dandelions) or favourite TV show (unless it's about dandelions). I fear the recent US election is going to kill it, though.
- attilakun 2y ago> I fear the recent US election is going to kill it, though. How? Aren’t there a lot more people migrating to Bluesky now in light of Musk’s antics on X?
- BadHumans 2y agoMusk has the president-elect in his pocket and Musk hates BlueSky. The goal is to be the only source of propaganda and let right-wing conspiracies fly unchecked on social media.
- cmxch 2y agoThat’s a bit reductive. What says that Bluesky doesn’t have their flavor of propaganda that suits their preferences? That is, what makes the Bluesky perspective more valid other than just being on a platform that hates Twitter? About anything that is currently legal and permitted on Twitter seems to be specifically prohibited by design (and can’t be opted out of wrt moderation) in Bluesky. If the Mastodon case is any guide, there will be a great effort to ensure that nothing wrt software can conflict with it.
- BadHumans 2y ago> What says that Bluesky doesn’t have their flavor of propaganda that suits their preferences? Nothing. They probably do. > That is, what makes the Bluesky perspective more valid other than just being on a platform that hates Twitter? Nothing. It probably isn't. > About anything that is currently legal and permitted on Twitter seems to be specifically prohibited by design Trump's FCC chief has signaled he would like to remove Section 230 which would make these things that are prohibited a downside for BlueSky and open them up to litigation and I doubt they have the wallet to litigate like Musk does.
- hntempacct99 2y agoFrom what I have seen using Bluesky this isn't true at all. It's brutally censored, even more than Twitter was in 2021. Or are there other relays and appviews I can use that aren't? Is there a comprehensive list of Bluesky infrastructure that isn't run by Bluesky themselves (excluding a PDS)? Or is it totally centralized for now?
- nick_ 2y agoWhat brutal censorship have you observed?
- okeuro49 2y agohttps://bsky.app/profile/realbabylonbee.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/realbabylonbee.bsky.social
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoIt looks like you can just click through the content warning.
- wulfstan 2y agoYou can also just turn it off globally by turning off the "Intolerance" setting on the Bluesky Moderation account - visit @moderation.bsky.app and set it up how you want.
- jayd16 2y agoYeah, I just made an account to test this very thing. As a brand new user it was easy to find. Makes you wonder how earnest the complaints are.
- vehemenz 2y agoCensorship and moderation aren't the same thing. Cmon folks, this comes up once a month on HN.
- nathias 2y agoI want to own my data, algo, and instance.
- haunter 2y agoSo basically a blog
- fsflover 2y agoOr Mastodon.
- kspacewalk2 2y agoAnd hosted for free, no ads. And a pony.
- nedt 2y agoFor Bluesky you start here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
- Super_Jambo 2y agoI'm having a crack at making feeds that filter by topic and location using LLM. The current test feed is here: https://bsky.app/profile/super-james.bsky.social/feed/uk-politics-all https://bsky.app/profile/super-james.bsky.social/feed/uk-pol... But I'm in the middle of a big re-work so it'll get a lot better when I finish that.
- PurpleBison 2y agoI've been using Bluesky casually for the past week and, as someone who was never a regular Twitter user, I don't see the point of using these kinds of social media websites. Sure, Bluesky is definitely less toxic than Twitter, but I still haven't found a way for it to add value to my life.
- mtlynch 2y agoIt's fine that you don't get value from it, but how does that add to the conversation? There are an infinite number of activities available to humans. Some people will find some of those activities enjoyable, and others will not. Is there value in joining a conversation about every activity to declare that you don't enjoy it personally? A more constructive way of engaging might be to say how it might add value to your life if it were different in some way. Or you could warn others that it's harmful in ways they don't recognize. But just an unqualified, "I don't see the point of that," is not so helpful.
- assanineass 2y agoRoasted
- hwbehrens 2y agoI partially agree, and I'm generally in favor of doing our part to help dang and keep the level of conversation high. With that being said, I read the parent post slightly differently. I took their post as an implicit request that commenters share their own experiences and how they receive value from these services. A bit like the nuance between the statements "This is pointless" vs "I don't see the point", where the latter has something of an implicit (yet).
- PurpleBison 2y agoThanks for you advice on writing Internet comments.
- mtlynch 2y agoYou should review the site guidelines, as you've only made two comments on HN, and both of them violate the community guidelines: >Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. >Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
- MostlyStable 2y agoIf one of the options is "only show me content by people that I have explicitely followed/subscribed to", then I might be interested. I completely understand why social media companies need to have some kind of an algorithm. Without one, when you first join, your feed would be completely empty and I'm sure that user retention after the first visit would be near zero. I do not understand _at all_ why it isn't at least an option to, at some point, decide I only want to see content from people I have actively selected.
- arcatech 2y agoYes, the following feed is the default.
- fckgw 2y agoThat's the default feed option. There is no "for you/trending" algorithm on Bluesky.
- dpkonofa 2y agoNot as a single feed. The "Discover" and "What's Hot Classic" feeds duplicate that behavior, if I'm not mistaken.
- dragonwriter 2y ago“Discover”, “What’s Hot Classic”, and “Popular with Friends”, of the Bluesky-provided feeds (there may be others) are different versions of that concept, but there is not one shoved down your throat like on many other social media apps.
- dragonwriter 2y ago> If one of the options is "only show me content by people that I have explicitely followed/subscribed to", then I might be interested. Yes, like most social media, Bluesky has a “Following” feed available (and, unlike many that always start on a different feed, with Bluesky Following can be — and I think is initially — the default feed it opens to.)
- dpkonofa 2y ago
- ZeroCool2u 2y agoI used a starter pack that focused on NLP/LLM academics and researchers in industry that tend to publish and talk about their work on Twitter, but have moved to BlueSky. It really does feel like a breath of fresh air. It's the content I want to casually browse when I'm on the subway or the ferry with a lot less rage baiting and without bots and spam. Plus, it has that nice chronological feature in the default algorithm that really focuses on recent news, which was always my issue with Threads.
- tbalsam 2y agoDo you have a link to said starter pack? Have been having trouble finding a good one of those specifically in this vein. <3
- ZeroCool2u 2y agoI don't have a link to one readily available, but you could probably just use my following list from my profile. I don't think I'm following much else at this point :) https://bsky.app/profile/uncomfortablywarm.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/uncomfortablywarm.bsky.social
- czottmann 2y agosimonw set up a "LLM labs" feed earlier today: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/lists/3lbfdgdukui2n https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/lists/3lbfdgdukui... Not a starter pack, but it might be useful to you!
- ZeroCool2u 2y agoThis is very cool too!
- zzzeek 2y agocan folks share some tech starter packs here that are preferably not all LLMs? python / web stuff / databases / systems design / hardware etc?
- troyvit 2y agoGod I can't believe what an evangelist I'm becoming for something I only understand a little, but here you go: https://github.com/stevendborrelli/bluesky-tech-starter-packs?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/stevendborrelli/bluesky-tech-starter-pack... https://github.com/ericclemmons/awesome-starter-packs https://github.com/ericclemmons/awesome-starter-packs
- pm90 2y agoBluesky is a refreshing addition to social media. Many users say it reminds them of “old twitter”. I didn’t use twitter so Im not sure what that means. But compared with other social medias? No ads. Auth using your domain. Choose your own timeline algo. Its amazing! I am worried about the commercial aspects though. I am willing to pay them a subscription if they just ignore ads altogether. The fact that all of it is oss (the protocol, and the implementation!) does give me hope that they won’t turn into an ad infected slop.
- bee_rider 2y agoWhat is the business model, anyway?
- steveklabnik 2y agoThey’ve promised no ads. They’ve also said they may roll out premium subscriptions which would give you stuff like “upload longer videos.” Other than that, yet to be determined. But it’s clearly some form of a platform play. Lots of options.
- an_guy 2y agoPromises can be broken. When they run out of VC money, We will see how they will keep it profitable.
- steveklabnik 2y agoFor sure. Just describing the current state of things.
- grishka 2y ago> The use of algorithms to filter information has become the norm because chronologically presenting information from followers creates a confusing morass for the average user to process. Can't disagree more. Call me old-fashioned but I hate any algorithms at all meddling with what I see. If I follow someone, I want to see their posts, all of them, without exceptions. If I don't follow someone, I only want to see their posts if they were knowingly reposted by someone who I do follow. If I want some posts filtered from my feed, I'll set up word filters myself, thank you very much. It's a recurring theme in the modern IT industry that "the average user" can't be trusted to take their own responsibility. It's sometimes taken as an indisputable truth, even. Why does this keep happening? What can I do to put an end to this?
- pessimizer 2y ago> chronologically presenting information from followers creates a confusing morass for the average user to process. This was simply a lie press released by Facebook, and endlessly repeated uncritically. Facebook became Facebook with a chronological feed. It began to manipulate the feed because it was profitable and the government didn't object. That confused the hell out of people for years, when they couldn't figure out why their aunt posted something that never showed up. And after that, social media transformed into something other than keeping track of your family and friends because of the paid injections of crap.
- dfabulich 2y agoSocial media apps need users, and they need users to return and re-engage. The data is clear that even very basic algorithmic feeds get better engagement, presumably by showing users better stuff than whatever happens to be newest. You can't possibly do anything to "put an end to this." Twitter and Bluesky both allow you to see a chronological feed, though you have to jump through some hoops to get to it. Just use that.
- 015a 2y agoMeth producers need users, and they need users to return and re-engage. The data is clear that even a small amount of meth introduced into a community generates higher return on investment, presumably by giving its users a high that's better than not being high. You can't possibly do anything to "put an end to this".
- rsynnott 2y agoDecades later, those people who spent hours on their USENET killfiles (despite the name, killfiles weren't just blocklists - fancier clients supported quite sophisticated scoring - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file) are finally getting their day in the sun. (I don't necessarily disagree that this is the future, but it is quite funny that the "bring your own algorithm" approach was basically forgotten about for about 25 years, and then revived...)
- TheOtherHobbes 2y agoI don't think it was forgotten, it was considered irrelevant by FB/Meta and TwX because they were more interested in collecting information about social graphs and demographics so they could sell ads and influence. So they invented (copied) following/friending individuals, which was the opposite of USENET's newsgroup (topic) system and also (sadly...) a proxy for social status. In reality there's always been huge interest in topic media. Reddit sort-of owned the space for non-real-time posting, and Twitter got some way there with lists for news and the breaking hashtags. BlueSky feels somewhere between those - still short posts (bad...), more topic than social graph, but not so obsessed with clout chasing and status.
- fldskfjdslkfj 2y agoI never understood why something like YouTube doesn't allow you to at least control the level of discovery.
- cube00 2y agoThey control the level because they need users to remain on the site for as long as possible. They'll do a better job of that then if the user has control. You might have a better experience if you could set your own level of discovery but your session could also be shorter and that's unacceptable to an advertising company that needs your eyeballs for as long as possible. Just ask Facebook why I could never see only my friends posts and then twisting the knife by showing me "suggested" click bait junk before it had even exhausted the posts available from my friends.
- intended 2y agoThere is one constant pattern for media. Old Media centralizes. New media decentralizes. New media becomes old media. I’m tempted to say that the only rule is that information networks with humans on it tend to centralize. I have no idea why, or how to explain the behavior, and I’m pretty sure this has happened since print came into existence. If you have the term or field that research would come under, do share. (economics ? media economics? Information x?)
- pessimizer 2y agoThis isn't a pattern. Old media was at least two or three orders of magnitude less centralized than new media, and this was legally enforced by restricting media ownership. After Clinton deregulated media, it centralized. That's it. So the pattern is if you let extremely wealthy people accumulate without limit, they will.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- caekislove 2y agoI'm old enough to remember when the media tried to astroturf Threads like this.
- hnpolicestate 2y agoRemember when HN tried to astroturf Lemmmy?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sharkjacobs 2y agoBluesky is a nice experience, exactly the way other social media sites were five or ten or fifteen years ago, when they were still focusing on user acquisition and were still paying employee salaries with VC money. If we get a few good years of Bluesky before it turns that's not bad, I'll take that, but I feel like the turn is inevitable, right?
- troyvit 2y agoI think that's the big question. I know jack about social media, but since I've joined Bluesky I've seen it go from 0 spam to a spammy post once or twice a week. It remains to be seen how moderation handles that with the large influx of users. Have we had this period of such large players all trying to do the same thing in this segment of social media? We have Threads, X, Bluesky, Truth Social (I think?), and then the federated instances that I can think of. Between Threads, Bluesky, and the federated ones we have three platforms where users can take their toys and leave pretty easily, and Threads tying into the federated platforms adds another way for people to move freely among platforms. There's a chance it _all_ turns, but is it less inevitable since people can move?
- josephd79 2y agoFAD.. will end up like threads and clubhouse.
- blastersyndrome 2y agoWhy do I keep seeing news stories about Bluesky here? It really feels like there some kind of campaign to shill Bluesky on this site. Does anybody else get this vibe or am I going crazy?
- swed420 2y agoLooks like there was a similar pattern for Mastodon: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=mastodon%20users&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Is it really so unexpected that a new platform supposedly gaining traction is tracked with milestones, user experiences, etc on a site such as HN?
- steveklabnik 2y agoIt is growing like crazy right now, so there's a burst of activity. Like anything that gets suddenly popular, that will end, and it'll subside.
- cloverich 2y agoBecause its a rapidly trending story about technology; twitter is a very popular platform and likely a substantial portion of the HN crowd is on it in some fashion. Same reason all the Musk-related changes to Twitter have appeared on HN really. New social networks picking up (real) traction is an extremely rare event and will always draw a series of stories in their wake.
- lavezzi 2y agoNot everything is a conspiracy. It makes logical sense that if something gets popular very quickly, people are going to want to talk about it.
- r00fus 2y agoGiven Musk's direct involvement in Trump's agenda, and his previous desires to make Twitter into an everything app like WeChat, his politicization of the platform - there's an interested in where those people go. 1) People were wondering since 2022 what would happen to Twitter (and it's users) since Musk's acquisition. 2) Musk decided to become actively political and to actively change Twitter as a company and a service. 3) Bluesky had previously existed as a spiritual successor to Twitter and is now gaining steam as a true successor (Mastodon didn't really get that spike, and Threads is quite different from Twitter and heavily integrated with FB and Insta).
- mcv 2y agoBeing able to choose your algorithm, possibly even to customize it, seems so obvious to me that it surprises me it's taken so long. I'm working on my own (Fediverse) site that I hope will some day give you the power to tweak your feed exactly the way you want, but so far nothing about it works, so don't hold your breath on that one. I don't really care about Bluesky doing it because I don't really care about proprietary social media anymore. I want a Fediverse site that does this.
- iteratethis 2y agoWhat people whom carefully tweak their feed don't understand is that they are the exception. Most normies embrace the out of the box algorithms because it is the least amount of effort. Lazy always wins.
- crossroadsguy 2y agoI have been seeing it from the first invites came out. It has gone from “nothing to do see there” to “maybe something rarely” to suddenly, in the last few post-Trump weeks, “a lot of something — and most of them is pure spam (of course for me; I am sure it’s beloved content for others). But of course there is no way to filter that out without losing on other things or being to square one “almost nothing to look at”. Besides, as we have seen with Signal and Mastodon — people will just go back to what they are used to and where most of the crowd and noise is.
- t0bia_s 2y agoIs it another, like Mastodon, rise and fall of so called social platform? Why social anyway when there is no socialising? If anything, those platforms makes humans less socialising and communicating in real life. I might be old fashioned but RSS is future of subscribing content for me.
- nedt 2y agoMastodon has never really risen. Bluesky has also users that aren't so technical and therefore attracts a lot more others. Good News is that they are more clients being created that can talk to Mastodon, Bluesky, but will also include RSS.