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Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same.

Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky

shigawire 2y ago
There is more momentum against Musk now than when threads launched. Not sure it is enough to overcome the network effect - but there is a lot of illwill towards his projects. I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.
- unnamed76ri 2y ago
  Free speech is the upside of X. People leaving to join the echo chambers of Bluesky or Threads, only serves to turn X into the echo chamber they claim it is.
  - madeofpalk 2y ago
    I know I'm falling for the bait, but saying X is some last bastion of free speech is baffling, considering it's actual actions. Why do the remaining posters keep self-censoring "Blues*y"?
    - unnamed76ri 2y ago
      I don’t know what you are referring to. I’ve never seen someone self-censor Bluesky. I see people talking about it on X all the time. Mainly to highlight some of the worst content they find there but that’s another subject… I tried checking out Bluesky the other day. The feed was mainly unhinged political rants of a very particular flavor.
      - threecheese 2y ago
        A feature of Bluesky is the ability to change your feed algorithm (or code your own - yes I wrote ‘code’). You can easily filter all political (labeled) content. To say that BS is an echo chamber is untrue, though I do not disbelieve that you observed that algorithmic choice when you first tried the app. There are many echo chambers for sure, but the protocol is designed to permit you to exclude or join them. Unlike competitor systems (which I also use, and dislike more and more due to the lack of ability to choose what I see - despite trying).
        glenstein 2y ago
        Right, and what's more the charge of echo chamber has always been intellectually lazy. You can have a fruitful exchanges of ideas and information and debates on a foundation of similar values in a way that amounts to more than just repeating ideas back and forth. Using the term as a catch-all for a shared desire for conversations to have certain ground rules or certain community values, or subjects that spark your intellectual curiosity, calling those echo chambers is shallow and is not going to inform you about the real cultural dynamics that drive those kinds of communities. It's just a lazy way to try absence of critical thought by looking for the wrong thing. If people labeling things as echo chambers cared about the things they said they cared about, they would look at entirely different criteria, such as epistemic closure, the quality of relationships, propensity for trolling, and so on.
        tensor 2y ago
        > more than just repeating ideas back and forth. Yes, people on X seem very upset that they can be blocked on bluesky. But if I've heard what you have to say and don't want to hear the same thing 1000x, that's not an echo chamber. That's me hearing you, disagreeing, and you having nothing more of value to add. Discussion requires communication, not simply repeating propaganda over and over and over, which is 99% of the time all that anyone crying "echo chamber" tends to do.
    - mlboss 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - Fnoord 2y ago
        Cause it is trolling, pure hatred. Hermaphroditism exists, simple scientifically backed up fact.
        glenstein 2y ago
        Right, this is one of the games that trolls play which is kind of to search for normalizing language, create a provocation, and then relish in the attention derived from the provocation.
        jazzyjackson 2y ago
        Hermaphroditism is an "exception proves the rule" kind of thing - they are not a third sex, and I don't think the "two genders" crowd hates intersex people or even men who claim to be women, but they do probably hate people who claim that it's bigotry to say sex is a binary.
      - sapphicsnail 2y ago
        You literally can't say cis on X anymore without your engagement getting nuked. Are they going to punish people for saying straight next?
      - insane_dreamer 2y ago
        that's completely untrue
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        I mean, you’ll pretty swiftly end up on transphobia blocklists, but what of it? Like, unless you want to force people who don’t want to hear your shit to hear your shit (note that this is not what ‘free speech’ means), what harm is that doing you?
  - mcphage 2y ago
    > Free speech is the upside of X. You can’t possibly believe that, can you? Have you not noticed the vast gulf between what Musk says and what Musk does?
    - unnamed76ri 2y ago
      I don’t care much for Musk one way or the other. What I do know is that old Twitter actively censored ideas that didn’t align with their world view and new Twitter stopped that fascistic approach. Musk fired 6,000 Twitter employees and the site not only continues to work fine but has rolled out many new features. What were those 6,000 people even doing? Just how big was the censorship team?
      - mcphage 2y ago
        But it does censor idea that don’t align with their world view. They do it even more now than they did before; the only difference is now they claim they don’t. And it continues to run, but not well. The nice thing about the kind of site it is, is that if you don’t see a particular message, you can’t tell it’s missing.
        trustinmenowpls 2y ago
        idk, I specifically go to twitter for my political fix and when I go to the for you section I see a ton of liberal stuff and a ton of conservative stuff, many posts are unhinged in either direction. Others are more moderate, in general I don't really follow any political accounts, and yet I see a many posts that give me a great view of the zeitgeist for each side.
        hooverd 2y ago
        Eh, post Musk I see may more straight-up StormFront shit from "verified" posters.
        Jensson 2y ago
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    > Free speech is the upside of X lol, you seriously believe that a network fully controlled by the world's richest man, accountable to no one, is a bastion of free speech? I presume you have a bridge to sell me as well?
  - pengowray 2y ago
    There is no "free speech" on X. Musk has banned journalists. Banned users he didn't like. Arbitrarily banned random words. Banned links to Mastodon. Banned links to linktree. Encouraged harassment of users and news organizations until they left the platform. Banned links to articles about political candidates. No unpaid user's reply can appear in the replies to one of Musk's tweets in any practical sense. X is not a free speech platform. Musk is a liar. He is lying to you. You are being lied to. If you think X has anything resembling "free speech" I have bridge made of solar powered tiles to sell you. (That was another scam of Musk's if you missed it). The lively debate you crave does not and cannot happen on X.
kalupa 2y ago
I’m going to guess you don’t use the service much… You’d likely have a very different opinion otherwise
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
It would be the worst thing for Bluesky if the eternal September came over from Twitter. I think that population is too passive to make the move and will put up with any level of advertising etc.
dkrich 2y ago
As someone (who likes to think) is pretty unbiased politically, I can say I’ll go wherever the people I’m interested post. I have been somewhat surprised that pretty non political accounts have moved to Bluesky which I have interpreted as both political and motivated by the loads of political bs that are posted on x that normal people simply get tired of. I think Bluesky will gain more traction than threads but will end up being a more successful mastodon. A place where people with massive followings who simply don’t like x will post and there will be two competing apps.
- jsheard 2y ago
  It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not, it's that it's flavor of politics is increasingly resembling that of 4chan. I just skimmed though the auto-play videos on my account and the algorithm decided to show me this for some reason: https://x.com/AlaskanTom/status/1860339990992925170 https://x.com/AlaskanTom/status/1860339990992925170 That's far from the worst I've seen on there either, evidently you can just post about how Hitler was right and it won't affect your visibility at all now, nevermind get you banned.
  - jghn 2y ago
    > It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not But this is not true. I always use my "following" feed and not my "for you" feed. Other than sponsored ads the only thing I see are posts from people I follow. I don't understand why people persist with the narrative that Twitter forces people into "the algorithm". I've been splitting time between Twitter & Bluesky for the last year or so. The only real difference i notice is the set of people I follow as until recently most of my Twitter follows weren't on Bluesky
    - jsheard 2y ago
      I also only use the following feed, but a fairly recent change to the video player means it now immediately cuts to the next video in the auto-play queue (or an ad) when it finishes, and that's always algorithmically driven regardless of which feed you were using.
grbrr 2y ago
For social media, moderation makes the product
ineedaj0b 2y ago
X is pretty great now. Once the politics dies down a little it'll be the best place to be for the next 4+ years
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there! It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in. There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss. The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to. There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on. Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping. The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049
bertil 2y ago
The difference in moderation is night and day. Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them). That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads. Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.
- transcriptase 2y ago
  What the hell are you doing or saying to warrant that kind of negative attention?
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    All you have to be is a proponent of ________ politics, LGBTQ, an opinionated woman, etc and you will receive death/rape threats on twitter. I’m sure 99% of them are bots, but still it can be unnerving. A strong opinion on a contentious topic will get you death threats eventually. That’s why I have DMs turned off and block/mute rather than engage trolls
    - bertil 2y ago
      I don’t even mention any of that.
  - bertil 2y ago
    I’ll let you guess. The thing that pisses people off the most is quoting well-known facts and statistics. Ironically, it’s making Elon Musk sound like a hero. The fact that you don’t know and people offer dozens of credible guesses should probably tell you the problem is widespread.
  - xena 2y ago
tapoxi 2y ago
Bluesky's custom labels, algorithm choice, client choice, and starter packs seem like legitimately cool features.
ianbicking 2y ago
I have given Threads a good try, and recently when Bluesky activity started up I restarted using Bluesky (it didn't stick for me the first time). The technology doesn't really matter that much, as long as it's basically competent. It's only the social network itself. I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't. Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us. X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two. Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.
madeofpalk 2y ago
> They don’t seem to offer anything new Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this. 'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny. Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function. But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.
that_guy_iain 2y ago
> Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago. > They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads. I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.
JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
I'm not sure Threads ever had that much of a spike in usage beyond the first day of new accounts. Got the impression a huge number of people curious about it signed up due to the very easy onboarding if you already had an instagram, looked around a little and then never went back. Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.
thekevan 2y ago
>but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same I disagree. Bluesky will grow further and then be like a "Coke or Pepsi" to Twitter. (Albeit, it will stay smaller than Twitter.) I have 2 threads accounts and never created a single one. That's because I had 2 Instagram accounts. The difference is people chose to go to Bluesky, Threads accounts were just added on to your Insta account by Meta.
afavour 2y ago
IMO the biggest difference is that they aren’t paying users based on engagement. That’s the #1 worst decision Musk made after buying Twitter, it incentivizes people to post incendiary content, to troll and to outright lie in the aim of going viral. You see it all the time on Twitter these days and Bluesky is vastly better not having that motive.
epistasis 2y ago
It's not just checkbox features that matter, it's also the entire algorithm and who is allowed to have their posts gain organic traction. X actively penalizes high quality information, and pushes misinformation in an attempt to become an echo chamber. If you want to find your colleauges' posts, if you want to find high quality information, if you want good links to long articles, X is no longer the place to be. If you want to have click-bait and rage-bait or lots of right-wing politics, X will cater to your needs. But it won't cater to somebody that's trying to get to highly-curated high-signal information networks that Twitter allowed in the past. That's all been actively destroyed, with great intention.
raxxorraxor 2y ago
I think overzealous moderation was what drove some people off Twitter in the first place. Another social media site asking for my phone number, no thank you. I read the occasional Twitter/X and probably now Bluesky post, but this offers nothing that would attract me. Twitter/X/Bluesky/Insta/Threads is for people that like celebrities with some interesting stuff in between. But overall that isn't worth it.

shigawire 2y ago

There is more momentum against Musk now than when threads launched. Not sure it is enough to overcome the network effect - but there is a lot of illwill towards his projects. I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.

unnamed76ri 2y ago
Free speech is the upside of X. People leaving to join the echo chambers of Bluesky or Threads, only serves to turn X into the echo chamber they claim it is.
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  I know I'm falling for the bait, but saying X is some last bastion of free speech is baffling, considering it's actual actions. Why do the remaining posters keep self-censoring "Blues*y"?
  - unnamed76ri 2y ago
    I don’t know what you are referring to. I’ve never seen someone self-censor Bluesky. I see people talking about it on X all the time. Mainly to highlight some of the worst content they find there but that’s another subject… I tried checking out Bluesky the other day. The feed was mainly unhinged political rants of a very particular flavor.
    - threecheese 2y ago
      A feature of Bluesky is the ability to change your feed algorithm (or code your own - yes I wrote ‘code’). You can easily filter all political (labeled) content. To say that BS is an echo chamber is untrue, though I do not disbelieve that you observed that algorithmic choice when you first tried the app. There are many echo chambers for sure, but the protocol is designed to permit you to exclude or join them. Unlike competitor systems (which I also use, and dislike more and more due to the lack of ability to choose what I see - despite trying).
      - glenstein 2y ago
        Right, and what's more the charge of echo chamber has always been intellectually lazy. You can have a fruitful exchanges of ideas and information and debates on a foundation of similar values in a way that amounts to more than just repeating ideas back and forth. Using the term as a catch-all for a shared desire for conversations to have certain ground rules or certain community values, or subjects that spark your intellectual curiosity, calling those echo chambers is shallow and is not going to inform you about the real cultural dynamics that drive those kinds of communities. It's just a lazy way to try absence of critical thought by looking for the wrong thing. If people labeling things as echo chambers cared about the things they said they cared about, they would look at entirely different criteria, such as epistemic closure, the quality of relationships, propensity for trolling, and so on.
        tensor 2y ago
        > more than just repeating ideas back and forth. Yes, people on X seem very upset that they can be blocked on bluesky. But if I've heard what you have to say and don't want to hear the same thing 1000x, that's not an echo chamber. That's me hearing you, disagreeing, and you having nothing more of value to add. Discussion requires communication, not simply repeating propaganda over and over and over, which is 99% of the time all that anyone crying "echo chamber" tends to do.
  - mlboss 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Fnoord 2y ago
      Cause it is trolling, pure hatred. Hermaphroditism exists, simple scientifically backed up fact.
      - glenstein 2y ago
        Right, this is one of the games that trolls play which is kind of to search for normalizing language, create a provocation, and then relish in the attention derived from the provocation.
      - jazzyjackson 2y ago
        Hermaphroditism is an "exception proves the rule" kind of thing - they are not a third sex, and I don't think the "two genders" crowd hates intersex people or even men who claim to be women, but they do probably hate people who claim that it's bigotry to say sex is a binary.
    - sapphicsnail 2y ago
      You literally can't say cis on X anymore without your engagement getting nuked. Are they going to punish people for saying straight next?
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      that's completely untrue
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      I mean, you’ll pretty swiftly end up on transphobia blocklists, but what of it? Like, unless you want to force people who don’t want to hear your shit to hear your shit (note that this is not what ‘free speech’ means), what harm is that doing you?
- mcphage 2y ago
  > Free speech is the upside of X. You can’t possibly believe that, can you? Have you not noticed the vast gulf between what Musk says and what Musk does?
  - unnamed76ri 2y ago
    I don’t care much for Musk one way or the other. What I do know is that old Twitter actively censored ideas that didn’t align with their world view and new Twitter stopped that fascistic approach. Musk fired 6,000 Twitter employees and the site not only continues to work fine but has rolled out many new features. What were those 6,000 people even doing? Just how big was the censorship team?
    - mcphage 2y ago
      But it does censor idea that don’t align with their world view. They do it even more now than they did before; the only difference is now they claim they don’t. And it continues to run, but not well. The nice thing about the kind of site it is, is that if you don’t see a particular message, you can’t tell it’s missing.
      - trustinmenowpls 2y ago
        idk, I specifically go to twitter for my political fix and when I go to the for you section I see a ton of liberal stuff and a ton of conservative stuff, many posts are unhinged in either direction. Others are more moderate, in general I don't really follow any political accounts, and yet I see a many posts that give me a great view of the zeitgeist for each side.
        hooverd 2y ago
        Eh, post Musk I see may more straight-up StormFront shit from "verified" posters.
        Jensson 2y ago
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > Free speech is the upside of X lol, you seriously believe that a network fully controlled by the world's richest man, accountable to no one, is a bastion of free speech? I presume you have a bridge to sell me as well?
- pengowray 2y ago
  There is no "free speech" on X. Musk has banned journalists. Banned users he didn't like. Arbitrarily banned random words. Banned links to Mastodon. Banned links to linktree. Encouraged harassment of users and news organizations until they left the platform. Banned links to articles about political candidates. No unpaid user's reply can appear in the replies to one of Musk's tweets in any practical sense. X is not a free speech platform. Musk is a liar. He is lying to you. You are being lied to. If you think X has anything resembling "free speech" I have bridge made of solar powered tiles to sell you. (That was another scam of Musk's if you missed it). The lively debate you crave does not and cannot happen on X.

kalupa 2y ago

I’m going to guess you don’t use the service much… You’d likely have a very different opinion otherwise

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

It would be the worst thing for Bluesky if the eternal September came over from Twitter. I think that population is too passive to make the move and will put up with any level of advertising etc.

dkrich 2y ago

As someone (who likes to think) is pretty unbiased politically, I can say I’ll go wherever the people I’m interested post. I have been somewhat surprised that pretty non political accounts have moved to Bluesky which I have interpreted as both political and motivated by the loads of political bs that are posted on x that normal people simply get tired of. I think Bluesky will gain more traction than threads but will end up being a more successful mastodon. A place where people with massive followings who simply don’t like x will post and there will be two competing apps.

jsheard 2y ago
It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not, it's that it's flavor of politics is increasingly resembling that of 4chan. I just skimmed though the auto-play videos on my account and the algorithm decided to show me this for some reason: https://x.com/AlaskanTom/status/1860339990992925170 https://x.com/AlaskanTom/status/1860339990992925170 That's far from the worst I've seen on there either, evidently you can just post about how Hitler was right and it won't affect your visibility at all now, nevermind get you banned.
- jghn 2y ago
  > It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not But this is not true. I always use my "following" feed and not my "for you" feed. Other than sponsored ads the only thing I see are posts from people I follow. I don't understand why people persist with the narrative that Twitter forces people into "the algorithm". I've been splitting time between Twitter & Bluesky for the last year or so. The only real difference i notice is the set of people I follow as until recently most of my Twitter follows weren't on Bluesky
  - jsheard 2y ago
    I also only use the following feed, but a fairly recent change to the video player means it now immediately cuts to the next video in the auto-play queue (or an ad) when it finishes, and that's always algorithmically driven regardless of which feed you were using.

grbrr 2y ago

For social media, moderation makes the product

ineedaj0b 2y ago

X is pretty great now. Once the politics dies down a little it'll be the best place to be for the next 4+ years

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there! It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in. There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss. The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to. There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on. Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping. The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049

bertil 2y ago

The difference in moderation is night and day. Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them). That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads. Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.

transcriptase 2y ago
What the hell are you doing or saying to warrant that kind of negative attention?
- EasyMark 2y ago
  All you have to be is a proponent of ________ politics, LGBTQ, an opinionated woman, etc and you will receive death/rape threats on twitter. I’m sure 99% of them are bots, but still it can be unnerving. A strong opinion on a contentious topic will get you death threats eventually. That’s why I have DMs turned off and block/mute rather than engage trolls
  - bertil 2y ago
    I don’t even mention any of that.
- bertil 2y ago
  I’ll let you guess. The thing that pisses people off the most is quoting well-known facts and statistics. Ironically, it’s making Elon Musk sound like a hero. The fact that you don’t know and people offer dozens of credible guesses should probably tell you the problem is widespread.
- xena 2y ago

tapoxi 2y ago

Bluesky's custom labels, algorithm choice, client choice, and starter packs seem like legitimately cool features.

ianbicking 2y ago

I have given Threads a good try, and recently when Bluesky activity started up I restarted using Bluesky (it didn't stick for me the first time). The technology doesn't really matter that much, as long as it's basically competent. It's only the social network itself. I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't. Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us. X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two. Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.

madeofpalk 2y ago

> They don’t seem to offer anything new Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this. 'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny. Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function. But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.

that_guy_iain 2y ago

> Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago. > They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads. I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.

JansjoFromIkea 2y ago

I'm not sure Threads ever had that much of a spike in usage beyond the first day of new accounts. Got the impression a huge number of people curious about it signed up due to the very easy onboarding if you already had an instagram, looked around a little and then never went back. Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.

thekevan 2y ago

>but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same I disagree. Bluesky will grow further and then be like a "Coke or Pepsi" to Twitter. (Albeit, it will stay smaller than Twitter.) I have 2 threads accounts and never created a single one. That's because I had 2 Instagram accounts. The difference is people chose to go to Bluesky, Threads accounts were just added on to your Insta account by Meta.

afavour 2y ago

IMO the biggest difference is that they aren’t paying users based on engagement. That’s the #1 worst decision Musk made after buying Twitter, it incentivizes people to post incendiary content, to troll and to outright lie in the aim of going viral. You see it all the time on Twitter these days and Bluesky is vastly better not having that motive.

epistasis 2y ago

It's not just checkbox features that matter, it's also the entire algorithm and who is allowed to have their posts gain organic traction. X actively penalizes high quality information, and pushes misinformation in an attempt to become an echo chamber. If you want to find your colleauges' posts, if you want to find high quality information, if you want good links to long articles, X is no longer the place to be. If you want to have click-bait and rage-bait or lots of right-wing politics, X will cater to your needs. But it won't cater to somebody that's trying to get to highly-curated high-signal information networks that Twitter allowed in the past. That's all been actively destroyed, with great intention.

raxxorraxor 2y ago

I think overzealous moderation was what drove some people off Twitter in the first place. Another social media site asking for my phone number, no thank you. I read the occasional Twitter/X and probably now Bluesky post, but this offers nothing that would attract me. Twitter/X/Bluesky/Insta/Threads is for people that like celebrities with some interesting stuff in between. But overall that isn't worth it.