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> BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now. I don't see this at all. Quite the

> BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now. I don't see this at all. Quite the opposite in fact. From what I've seen, BlueSky is trying very hard as a company to stay apolitical in an extremely naive way that's going to ultimately drive away users. There's simply no way to to be apolitical as a general social media platform today when social media is so widely used for discussing politics and current events, is a key target for propaganda campaigns, and in a highly fractured political climate. BlueSky gained momentum primarily from people who were driven away from X as it started to move further right, with a lot of engagement driven by left and center-left leaning people, along with people who might not have been directly engaged in politics except for being the target of right-leaning hate campaigns (LGBT people in particular). If they'd doubled down on that, I think they'd be a lot more successful in the long run. Sites like Truth Social, Parler, and X have demonstrated that there's a significant market for politically aligned social media spaces for the right, and both the significant activity in left and center-left spaces in Twitter before the buy-out, and the growth in Bluesky point to there being a significant market for an unapologeticly left leaning social media site as well (I'd point to Tumblr here as another example, although I don't use it and only have a passing idea that it seems to be a predominantly left leaning space). Instead of embracing product market fit with an underserved market though, BlueSky seems to be both-sides-ing themselves into a situation where they're likely going to see an exodus. By inviting and protecting right-wing provocateurs on the platform they are driving away their core audience in order to attract people who already have their choice of established competitors (X). The only value they can add over sites like X and Truth Social is a group of users ready to be the target of trolling and bullying, but having recent experience with migrating away from Twitter I don't see them sticking around BlueSky for long in that environment. In the end, the attempt at being apolitical will doom BlueSky to being a worse less populated X or Truth Social, rather than making the most of the opportunity to be a more decidedly left-leaning social media platform for an audience that prefers to avoid a strong right-wing presence in their social media experience.

Karrot_Kream 2y ago
I think Mastodon and the Fediverse is better equipped for this kind of thing. The software itself acts like a "common carrier", and the networks formed by the instance operators align according to their politics. Truth Social itself is built on Mastodon.
- rebeccaskinner 2y ago
  I really wanted mastodon to take off but in practice it just hasn’t seemed to, or at least any spaces that are worth using are also not discoverable. Anecdotally, as someone who mostly used Twitter for math and theoretical CS (plus some news and current events) I feel like I ought to have been able to fairly easily find a community on mastodon but I never did. BlueSky is doing much better as a replacement for tech twitter and math twitter. I suspect the centralization is necessary to an extent to get critical momentum. You could replicate something like that in mastodon maybe, but nobody seems to have done so in practice and I’m skeptical they will. Truth Social is probably the best example but from what I know, but it never hit the scale of Twitter even with a fairly ravenous core audience.
tqwhite 2y ago
I’m hoping that the problems caused by their effort to avoid viewpoint moderation will be overcome by their composable self-moderation idea. It is increasingly straightforward to control what you see (graze.social is a good example, along with number tools inside bsky itself), both for safety and for creating a well-tuned echo chamber. Add some more tools to facilitate selection of people to block and the only real problem left will be people demanding performative loyalty acts.

Karrot_Kream 2y ago

I think Mastodon and the Fediverse is better equipped for this kind of thing. The software itself acts like a "common carrier", and the networks formed by the instance operators align according to their politics. Truth Social itself is built on Mastodon.

rebeccaskinner 2y ago
I really wanted mastodon to take off but in practice it just hasn’t seemed to, or at least any spaces that are worth using are also not discoverable. Anecdotally, as someone who mostly used Twitter for math and theoretical CS (plus some news and current events) I feel like I ought to have been able to fairly easily find a community on mastodon but I never did. BlueSky is doing much better as a replacement for tech twitter and math twitter. I suspect the centralization is necessary to an extent to get critical momentum. You could replicate something like that in mastodon maybe, but nobody seems to have done so in practice and I’m skeptical they will. Truth Social is probably the best example but from what I know, but it never hit the scale of Twitter even with a fairly ravenous core audience.

tqwhite 2y ago

I’m hoping that the problems caused by their effort to avoid viewpoint moderation will be overcome by their composable self-moderation idea. It is increasingly straightforward to control what you see (graze.social is a good example, along with number tools inside bsky itself), both for safety and for creating a well-tuned echo chamber. Add some more tools to facilitate selection of people to block and the only real problem left will be people demanding performative loyalty acts.