8 ms·

Bluesky's science takeover: 70% of Nature poll respondents use platform

126 points by ironyman 2y ago

matthewdgreen 2y ago
BlueSky has its problems, but the problems are more bearable than Twitter. You can have conversations about science and technology without weird angry people/bots popping up in the replies and shouting at you. Twitter used to be great that way as well, but now it isn't. Losing those communication channels is a big loss, no matter what you think of social media.
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  Bluesky also doesn't show me videos of people dying every 10 minutes.
  - jeffhuys 2y ago
    X doesn't do that for me either... If you see posts you don't like, block/hide them. X learns. That's the cost of a free platform though. Rather have that than being banned for thinking wrong.
    - duxup 2y ago
      Extreme content aside (well sometimes included): Personally I found the "job" of managing who you follow / feed and pruning on twitter tiresome and at times impossible. Bluesky has been better, maybe only due to fewer people, but if so then so be it.
      - aredox 2y ago
        In the end, the only thing Musk has done is cripple the spam filter of twitter.
        duxup 2y ago
        Maybe, but I'm pretty sure that thing is not a lot of user's motivation ... at least as far as the discussion goes / their motivation to go elsewhere. Side note: It is amusing how the current ownership's concern about bots vanished as soon as they took over.
      - grajaganDev 2y ago
        Bluesky has a nuclear block which really helps.
        verdverm 2y ago
        Bluesky, or more accurately ATProto, has stackable moderation which is more sustainable in the long run https://github.blog/news-insights/the-library/browser-monitoring-for-github-com/ https://github.blog/news-insights/the-library/browser-monito... tl;dr - anyone can run a labelling service, users have choice which one(s) they use (Bluesky &| 3rd party), competition and network effect will surface the good ones and weed out the bad ones. This concept is going to be extended to community notes, sometime this year I suspect
        patmorgan23 2y ago
        Yeah. Think that got the broad strokes of the atproto architecture right for social media. Individual data stores -> aggregation/crawler layer -> services/app views. Feels like how search engines work with html web sites. I think it will be more successful than Mastodon has been.
        verdverm 2y ago
        It's already 3x+ the size and growing faster, I would say it is already more successful in one regard. Next up is to build out the app ecosystem that APub has
        immibis 2y ago
        Note: the reasons Bluesky is more popular than Mastodon have nothing to do with their technical architectures (except insofar as some people have learned helplessness about x@y), and everything to do with one being heavily marketed by a billionaire. Though people do seem to prefer a consistent moderation policy, even if it's harsher. People don't like to have free speech about the things they want to speak about, and have another group of people choose to ignore it. They want to either speak to everyone at once or be blocked from everyone at once (at which time they make a new account).
    - aredox 2y ago
      Except that it is exactly the same, as Twitter will use those signals to derank globally the users whose posts are blocked too often. Meanwhile, Musk himself is banning people for thinking what he decides is wrong.
    - dangus 2y ago
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-musk-silencing-his-critics-as-journalists-are-suspended-by-x/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-mus... https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/06/business/x-banned-a-journalist-for-disproving-a-rumor-about-elon-musk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/06/business/x-banned-a-journalis... https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-x-twitter-account-suspensions-rising-2024-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-x-twitter-account-... https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-business-dac21de7abb6167bb604f5317aeda10a https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-business-dac... https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-musk-throttled-tweets-turkey-presidential-election-2023-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/musk-tried-to-punish-critics-judge-rules-in-tossing-a-lawsuit/ar-BB1kvzSM https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/musk-tried-to-punish-criti... Should I go on?
      - pmarreck 2y ago
        (apologies for AI summary of the above articles; was just trying to be helpful!) Elon Musk's tenure at X (formerly Twitter) has been marked by a series of actions that starkly contrast his self-proclaimed stance as a "free speech absolutist." Despite his vocal advocacy for unrestricted expression, Musk has overseen a significant increase in account suspensions and content restrictions, often targeting critics and journalists. Notably, X has suspended numerous journalists who have reported critically on Musk or his ventures. For instance, in December 2022, the platform suspended accounts of reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, among others, who covered Musk's activities. These actions have raised concerns about the suppression of dissenting voices and the erosion of journalistic freedom on the platform. Associated Press Furthermore, under Musk's leadership, X has shown a heightened willingness to comply with government censorship requests. During the 2023 Turkish presidential election, the platform restricted access to certain content within Turkey, a move that critics argue was influenced by Musk's business interests in the region, including SpaceX's satellite launches in collaboration with the Turkish government. These actions suggest a departure from Musk's professed commitment to free speech, revealing a pattern of behavior that prioritizes personal and business interests over the principle of open expression. The increasing suppression of critical voices and compliance with authoritarian regimes' censorship demands highlight a concerning inconsistency between Musk's stated ideals and his actions as the steward of a major social media platform.
    - hedora 2y ago
      Blue sky supports federation, and X is selectively censored by the top level of the US executive branch. How do you define “free”?
      - immibis 2y ago
        In practice, Bluesky is a fully centralized system. You can run your own server to feed posts into the single centralized system.
        mayneack 2y ago
        The moderation is mostly federated. You can choose which lists to subscribe to to mute/block/label as you see fit.
        immibis 2y ago
        I created a parody Donald Trump account as an experiment. It was deleted for "impersonation". Are you saying if I had run it on my own PDS, other people would get to choose whether it was deleted for them or not?
        mayneack 2y ago
        I obviously can't speak to your specific situation. As I understand it, both X and bluesky require parodies to be labeled. From what I can tell, most content moderation on bluesky is done via labelers, which you need a pds to run, but not to use. Both X and bluesky have semi-automated moderation processes with an inherent false positive rate. The two high profile cases I'm aware of (Jessie Singal and Laura Loomer) that were suspended automatically eventually got turned back on once a human was involved. https://bsky.app/profile/jessesingal.com https://bsky.app/profile/jessesingal.com https://bsky.app/profile/loomered.bsky.social/post/3lemtdvls7k2n https://bsky.app/profile/loomered.bsky.social/post/3lemtdvls...
        immibis 2y ago
  - Vaslo 2y ago
    Literally never had this issue on X.
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 2y ago
      I don't either, but that's because I stopped using Twitter ages ago. It's a very reliable solution to all of Twitter's problems.
    - afavour 2y ago
      This is far from the first time I've seen it mentioned. Seems quite possible that if you're a heavy user it has enough source material for your recommendations that they'll be good, but for less regular users it'll draw from whatever is 'trending'.
  - TheChaplain 2y ago
    Because there are no algorithms yet. I try to follow the situation in Ukraine and I see lots of videos on X with russians murdering ukrainians as well as their own.
    - afavour 2y ago
      Well, no, violent content is against Bluesky's terms of service so it would be removed if flagged. Twitter has no such restriction so violent content spreads widely. I understand the free speech principle at work but from a purely pragmatic point of view I simply don't want to see that stuff in my day to day browsing of social media.
    - llm_nerd 2y ago
      Bluesky has a number of algorithmic feeds. For instance "What's Hot Classic". And while that feed doesn't have violence, it does have a surprisingly high number of "dudes holding their cock" and furry-related images, which seems like something that should probably be filtered out or at least tagged.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > Because there are no algorithms yet. One of the major selling points of Bluesky is that you get to chose your own algorithms (or rather, chose what algorithms you want to use, that others built). So there are way more algorithms than any other social media, today. Only difference is that with Bluesky you get to chose which one you use. https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice
  - TiredOfLife 2y ago
    Bluesky doesn't have a working only followed feed.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      What's wrong with the "following" feed? Works for me.
      - paulgb 2y ago
        Same. And Bluesky also allows you to bring your own feed algorithm, so if you don't like the discover feed you could make a better one! It's not a hypothetical either, I follow and use several custom feeds today (for example, one that shows post by people who follow _me_, so I can discover people to follow back).
      - TiredOfLife 2y ago
        It shows couple days worth of posts by people you follow and then turns into discover feed. While OnlyPosts feed shows posts only from 1 to 4 days.
        pfraze 2y ago
        Infra team recently switched the timeline backend to a new cluster and didn't backfill. It will regrow over time. Sorry about the confusion that caused. It was one of those things that happened in the scaling rush.
- after_mirage 2y ago
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  - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
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    - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
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      - giraffe_lady 2y ago
        What is "being bulldozed by them" like for you? I hear this sort of thing a lot, but I really can't say I've ever felt this way. And I am a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition, but I just don't ever feel personally affected by this issue.
        immibis 2y ago
        [flagged]
        concerndc1tizen 2y ago
        The more you suppress normal people, the more people you will add to your opposition. But perhaps the right wing knows that. Maybe they're adding fuel to the fire by supporting extremist LGBT people. Wouldn't that be something!
        concerndc1tizen 2y ago
        Bulldozed: flagged, downvoted, villified, sidetracked, strawmanned, ad hominem, getting cancelled. They often use tactics like brigading, dogpiling, astroturfing.
        2y ago
- duxup 2y ago
  Yeah the typical issue of "they could go bad" is always present. Really that's internet services history in a nutshell. You use the thing, you move when you feel motivated.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > Yeah the typical issue of "they could go bad" is always present. It's at least refreshing to see Bluesky PBC try to prevent it by setting up guardrails themselves, like allowing people to host their data somewhere else, which seems to work today already. Here's to hoping the federation stuff shapes up nicely too.
    - verdverm 2y ago
      The community is organizing the first ATProto Developer Conference, Seattle, March 22-23 Getting together to show and talk about building the next gen of social media https://atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf-confirming-date-seattle/ https://atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf-confirming-date-seattl...
      - diggan 2y ago
        That's awesome to hear! You happen to know about something similar but outside of the US? Any continent is fine, even Canada or Mexico would be OK.
        verdverm 2y ago
        No, this is totally grassroots by the people, though it is in the same city Bluesky is located. This kind of thing is just getting started, it is actually a guy from Vancouver that is taking the lead on this one. I'd recommend - getting on the ATProto dev Discord: https://discord.gg/VweB8gn5 https://discord.gg/VweB8gn5 - getting involved with: https://github.com/lexicon-community/lexicon https://github.com/lexicon-community/lexicon - using the #ATProtoDev hashtag There is a lot of overlap in the people and the developer community is starting to snowball
- itsoktocry 2y ago
  >You can have conversations about science and technology without weird angry people/bots popping up in the replies and shouting at you There's a guy on Twitter who posts about AI and has been reposting his Bluesky interactions on Twitter. Absolutely unhinged people going off on his benign takes. It's hilarious. People who have moved to Bluesky like to tell themselves it's the "smart place", but it's really just the place where you agree with the politics.
  - peterpost2 2y ago
    I'm not sure if I would agree with that, definitely a lot of political arguments going on in bsky. It definitely used to be an echochamber though. But with Twitter being packed with Nazi's and every other comment being a sex-spambot I would guess plenty of non-traditional bluesky users have come over.
    - itsoktocry 2y ago
      I have a niche I follow on Twitter, and during the great Twitter migration a few month back, everyone made an effort to head to Bluesky. I did as well, because I want good content, I don't care about the platform. It's already a ghost town. Sparse posting, lots of empty "here's what I cooked for supper" posts.
    - immibis 2y ago
      If Nazis become the majority, then non-Nazism is an echo chamber phenomenon. Is this fixable?
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        Yes, through blocklists. Jesse Singal and his coterie of ‘just asking questions’ ‘polite’ transphobes are on Bluesky, say, but through judicious use of blocklists one never needs to hear from them.
        immibis 2y ago
        That's an echo chamber.
- fnord77 2y ago
  > You can have conversations about science and technology without weird angry people/bots popping up in the replies and shouting at you. If the conversation is about climate science, no you cannot unless your POV is the oceans are going to boil off in the next 5 years.
- eightysixfour 2y ago
  I wish there was a bluesky with less moderation. I don’t want bots and spam, but since I can control my own feeds and the mute functions actually work, I can shape it better than the other networks let me. I think that should be the real goal.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    You can actually unsubscribe from default moderation, and there's quite a lot of NSFW on there if you want it. There are some things they won't host, but it may be possible to work around that with your own PDS.
    - eightysixfour 2y ago
      I meant more along the lines of kicking off people with viewpoints their user base doesn’t like. The Lauren Loomer’s of the world. I vehemently disagree with every thing she stands for and I agree that Bluesky has a right to ban her. But long run, I think we suffer when the biggest platforms turn into partisan black holes. I want a platform that is accessible to "normal" people, spends tons of effort blocking bots, has a UX that makes it easy to manage content you do and don’t see, and is open to any human to speak.
  - immibis 2y ago
    How would it be different from Mastodon?
    - eightysixfour 2y ago
      This comes up in most bluesky threads. I honestly can’t tell you what it is but every experience I have with Mastodon sucks. Maybe you can point me in a better direction. I want a platform that: • blocks bots and maybe doesn’t allow companies as users • user control first (blocking, custom algos, smart word filtering, content/topic based filtering) • does not deplatform users for their views • has community notes
- pjc50 2y ago
  The blocklists systems can often be over-broad and sneakily include personal beefs, but overall the bluesky norm of "block on sight on first aggressive contact" is having a positive effect against engagement-baiting. Hostile actors seem to be trying something else: LLM "reply guys", which make superficially plausible conversation in your replies. Twitter is really the King Log/King Stork parable writ large. It had problems under Jack, as absentee owner, but getting an owner who is interested in making it his personal platform is much worse. Edit: this post has already been flagged off the front page, lol
  - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
    It's an interesting arms race, where an optimal bot has better chances of surviving than a normal person that will naturally have diverse opinions. As I pointed out in another comment: The right can pretend to be antagonizing extremist LGBTs to get more centrists to support their agenda - while undermining the LGBT movement itself also from within.
    - immibis 2y ago
      If you support people who "pretend to" antagonize LGBTs you're not a centrist.
      - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
        You misunderstood: I'm saying that right wing activist groups can use botnet to pretend to be LGBT, while being hateful and extreme in their views, to the point that "normal" people (who are indifferent about LGBT) become annoyed with "LGBT" to the point of supporting Trump etc. I'm saying that LGBT groups need to be aware that there is a serious internal threat of people pretending to be LGBT while harassing people who are not against LGBT, but will be. An alternative explanation is that LGBT people are just a hateful bunch, but I'm trying to argue against that hypothesis.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > The blocklists systems can often be over-broad and sneakily include personal beefs, but overall the bluesky norm of "block on sight on first aggressive contact" is having a positive effect against engagement-baiting. Yeah, it's kind of inspiring to see even the common person is getting used to just block trolls on sight, rather than engaging in it. Something we veterans been doing for 2 decades or more, but good to see others are catching up on how to save your sanity :) That said, the other day I ended up on a "Transphobes, Genocide Enthusiasts, and Crumbums" list for some reason on Bluesky, while I haven't even posted anything about those topics or engaging in anything like that. Makes one wonder how many others on a list like that actually even discussed the supposed topics? I kind of wish people had to justify additions to lists somehow, like adding a reason or at least linking the post that made you add this user to the list, or something similar.
- clumsysmurf 2y ago
  > BlueSky has its problems I had this same problem with twitter - I would like to follow a person, say Joe, that talks about X, Y, and * ... but I'm only interested in X. I would like more granular pub/sub so I could follow Joe/X. Of course, Joe would have to set up those channels.
- deleted 2y ago
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boringg 2y ago
Thanks for marketing push for bluesky via nature!
- Vaslo 2y ago
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  - verdverm 2y ago
    Musk has pushed people away with his policies and cult of personality. It's his own fault, maybe he did ** that coming?
  - mayneack 2y ago
    What's far left about the platform? The platform seems more open. Given the choice between a left or right user base, seems like the platform fundamentals would be more important.
    - hagbard_c 2y ago
      The platform itself - i.e. the technical bits - is not "far-left", it just ended up absorbing the most recent victims of Musk-phobia. In that way is a mirror image of what happened to Twitter-alternatives from back when Twitter was run by more or less the same crowd as that which now insists on migrating to BS: something like Parler became a haven for those who were pushed out and with that ended up being a "right-wing" platform even though the technology (based on Mastodon) itself was no "right-wing". Wikipedia ended up with a left-wing bias due to the influx of ideologically left-leaning editors (academics and ex-academics with time on their hands), not because Mediawiki is a "left-wing" wiki engine.
      - 2y ago
Spacecosmonaut 2y ago
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- krapp 2y ago
  Science is not a political bias.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Vaslo 2y ago
    Clearly you’ve never worked in the groupthink of academia.
    - krapp 2y ago
      "Academia" is not science, and science is not a political bias.
- duxup 2y ago
  What are these services if not "stuff people want to see"? Call that bias if you want, but that's all they are.
pgryko 2y ago
Can anyone recommend good science or ml people to follow on bluesky? I've moved from twitter, but haven't quite found as interesting content yet, especially with ML - seems like they are still posting on twitter
- kawera 2y ago
  Maybe try this: https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs
- ykonstant 2y ago
  Ditto for any mathematics or applied maths feeds.
  - grajaganDev 2y ago
    Here is a big mathematics starter pack: https://bsky.app/starter-pack/miniapeur.bsky.social/3lc4zmcf2cl2i https://bsky.app/starter-pack/miniapeur.bsky.social/3lc4zmcf...
    - cma 2y ago
      Thanks, was looking for that too
EcommerceFlow 2y ago
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- mjmsmith 2y ago
  Because the platform with 100x the reach has been "ideologically captured" by one person.
- grajaganDev 2y ago
  It is a matter of quality over quantity. Disabling or limiting comments does not improve the quality of the comments.
- esotericimpl 2y ago
  [dead]
- diggan 2y ago
  > Or maybe someone can explain why a researcher would leave a platform with 100x the reach Not everyone is out after "widest reach", some people just want to have reasonable discussions about things, without overly emotional reactions. Those people have been migrating over to Bluesky since you can actually have dialogues and discussions there without it derailing instantly.
  - hedora 2y ago
    Also, it’s the job of a PhD student to plan 5 years out, and professors should look even further into the future.
  - immibis 2y ago
    I think the Fediverse took this role for a lot of groups, since it's not trying to show everything to everyone by default, but trying to attract accounts with similar interests to the same servers, and then have some limited cross-server interaction.
- aredox 2y ago
  What reach? Reaching tousands of bots?
MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
[flagged]
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
This is in line with the ideal scenario of Twitter remaining online as a quarantine for spam and culture war stuff, but real traffic migrating slowly elsewhere, hopefully without any single "winner" ever becoming big enough to attract what was left behind.
- diggan 2y ago
  Is that expected to last though? As far as I understand, the reason Twitter got popular for all the "culture war" stuff was because there was more people engaging with it there, otherwise they would have kept themselves to Social Truth or whatever it's called. These people thrive on reactions, if there is no reaction to what they say, they'll get bored and move over to the place where the people who'd react is.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Not forever. I’d be rather surprised if Twitter still exists in a decade. And then maybe Bluesky will get bad. But, well, that is how it goes. No social network lasts forever. You move every five to 10 years.
- aredox 2y ago
  We already have 4chan/8chan for that.
  - Maken 2y ago
    Even 4chan have actual bot filters and moderation.
    - 4ggr0 2y ago
      then i don't even want to know what an unmoderated 4chan would look like.
      - Maken 2y ago
        Twitter?
Epitaque 2y ago
A bit off topic, but does anyone know why there's only one Bluesky relay, or can direct me to an article? Even if the hardware requirements are high, I'd think someone would've made a second relay by now.
- immibis 2y ago
  The relay stores a copy of everything ever posted by anyone, that's why.
- verdverm 2y ago
  https://bsky.app/profile/skyseed.fund https://bsky.app/profile/skyseed.fund is looking to fund efforts to run 3rd party instances of the critical services
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findthewords 2y ago
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- grajaganDev 2y ago
  I am a huge Taleb fan but how does this relate to the article?
  - findthewords 2y ago
    Scientists are an intransigent minority.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  [dead]
- itsoktocry 2y ago
  Ah yes, Taleb needs support.
deleted 2y ago
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grajaganDev 2y ago
You can read Bluesky posts without an algorithm, just like the good old days.
- verdverm 2y ago
  You can read them without an account too
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  You can also write your own algorithm.
- ritcgab 2y ago
  Doesn't Twitter provide that as well?
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    In my experience, they pretend to, but they try as hard as they can to prevent you from doing it and the timeline is still filled with algorithm guff.
    - grajaganDev 2y ago
      Not to mention advertisements. Bluesky is ad free (for now).
zzleeper 2y ago
Being in academia (or very adjacent to it), there are two types of BlueSky users: 1) The ones that moved because of ideological reasons 2) The ones that moved b/c Twitter became a desolate hellscape. I'm closer to (2) than to (1), and the difference between 2024 and 2020-2022 twitter is stark. Before, if you had an interesting tweet about a new article you would get lots of engagement (retweets, discussions, people disagreeing and pushing back). Now? Nothing, just a few random retweets or comments from non-academic people that almost feel LLM-generated. Compound this with network effects, and even my right-wing pro-Trump colleagues (and there are some) decided to at the very least dual-post.
- pjc50 2y ago
  The ideology and the desolate hellscape are strongly connected, in that one has caused the other.
- subsection1h 2y ago
  > non-academic people that almost feel LLM-generated I don't understand why this isn't talked about as much as the MAGA garbage. I occasionally read tweets by a couple prominent Rubyists who've been using Twitter since 2006 (because Twitter was written in Ruby, which attracted Rubyists) and none of the replies to their tweets are written by familiar Rubyists like back in the day. Most of the replies are from accounts created in the past few years with AI-generated profile images.
lexlambda 2y ago
Important to note: > Although the survey is not statistically representative of Nature readers or the scientific community at large I found that the survey seems to have been advertised for with "Has Bluesky replaced X for scientists?" according to this article from Jan 14 [1]. This attracts people who switched more I think. So the 70% figure is nothing than hot air. It is still interesting seeing the positive sentiments and reasons for switching analyzed. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00037-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00037-y
hn1986 2y ago
Unfortunately, this is a result of twitter censorship directly caused by harassment of the science community. A specific type of censoring people that is often ignored. In this way, Twitter practices more censorship than most platforms!
mayneack 2y ago
I don't understand all the comments promoting the openness of twitter/x. There's a ton of friction to interact with X without an account. Meanwhile, the alternatives mostly allow third party apps, cross posting, and logged out access. I can follow mastodon and threads accounts on my bluesky timeline using one of many bridge services: https://fed.brid.gy/ https://fed.brid.gy/ I can merge mastodon, bluesky, nostr, and threads one timeline using one of many third party apps: https://openvibe.social/ https://openvibe.social/ I can unsubscribe from the default bluesky moderation service and choose one run by a third party: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation The only differentiator for X is the content, and that's an easy choice.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  Twitter used to be open, but being open doesn't make you a lot of money. Thanks to the upcoming AI industry running on (scraping) user generated content, being open costs more and cuts into profits. The service went downhill fast once they needed to make a healthy profit.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    That's certainly a risk, and bluesky STILL has no user funding, sustainable or otherwise. But making your site a heavily walled garden is bad for any kind of open Internet.
  - epistasis 2y ago
    Have any of the X changes been positive for the investment, though? They all seem to have diminished audience, lessened influence, and resulted in less ad revenue. It's very clear that X has a far smaller burn rate than Twitter did, but it also seems to have lessened revenue, and it's really unclear that there's any profit at all.
    - EA-3167 2y ago
      Perhaps Elon Musk and the people who helped pony up the cash to buy Twitter were more concerned with something other than profit.
cmxch 2y ago
But at some point they will have to interact with people outside the hermetic filter bubble(s) of BlueSky - even if it relates more to the results and byproducts as opposed to the raw research.
- krapp 2y ago
  How is it Bluesky a "hermetic filter bubble?" I'm not aware that anyone only interacts with people on Bluesky, nor do I see any indication from the article that this is the case. Choosing not to interact with Twitter is not equivalent to sealing oneself away from the world.
  - josephcsible 2y ago
    Bluesky as a whole isn't a hermetic filter bubble, but most people on it set up blocklists so they never have to see anyone with opinions they disagree with.

126 points by ironyman 2y ago

BlueSky has its problems, but the problems are more bearable than Twitter. You can have conversations about science and technology without weird angry people/bots popping up in the replies and shouting at you. Twitter used to be great that way as well, but now it isn't. Losing those communication channels is a big loss, no matter what you think of social media.

TechDebtDevin 2y ago
Bluesky also doesn't show me videos of people dying every 10 minutes.
- jeffhuys 2y ago
  X doesn't do that for me either... If you see posts you don't like, block/hide them. X learns. That's the cost of a free platform though. Rather have that than being banned for thinking wrong.
  - duxup 2y ago
    Extreme content aside (well sometimes included): Personally I found the "job" of managing who you follow / feed and pruning on twitter tiresome and at times impossible. Bluesky has been better, maybe only due to fewer people, but if so then so be it.
    - aredox 2y ago
      In the end, the only thing Musk has done is cripple the spam filter of twitter.
      - duxup 2y ago
        Maybe, but I'm pretty sure that thing is not a lot of user's motivation ... at least as far as the discussion goes / their motivation to go elsewhere. Side note: It is amusing how the current ownership's concern about bots vanished as soon as they took over.
    - grajaganDev 2y ago
      Bluesky has a nuclear block which really helps.
      - verdverm 2y ago
        Bluesky, or more accurately ATProto, has stackable moderation which is more sustainable in the long run https://github.blog/news-insights/the-library/browser-monitoring-for-github-com/ https://github.blog/news-insights/the-library/browser-monito... tl;dr - anyone can run a labelling service, users have choice which one(s) they use (Bluesky &| 3rd party), competition and network effect will surface the good ones and weed out the bad ones. This concept is going to be extended to community notes, sometime this year I suspect
        patmorgan23 2y ago
        Yeah. Think that got the broad strokes of the atproto architecture right for social media. Individual data stores -> aggregation/crawler layer -> services/app views. Feels like how search engines work with html web sites. I think it will be more successful than Mastodon has been.
        verdverm 2y ago
        It's already 3x+ the size and growing faster, I would say it is already more successful in one regard. Next up is to build out the app ecosystem that APub has
        immibis 2y ago
        Note: the reasons Bluesky is more popular than Mastodon have nothing to do with their technical architectures (except insofar as some people have learned helplessness about x@y), and everything to do with one being heavily marketed by a billionaire. Though people do seem to prefer a consistent moderation policy, even if it's harsher. People don't like to have free speech about the things they want to speak about, and have another group of people choose to ignore it. They want to either speak to everyone at once or be blocked from everyone at once (at which time they make a new account).
  - aredox 2y ago
    Except that it is exactly the same, as Twitter will use those signals to derank globally the users whose posts are blocked too often. Meanwhile, Musk himself is banning people for thinking what he decides is wrong.
  - dangus 2y ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-musk-silencing-his-critics-as-journalists-are-suspended-by-x/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-mus... https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/06/business/x-banned-a-journalist-for-disproving-a-rumor-about-elon-musk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/06/business/x-banned-a-journalis... https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-x-twitter-account-suspensions-rising-2024-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-x-twitter-account-... https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-business-dac21de7abb6167bb604f5317aeda10a https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-business-dac... https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-musk-throttled-tweets-turkey-presidential-election-2023-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/musk-tried-to-punish-critics-judge-rules-in-tossing-a-lawsuit/ar-BB1kvzSM https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/musk-tried-to-punish-criti... Should I go on?
    - pmarreck 2y ago
      (apologies for AI summary of the above articles; was just trying to be helpful!) Elon Musk's tenure at X (formerly Twitter) has been marked by a series of actions that starkly contrast his self-proclaimed stance as a "free speech absolutist." Despite his vocal advocacy for unrestricted expression, Musk has overseen a significant increase in account suspensions and content restrictions, often targeting critics and journalists. Notably, X has suspended numerous journalists who have reported critically on Musk or his ventures. For instance, in December 2022, the platform suspended accounts of reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, among others, who covered Musk's activities. These actions have raised concerns about the suppression of dissenting voices and the erosion of journalistic freedom on the platform. Associated Press Furthermore, under Musk's leadership, X has shown a heightened willingness to comply with government censorship requests. During the 2023 Turkish presidential election, the platform restricted access to certain content within Turkey, a move that critics argue was influenced by Musk's business interests in the region, including SpaceX's satellite launches in collaboration with the Turkish government. These actions suggest a departure from Musk's professed commitment to free speech, revealing a pattern of behavior that prioritizes personal and business interests over the principle of open expression. The increasing suppression of critical voices and compliance with authoritarian regimes' censorship demands highlight a concerning inconsistency between Musk's stated ideals and his actions as the steward of a major social media platform.
  - hedora 2y ago
    Blue sky supports federation, and X is selectively censored by the top level of the US executive branch. How do you define “free”?
    - immibis 2y ago
      In practice, Bluesky is a fully centralized system. You can run your own server to feed posts into the single centralized system.
      - mayneack 2y ago
        The moderation is mostly federated. You can choose which lists to subscribe to to mute/block/label as you see fit.
        immibis 2y ago
        I created a parody Donald Trump account as an experiment. It was deleted for "impersonation". Are you saying if I had run it on my own PDS, other people would get to choose whether it was deleted for them or not?
        mayneack 2y ago
        I obviously can't speak to your specific situation. As I understand it, both X and bluesky require parodies to be labeled. From what I can tell, most content moderation on bluesky is done via labelers, which you need a pds to run, but not to use. Both X and bluesky have semi-automated moderation processes with an inherent false positive rate. The two high profile cases I'm aware of (Jessie Singal and Laura Loomer) that were suspended automatically eventually got turned back on once a human was involved. https://bsky.app/profile/jessesingal.com https://bsky.app/profile/jessesingal.com https://bsky.app/profile/loomered.bsky.social/post/3lemtdvls7k2n https://bsky.app/profile/loomered.bsky.social/post/3lemtdvls...
        immibis 2y ago
- Vaslo 2y ago
  Literally never had this issue on X.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 2y ago
    I don't either, but that's because I stopped using Twitter ages ago. It's a very reliable solution to all of Twitter's problems.
  - afavour 2y ago
    This is far from the first time I've seen it mentioned. Seems quite possible that if you're a heavy user it has enough source material for your recommendations that they'll be good, but for less regular users it'll draw from whatever is 'trending'.
- TheChaplain 2y ago
  Because there are no algorithms yet. I try to follow the situation in Ukraine and I see lots of videos on X with russians murdering ukrainians as well as their own.
  - afavour 2y ago
    Well, no, violent content is against Bluesky's terms of service so it would be removed if flagged. Twitter has no such restriction so violent content spreads widely. I understand the free speech principle at work but from a purely pragmatic point of view I simply don't want to see that stuff in my day to day browsing of social media.
  - llm_nerd 2y ago
    Bluesky has a number of algorithmic feeds. For instance "What's Hot Classic". And while that feed doesn't have violence, it does have a surprisingly high number of "dudes holding their cock" and furry-related images, which seems like something that should probably be filtered out or at least tagged.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > Because there are no algorithms yet. One of the major selling points of Bluesky is that you get to chose your own algorithms (or rather, chose what algorithms you want to use, that others built). So there are way more algorithms than any other social media, today. Only difference is that with Bluesky you get to chose which one you use. https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  Bluesky doesn't have a working only followed feed.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    What's wrong with the "following" feed? Works for me.
    - paulgb 2y ago
      Same. And Bluesky also allows you to bring your own feed algorithm, so if you don't like the discover feed you could make a better one! It's not a hypothetical either, I follow and use several custom feeds today (for example, one that shows post by people who follow _me_, so I can discover people to follow back).
    - TiredOfLife 2y ago
      It shows couple days worth of posts by people you follow and then turns into discover feed. While OnlyPosts feed shows posts only from 1 to 4 days.
      - pfraze 2y ago
        Infra team recently switched the timeline backend to a new cluster and didn't backfill. It will regrow over time. Sorry about the confusion that caused. It was one of those things that happened in the scaling rush.
after_mirage 2y ago
[flagged]
- concerndc1tizen 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - giraffe_lady 2y ago
      What is "being bulldozed by them" like for you? I hear this sort of thing a lot, but I really can't say I've ever felt this way. And I am a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition, but I just don't ever feel personally affected by this issue.
      - immibis 2y ago
        [flagged]
        concerndc1tizen 2y ago
        The more you suppress normal people, the more people you will add to your opposition. But perhaps the right wing knows that. Maybe they're adding fuel to the fire by supporting extremist LGBT people. Wouldn't that be something!
      - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
        Bulldozed: flagged, downvoted, villified, sidetracked, strawmanned, ad hominem, getting cancelled. They often use tactics like brigading, dogpiling, astroturfing.
        2y ago
duxup 2y ago
Yeah the typical issue of "they could go bad" is always present. Really that's internet services history in a nutshell. You use the thing, you move when you feel motivated.
- diggan 2y ago
  > Yeah the typical issue of "they could go bad" is always present. It's at least refreshing to see Bluesky PBC try to prevent it by setting up guardrails themselves, like allowing people to host their data somewhere else, which seems to work today already. Here's to hoping the federation stuff shapes up nicely too.
  - verdverm 2y ago
    The community is organizing the first ATProto Developer Conference, Seattle, March 22-23 Getting together to show and talk about building the next gen of social media https://atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf-confirming-date-seattle/ https://atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf-confirming-date-seattl...
    - diggan 2y ago
      That's awesome to hear! You happen to know about something similar but outside of the US? Any continent is fine, even Canada or Mexico would be OK.
      - verdverm 2y ago
        No, this is totally grassroots by the people, though it is in the same city Bluesky is located. This kind of thing is just getting started, it is actually a guy from Vancouver that is taking the lead on this one. I'd recommend - getting on the ATProto dev Discord: https://discord.gg/VweB8gn5 https://discord.gg/VweB8gn5 - getting involved with: https://github.com/lexicon-community/lexicon https://github.com/lexicon-community/lexicon - using the #ATProtoDev hashtag There is a lot of overlap in the people and the developer community is starting to snowball
itsoktocry 2y ago
>You can have conversations about science and technology without weird angry people/bots popping up in the replies and shouting at you There's a guy on Twitter who posts about AI and has been reposting his Bluesky interactions on Twitter. Absolutely unhinged people going off on his benign takes. It's hilarious. People who have moved to Bluesky like to tell themselves it's the "smart place", but it's really just the place where you agree with the politics.
- peterpost2 2y ago
  I'm not sure if I would agree with that, definitely a lot of political arguments going on in bsky. It definitely used to be an echochamber though. But with Twitter being packed with Nazi's and every other comment being a sex-spambot I would guess plenty of non-traditional bluesky users have come over.
  - itsoktocry 2y ago
    I have a niche I follow on Twitter, and during the great Twitter migration a few month back, everyone made an effort to head to Bluesky. I did as well, because I want good content, I don't care about the platform. It's already a ghost town. Sparse posting, lots of empty "here's what I cooked for supper" posts.
  - immibis 2y ago
    If Nazis become the majority, then non-Nazism is an echo chamber phenomenon. Is this fixable?
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Yes, through blocklists. Jesse Singal and his coterie of ‘just asking questions’ ‘polite’ transphobes are on Bluesky, say, but through judicious use of blocklists one never needs to hear from them.
      - immibis 2y ago
        That's an echo chamber.
fnord77 2y ago
> You can have conversations about science and technology without weird angry people/bots popping up in the replies and shouting at you. If the conversation is about climate science, no you cannot unless your POV is the oceans are going to boil off in the next 5 years.
eightysixfour 2y ago
I wish there was a bluesky with less moderation. I don’t want bots and spam, but since I can control my own feeds and the mute functions actually work, I can shape it better than the other networks let me. I think that should be the real goal.
- pjc50 2y ago
  You can actually unsubscribe from default moderation, and there's quite a lot of NSFW on there if you want it. There are some things they won't host, but it may be possible to work around that with your own PDS.
  - eightysixfour 2y ago
    I meant more along the lines of kicking off people with viewpoints their user base doesn’t like. The Lauren Loomer’s of the world. I vehemently disagree with every thing she stands for and I agree that Bluesky has a right to ban her. But long run, I think we suffer when the biggest platforms turn into partisan black holes. I want a platform that is accessible to "normal" people, spends tons of effort blocking bots, has a UX that makes it easy to manage content you do and don’t see, and is open to any human to speak.
- immibis 2y ago
  How would it be different from Mastodon?
  - eightysixfour 2y ago
    This comes up in most bluesky threads. I honestly can’t tell you what it is but every experience I have with Mastodon sucks. Maybe you can point me in a better direction. I want a platform that: • blocks bots and maybe doesn’t allow companies as users • user control first (blocking, custom algos, smart word filtering, content/topic based filtering) • does not deplatform users for their views • has community notes
pjc50 2y ago
The blocklists systems can often be over-broad and sneakily include personal beefs, but overall the bluesky norm of "block on sight on first aggressive contact" is having a positive effect against engagement-baiting. Hostile actors seem to be trying something else: LLM "reply guys", which make superficially plausible conversation in your replies. Twitter is really the King Log/King Stork parable writ large. It had problems under Jack, as absentee owner, but getting an owner who is interested in making it his personal platform is much worse. Edit: this post has already been flagged off the front page, lol
- concerndc1tizen 2y ago
  It's an interesting arms race, where an optimal bot has better chances of surviving than a normal person that will naturally have diverse opinions. As I pointed out in another comment: The right can pretend to be antagonizing extremist LGBTs to get more centrists to support their agenda - while undermining the LGBT movement itself also from within.
  - immibis 2y ago
    If you support people who "pretend to" antagonize LGBTs you're not a centrist.
    - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
      You misunderstood: I'm saying that right wing activist groups can use botnet to pretend to be LGBT, while being hateful and extreme in their views, to the point that "normal" people (who are indifferent about LGBT) become annoyed with "LGBT" to the point of supporting Trump etc. I'm saying that LGBT groups need to be aware that there is a serious internal threat of people pretending to be LGBT while harassing people who are not against LGBT, but will be. An alternative explanation is that LGBT people are just a hateful bunch, but I'm trying to argue against that hypothesis.
- diggan 2y ago
  > The blocklists systems can often be over-broad and sneakily include personal beefs, but overall the bluesky norm of "block on sight on first aggressive contact" is having a positive effect against engagement-baiting. Yeah, it's kind of inspiring to see even the common person is getting used to just block trolls on sight, rather than engaging in it. Something we veterans been doing for 2 decades or more, but good to see others are catching up on how to save your sanity :) That said, the other day I ended up on a "Transphobes, Genocide Enthusiasts, and Crumbums" list for some reason on Bluesky, while I haven't even posted anything about those topics or engaging in anything like that. Makes one wonder how many others on a list like that actually even discussed the supposed topics? I kind of wish people had to justify additions to lists somehow, like adding a reason or at least linking the post that made you add this user to the list, or something similar.
clumsysmurf 2y ago
> BlueSky has its problems I had this same problem with twitter - I would like to follow a person, say Joe, that talks about X, Y, and * ... but I'm only interested in X. I would like more granular pub/sub so I could follow Joe/X. Of course, Joe would have to set up those channels.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

boringg 2y ago

Thanks for marketing push for bluesky via nature!

Vaslo 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- verdverm 2y ago
  Musk has pushed people away with his policies and cult of personality. It's his own fault, maybe he did ** that coming?
- mayneack 2y ago
  What's far left about the platform? The platform seems more open. Given the choice between a left or right user base, seems like the platform fundamentals would be more important.
  - hagbard_c 2y ago
    The platform itself - i.e. the technical bits - is not "far-left", it just ended up absorbing the most recent victims of Musk-phobia. In that way is a mirror image of what happened to Twitter-alternatives from back when Twitter was run by more or less the same crowd as that which now insists on migrating to BS: something like Parler became a haven for those who were pushed out and with that ended up being a "right-wing" platform even though the technology (based on Mastodon) itself was no "right-wing". Wikipedia ended up with a left-wing bias due to the influx of ideologically left-leaning editors (academics and ex-academics with time on their hands), not because Mediawiki is a "left-wing" wiki engine.
    - 2y ago

Spacecosmonaut 2y ago

[flagged]

krapp 2y ago
Science is not a political bias.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Vaslo 2y ago
  Clearly you’ve never worked in the groupthink of academia.
  - krapp 2y ago
    "Academia" is not science, and science is not a political bias.
duxup 2y ago
What are these services if not "stuff people want to see"? Call that bias if you want, but that's all they are.

pgryko 2y ago

Can anyone recommend good science or ml people to follow on bluesky? I've moved from twitter, but haven't quite found as interesting content yet, especially with ML - seems like they are still posting on twitter

kawera 2y ago
Maybe try this: https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs
ykonstant 2y ago
Ditto for any mathematics or applied maths feeds.
- grajaganDev 2y ago
  Here is a big mathematics starter pack: https://bsky.app/starter-pack/miniapeur.bsky.social/3lc4zmcf2cl2i https://bsky.app/starter-pack/miniapeur.bsky.social/3lc4zmcf...
  - cma 2y ago
    Thanks, was looking for that too

EcommerceFlow 2y ago

[flagged]

mjmsmith 2y ago
Because the platform with 100x the reach has been "ideologically captured" by one person.
grajaganDev 2y ago
It is a matter of quality over quantity. Disabling or limiting comments does not improve the quality of the comments.
esotericimpl 2y ago
[dead]
diggan 2y ago
> Or maybe someone can explain why a researcher would leave a platform with 100x the reach Not everyone is out after "widest reach", some people just want to have reasonable discussions about things, without overly emotional reactions. Those people have been migrating over to Bluesky since you can actually have dialogues and discussions there without it derailing instantly.
- hedora 2y ago
  Also, it’s the job of a PhD student to plan 5 years out, and professors should look even further into the future.
- immibis 2y ago
  I think the Fediverse took this role for a lot of groups, since it's not trying to show everything to everyone by default, but trying to attract accounts with similar interests to the same servers, and then have some limited cross-server interaction.
aredox 2y ago
What reach? Reaching tousands of bots?

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

[flagged]

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

This is in line with the ideal scenario of Twitter remaining online as a quarantine for spam and culture war stuff, but real traffic migrating slowly elsewhere, hopefully without any single "winner" ever becoming big enough to attract what was left behind.

diggan 2y ago
Is that expected to last though? As far as I understand, the reason Twitter got popular for all the "culture war" stuff was because there was more people engaging with it there, otherwise they would have kept themselves to Social Truth or whatever it's called. These people thrive on reactions, if there is no reaction to what they say, they'll get bored and move over to the place where the people who'd react is.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Not forever. I’d be rather surprised if Twitter still exists in a decade. And then maybe Bluesky will get bad. But, well, that is how it goes. No social network lasts forever. You move every five to 10 years.
aredox 2y ago
We already have 4chan/8chan for that.
- Maken 2y ago
  Even 4chan have actual bot filters and moderation.
  - 4ggr0 2y ago
    then i don't even want to know what an unmoderated 4chan would look like.
    - Maken 2y ago
      Twitter?

Epitaque 2y ago

A bit off topic, but does anyone know why there's only one Bluesky relay, or can direct me to an article? Even if the hardware requirements are high, I'd think someone would've made a second relay by now.

immibis 2y ago
The relay stores a copy of everything ever posted by anyone, that's why.
verdverm 2y ago
https://bsky.app/profile/skyseed.fund https://bsky.app/profile/skyseed.fund is looking to fund efforts to run 3rd party instances of the critical services
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

findthewords 2y ago

[flagged]

grajaganDev 2y ago
I am a huge Taleb fan but how does this relate to the article?
- findthewords 2y ago
  Scientists are an intransigent minority.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
[dead]
itsoktocry 2y ago
Ah yes, Taleb needs support.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

grajaganDev 2y ago

You can read Bluesky posts without an algorithm, just like the good old days.

verdverm 2y ago
You can read them without an account too
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
You can also write your own algorithm.
ritcgab 2y ago
Doesn't Twitter provide that as well?
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  In my experience, they pretend to, but they try as hard as they can to prevent you from doing it and the timeline is still filled with algorithm guff.
  - grajaganDev 2y ago
    Not to mention advertisements. Bluesky is ad free (for now).

zzleeper 2y ago

Being in academia (or very adjacent to it), there are two types of BlueSky users: 1) The ones that moved because of ideological reasons 2) The ones that moved b/c Twitter became a desolate hellscape. I'm closer to (2) than to (1), and the difference between 2024 and 2020-2022 twitter is stark. Before, if you had an interesting tweet about a new article you would get lots of engagement (retweets, discussions, people disagreeing and pushing back). Now? Nothing, just a few random retweets or comments from non-academic people that almost feel LLM-generated. Compound this with network effects, and even my right-wing pro-Trump colleagues (and there are some) decided to at the very least dual-post.

pjc50 2y ago
The ideology and the desolate hellscape are strongly connected, in that one has caused the other.
subsection1h 2y ago
> non-academic people that almost feel LLM-generated I don't understand why this isn't talked about as much as the MAGA garbage. I occasionally read tweets by a couple prominent Rubyists who've been using Twitter since 2006 (because Twitter was written in Ruby, which attracted Rubyists) and none of the replies to their tweets are written by familiar Rubyists like back in the day. Most of the replies are from accounts created in the past few years with AI-generated profile images.

lexlambda 2y ago

Important to note: > Although the survey is not statistically representative of Nature readers or the scientific community at large I found that the survey seems to have been advertised for with "Has Bluesky replaced X for scientists?" according to this article from Jan 14 [1]. This attracts people who switched more I think. So the 70% figure is nothing than hot air. It is still interesting seeing the positive sentiments and reasons for switching analyzed. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00037-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00037-y

hn1986 2y ago

Unfortunately, this is a result of twitter censorship directly caused by harassment of the science community. A specific type of censoring people that is often ignored. In this way, Twitter practices more censorship than most platforms!

mayneack 2y ago

I don't understand all the comments promoting the openness of twitter/x. There's a ton of friction to interact with X without an account. Meanwhile, the alternatives mostly allow third party apps, cross posting, and logged out access. I can follow mastodon and threads accounts on my bluesky timeline using one of many bridge services: https://fed.brid.gy/ https://fed.brid.gy/ I can merge mastodon, bluesky, nostr, and threads one timeline using one of many third party apps: https://openvibe.social/ https://openvibe.social/ I can unsubscribe from the default bluesky moderation service and choose one run by a third party: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation The only differentiator for X is the content, and that's an easy choice.

jeroenhd 2y ago
Twitter used to be open, but being open doesn't make you a lot of money. Thanks to the upcoming AI industry running on (scraping) user generated content, being open costs more and cuts into profits. The service went downhill fast once they needed to make a healthy profit.
- pjc50 2y ago
  That's certainly a risk, and bluesky STILL has no user funding, sustainable or otherwise. But making your site a heavily walled garden is bad for any kind of open Internet.
- epistasis 2y ago
  Have any of the X changes been positive for the investment, though? They all seem to have diminished audience, lessened influence, and resulted in less ad revenue. It's very clear that X has a far smaller burn rate than Twitter did, but it also seems to have lessened revenue, and it's really unclear that there's any profit at all.
  - EA-3167 2y ago
    Perhaps Elon Musk and the people who helped pony up the cash to buy Twitter were more concerned with something other than profit.

cmxch 2y ago

But at some point they will have to interact with people outside the hermetic filter bubble(s) of BlueSky - even if it relates more to the results and byproducts as opposed to the raw research.

krapp 2y ago
How is it Bluesky a "hermetic filter bubble?" I'm not aware that anyone only interacts with people on Bluesky, nor do I see any indication from the article that this is the case. Choosing not to interact with Twitter is not equivalent to sealing oneself away from the world.
- josephcsible 2y ago
  Bluesky as a whole isn't a hermetic filter bubble, but most people on it set up blocklists so they never have to see anyone with opinions they disagree with.