from Hacker News

Maybe Bluesky has "won"

by GavinAnderegg on 11/15/24, 7:56 PM with 794 comments

by PaulHoule on 11/15/24, 9:21 PM
My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.
Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.
A common kind of profile on that kind of platform is: "There are good people and bad people and I'm one of the good people"
It is very easy to other people and share memes that build group cohesion while driving other people away. Really making progress requires in politics a lot of "I agree with you about 90% but there is 10% that I don't" or "Well, I negotiated something in the backroom that you'd really hate but headed off a situation you would have thought was catastrophic but you won't appreciate that I did it so you and I are both better off if I don't tell you" and other sorts of nuance, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, etc.
To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read) I have to have about 20 or so block rules.
I see some people with the same kind of profiles on Bluesky but see a lot less othering in my feed because the "Discover" feed on Bluesky filters out a lot of angry content. My rough estimate is that it removes about 75% of the divisive political junk. That
(1) Immediately improves my feed, but also
(2) Reduces the amount of re-posted angry political content (it's like adding some boron to the coolant in a nuclear reactor) and
(3) Since angry political memes don't work anymore people find a different game to play
My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable. Those who go are less agreeable than those who stay. On the other hand, a certain amount of suppression of negativity could stop it from spreading and might not even be noticed as "censorship".
by mrtksn on 11/15/24, 8:33 PM
A year ago, Bluesky was an empty place, I wanted to use it but there wasn't anything. Now its bustling, there are interesting posts and they receive thousands of likes.
On the other hand Twitter still feels like where things are actually happening but more and more feels like they are about to start terminating anyone with eyeglasses.
I was there when the Digg exodus happened, it doesn't feel like that. It's something else. It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.
by dang on 11/15/24, 9:33 PM
Recent and related:
How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147430 - Nov 2024 (42 comments)
1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144340 - Nov 2024 (109 comments)
Ask HN: Bluesky is #1 in the U.S. App Store. Is this a first for open source? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129768 - Nov 2024 (44 comments)
Ask HN: Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129171 - Nov 2024 (13 comments)
Visualizing 13M Bluesky users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118180 - Nov 2024 (236 comments)
Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42112432 - Nov 2024 (168 comments)
How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086596 - Nov 2024 (79 comments)
Bluesky Is Not Decentralized - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952994 - Oct 2024 (194 comments)
There are lots more...
by Retr0id on 11/15/24, 8:22 PM
> This is because the data in the network is all cryptographically signed based on what came before it. The protocol does this using the Merkle tree structure, which is also how Git stores data. The issue with this is: if you want to look at one piece of content in the system, you also need to know about everything that happened before.
This isn't quite accurate. You only need the MST blocks in the merkle path(s) back to the root, for the subset of records that you care about. For a single record, that's O(logn) blocks on average, where n is the total number of records in the repo. For a full checkout, the MST block count is ~33% of the number records in the repo, on average.
(MST = Merkle Search Tree, which is a special type of merkle tree, distinct from the one used by git - https://inria.hal.science/hal-02303490/document )
> Also, it would be great to edit posts! I believe this is tricky because of the Merkle tree structure mentioned above
It's not so tricky at the MST level, and it already happens there when you edit your bio for example. What is tricky (relatively) is figuring out how to represent post edits at the UI/UX level.
For context, I'm working on my own PDS implementation in Python, with corresponding library for working with the MST (both fairly WIP):
https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/millipds
https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/atmst
by quectophoton on 11/15/24, 9:03 PM
Bluesky looks promising. In my bubble it seems like a lot of artists have been moving to it after some Xitter fiasco with AI training or whatnot (idk, I don't keep up with those news).
But, this:
> Radically open
> I think some might be surprised to learn how open Bluesky is. It’s trivially easy to grab an export of any user’s data. It’s also a core assumption of the service that all the data (aside from out-of-protocol stuff like DMs) is completely open.
I'm still skeptical of Bluesky having "won" until the average user is completely aware of things like this. I fully expect that there will be some drama about this openness at some point in the future.
When this happens, we'll see if people go back to Twitter again (how many times has it been already?); or if they embrace this new social network where your art and posts can be scraped waaaaaay more easily than in Twitter, so they're probably more likely to be used for AI training anyway.
Until conversations about these topics happen between non-tech users, I'm mostly just watching how the situation evolves.
by throwaway48476 on 11/15/24, 8:22 PM
n=1 but I've never seen a bluesky content link in the wild. I've seen lots of people talking about bluesky or moving to bluesky though.
by EmersonL on 11/15/24, 11:22 PM
I loved Twitter. It was this magic place where I could connect with both friends and legends in my field (programmers). That’s not what it is anymore and it’s impossible to ignore how political it’s become.
Bluesky feels like Twitter used to and it’s shockingly refreshing to hear about industry news and friendly updates rather than some “pick-up artist” explaining how women are too privileged these days.
by ineedaj0b on 11/16/24, 4:03 AM
Twitter/X is great. I like it quite a lot. Follow people you like and keep that number under 100. Or if you just started, under 25 and add people slowly. Unfollow people quickly if they annoy you! Or mute them if you still like them but they annoy you temporarily.
There's two feeds: for you (the algo) and following. following is the traditional only people you know feed.
If you're having trouble with the people on X you might need to reconsider yourself. Why are you not open to many viewpoints? Diversity of thought and people should be welcome and if you hope to change minds, you do need to be able to interact with those people to do so.
I did theater when I was younger, and I think a lot of my 'open' friends weren't open per-say they were just weird and like being in the weird group more than being truly open.
by GMoromisato on 11/15/24, 11:50 PM
I remember Quora circa 2016 fondly. It had a high number of interesting people writing deep insights into their area of expertise. And then, of course, since they are a venture-backed startup, they tried to grow, and it all went sideways.
I think a small, somewhat homogeneous community is very attractive. You get a high ratio of interesting posts and very little toxic behavior.
The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. Technology won't solve this problem (because it is not a technology problem). Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.
Maybe the balkanization of social media is the best we can hope for.
by nabla9 on 11/15/24, 8:06 PM
Threads has 275 million monthly active users.
Bluesky has now 15 million total users (how many active?)
Mastodon monthly active usage has dropped below 1 million.
by llm_nerd on 11/15/24, 8:33 PM
Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.
A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.
Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.
Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.
by okhuman on 11/15/24, 8:27 PM
There will be no great migration like we saw in 2010 with users shifting from Digg to Reddit but, instead, only the slow trickling escapes of users to more dispersed communities.
Here the human condition can flourish in a more localized way, with more participation (less lurking). No more winner takes all.
by sherburt3 on 11/15/24, 8:56 PM
Did everyone in tech run out of new ideas in 2013 or something? There’s something so depressing about the hot new app of 2024 being a Twitter clone.
by bsimpson on 11/15/24, 9:24 PM
Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism. In theory, I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn. I haven't had a portfolio in years, because I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it. Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists. (And plenty of precious content that ended up on other services, like Qik, no longer does.)
If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.
The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.
by eBombzor on 11/15/24, 10:37 PM
Why is this site so unbearably political now? Some of these takes are almost as bad as the stuff you find on the front page of Reddit...
by spike021 on 11/16/24, 1:00 AM
As with a lot of things these days, the places you congregate are what you make of it.
Putting aside the issues with who owns twitter and some of their recent policy shifts about content, I still have relatively sanitized feeds where I mostly only see friends' content. I'm still making new friends from Japan on it through our shared hobbies. Most of the sports news I follow is still there.
Nothing materially has changed about how I use the platform.
Bluesky is still pretty empty. Maybe some "nodes" of it are getting busier as people trickle out of twitter but I'm not sure it matters much until theres more saturation of many more things.
by tmvphil on 11/15/24, 8:40 PM
One thing I like about bluesky is it allows you to watch embedded videos from external media sources (e.g. youtube) without leaving the app. Seems like twitter/X was clearly opposed to the loss of control this entailed.
by jazzyjackson on 11/15/24, 8:45 PM
I don't understand this critique:
> I’ll also add that the reason I’m a big fan of a ActivityPub solution like Mastodon is that it’s quite inexpensive to run your own complete stack unless you’re extremely famous. Hosting a Mastodon instance is a one-step process, and you then control everything. To get the same experience with atproto, you’ll need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, and even then you still don’t control everything as of today.
When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison. I'm quite interested to find whether there will be niche relays that only index posts from certain pds (or provide a kind of community-chat discord competitor by being one server that hosts the PDSs of the community, and also provides the relay and appview for that community)
by pornel on 11/16/24, 11:42 AM
I'm concerned that Bluesky has taken money from VCs, including Blockchain Capital. The site is still in the honeymoon phase, but they will have to pay 10x of that money back.
This is Twitter all over again, including risk of a hostile takeover. I don't think they're stupid enough to just let the allegedly-decentralized protocol to take away their control when billions are at stake. They will keep users captive if they have to.
by givemeethekeys on 11/15/24, 9:48 PM
A quick look at the Bluesky homepage having never been there before tells me that it's just another Reddit without the r/conservative part.
by poniko on 11/15/24, 8:18 PM
Too early to call, the momentum must also become normal. I can see a future where threads is mainstream and bluesky attracts news/politics.
by JeremyNT on 11/15/24, 11:04 PM
Bluesky has made a lot of smart choices to both support openness while also retaining the benefits of a monolithic single instance. In reality this makes it easier to use than say Mastodon.
So if you take everybody at their word and assume the money doesn't run out, this is sort of the opposite approach to federation. Build out a solid main instance and get federation working "for real" later.
But has it won? I guess that remains to be seen. It entirely depends on the users who are willing to move there from x.
by Tenoke on 11/15/24, 8:28 PM
It's definitely the best contender, and I've been trying to use it but so far there's less people, my feed there is much blander, there's missing features that I miss from Twitter, and everyone seems to be posting about Twitter itself all the time.
by danieltanfh95 on 11/16/24, 2:57 AM
Most of the Vitriole is still contained in twitter/x, bluesky will soon have the same problem and I expect it to be worse/require more active user maintenance due to the decentralised aspect of trying to moderate speech.
Bluesky should actively increase the difficulty of onboarding people onto the platform to weed out or reduce the population. Vitriole need a critical mass before it overtakes the entire discussion.
by jeswin on 11/16/24, 10:52 AM
Bluesky's biggest asset is the technical leadership team. Using Paul Frazee's (and Daniel Holmgren's - though I never actively used IPFS) work is like living in the far out future.
Is it still too early? Time will tell.
by camwhite on 11/15/24, 11:07 PM
the article says:
"if you want to look up a DID:PLC, you need to query the Bluesky servers. This is important because every user is identified by a DID:PLC, and all interactions need to reference them."
which is not strictly true.
almost every user is identified by a DID:PLC but DID:WEB is also supported. DID:WEB is not mentioned in the article at all
I think this is important because it means that users can opt into being their own source of truth for their "identity" in the ATPROTO system
by b0sk on 11/15/24, 8:20 PM
Bluesky's issue is the Discover feed is not good. After a few days of activity, the suggestions are mostly random and nowhere close to the stuff I want. Twitter was very good - it makes sense because the graph is rich.
by INTPenis on 11/15/24, 9:40 PM
There is nothing to win. Fediverse has always been and will always remain an interesting place for sub-cultures.
by zoom6628 on 11/16/24, 3:05 AM
I agree with authors take of writing on your own blog and then posting to network(s) for engagement. If your crowd moves its social platform then you move too. Platform independence and you choose what to "push" just like you choose what to share during IRL conversations. Platforms that own the data are farming the users.
FWIW I just exited from twitter - no value.
by tiffanyh on 11/16/24, 1:35 AM
For all the talk about Bluesky adoption and use here on HN, I don’t think I’ve seen a single Bluesky thread posted here on HN.
Very odd.
by davidw on 11/15/24, 8:16 PM
It's early days, I think.
So far I see good sides of both Threads and Blue Sky. Threads has a lot more users, but I see more 'subject matter expert' kinds of people on Blue Sky as well as smaller more intimate communities. But we'll see what happens if that dynamic attracts more people and it stops being quite so cozy.
by pjc50 on 11/15/24, 8:17 PM
I think Bluesky has won the "cool" factor; remains to be seen how effective that is at pulling other users across while maintaining its culture.
There's probably a good chunk of people who just drop Twitter without picking up another social media in replacement.
by pjbster on 11/16/24, 6:51 AM
Mmm. Bluesky is the tits, for sure, but Trump has unfinished business. This is from 2020:
https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/trump-and-section-230-what-know
We can assume that Twitter was a vocal opponent to the repeal at the time and that they have now become somewhat more in favour if it means knocking out their competition whilst they enjoy special protection.
All it would take is some catalytic content to kick things off and a compliant state judiciary to get the ball rolling.
Bluesky's Terms Of Service explicitly state that they are not liable for the impacts of their user's content. They say they reserve the right to delete content or accounts at any time at their discretion. And then there's this:
Indemnity: Summary: If someone brings a legal claim against us based on your actions on Bluesky Social, you are responsible for our defense in, and the consequences of, that claim.
It all looks bulletproof on the surface but I just don't know if it will survive under Trump/Musk.
by dmead on 11/16/24, 1:02 AM
Can someone explain why Twitter was good? I have an account and I posted like twice. The UI is weird, takes the entire screen to show a thread and it's difficult to follow a conversation.
I get the sense that it's just for trying to be witty. The replies are hard to follow for a reason. They aren't the point. It's really a series of unrelated posts you have to keep reading to follow any kind of "zeitgeist". It's like they thought of a good user interface for conversations and did the opposite of that.
by that_guy_iain on 11/15/24, 10:56 PM
I think Bluesky has won the battle to become the replacement for Twitter. A lot of the attempts were all trying some weird gimmick like posting voice notes and stuff. Bluesky has the whole federation stuff without actually having it, which is ok, but for the rest of it. They're clearly just copying features over from Twitter and adding in some of the most requested features for Twitter.
This makes me super happy I was on that train early and got the "iain.bsky.social" handle.
by tonfreed on 11/15/24, 8:57 PM
I'll never create a bluesky account because the people who use it ultimately think it's some sort of genius political point to rag on X.
Went to GopherconAU last week and one of the organizers very proudly announced that you should "skeet" with their hashtag like the word didn't have another completely inappropriate connotation. I really can't take this sort of internet circlejerk seriously when I have a mortgage to pay and a family to look after.
by Animats on 11/15/24, 8:22 PM
If you have a business with a lot of customers who need a support forum, does it make sense to run a Bluesky server?
How does censorship work?
by g8oz on 11/16/24, 12:52 AM
I encourage people to give Mastodon a fair go. Don't be scared off by the negative stories. It can definitely be a positive experience.
by jsemrau on 11/15/24, 8:19 PM
I'd argue longform content has done more for opinion-making than microblogs in the 2024 election. And to be honest, I like that. Irrespective of the politics the podcasts with JD Vance and even Trump at Theo Von were remarkable. Seeing Trump genuinely care about Theo's drug history was a strange but impactful moment.
by nopelynopington on 11/16/24, 12:22 PM
If November taught us anything it's that instead of looking for an x alternative and creating increasingly silo'd echo chambers on the internet, we should instead be trying to disconnect ourselves from social media.
The golden age of social is over and it's just a horror show now. Look what it did.
by sebazzz on 11/16/24, 10:16 AM
I still don’t understand why jack (founder) is also investor in Elons X. I wonder what the endgame is there.
by portaouflop on 11/16/24, 10:23 AM
Zero interest to invest in another proprietary walled garden social media site.
I’ll just put stuff on my personal website.
by gethoht on 11/16/24, 4:36 PM
Bluesky definitely has a "this is what twitter used to be vibe" but it's so much more than that. With follow lists and block lists it's really easy to get up to speed and curate your feed. It's also very noticeably less algorithm driven.
by leoc on 11/16/24, 12:16 AM
Relevant information about the links between the AT Protocol and IPFS: https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3l7vjsvufwc2g .
by ChrisArchitect on 11/15/24, 8:33 PM
bluesky is reselling domains? Not sure that's still the case. Never saw anything about buying a new one when I was going thru the settings to change a handle.
That being said, the change handle to domain process is quite slick with very smooth DNS record based transfer done in a minute.
by jaredcwhite on 11/15/24, 10:10 PM
I will never, ever use Bluesky. ActivityPub is the present AND future of decentralized social networking on the open web. Bluesky's protocol isn't even a standard and amounts to little more than smoke and mirrors.
I'm fine with people backing the wrong horse (again), and I don't have an ounce of FOMO. It's upsetting in a general sense that people will regularly behave in a manner against their own self-interest. But when Bluesky is fully enshittified in a few years and people are wondering what in the hell just happened, the Fediverse will be here waiting to embrace them with open arms.
by jimbob45 on 11/15/24, 8:19 PM
All of the major platforms experience major outflow after elections, no? Logically, Twitter would lose more users given that they have a larger user base to start with. What’s the next major event where we can reliably measure to see which platform is actually ahead?
by numbers_guy on 11/15/24, 8:24 PM
It's a bigger echo chamber than X. What's the point? I go online to try to get a general idea of the landscape of views and opinions.
I think a general problem with the current political landscape right now is that people literally cannot tolerate reading something they disagree with, because they convinced themselves that the other side is so morally flawed, they can just immediately write them off without further consideration.
But irrespective of that, how are you supposed to understand what is going on if you only read content by people who think the same way you do?
by tolerance on 11/15/24, 10:43 PM
What I want to know is how did people come to believe that microblogging is a social necessity. How have we allowed for what’s perhaps the most impoverished form of human expression to become a gathering place for ourselves and our institutions.
by bardan on 11/16/24, 10:17 AM
It seems very cozy, although filled with people pushing their commercial projects. If people are projecting Bluesky's future on its current cozy state they are fools. The only way to remain cozy is to remain small.
by est on 11/16/24, 3:35 AM
My only problem with ActivityPub or atproto is that they were not static hostable.
For readonly nodes they should be. Otherwise we could see tons of adoptions by bloggers, with some simple Github/Cloudflare Pages setup.
by asdfman123 on 11/16/24, 12:51 AM
I loved Twitter so much but now I find it literally unbearable. It's not the politics, everyone is aggressively mean and it's just too much.
Bluesky is a breath of fresh air.
by MiguelX413 on 11/15/24, 10:21 PM
I'm still not gonna use anything besides the Fediverse.
by kettlecorn on 11/15/24, 8:23 PM
The competitive advantage to BlueSky, over Twitter / X, is that there's tremendous value in connecting intelligent and kind people while maintaining a certain quality standard.
Twitter / X, for political reasons, allowed extremely toxic behavior while at the same time disempowered communities from moderating themselves. If you force each individual user to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person it's a losing battle and low quality speech will overwhelm conversations. X folks know that but did it anyways.
It's also becoming more and more clear that we need a relatively neutral medium for free speech. Musk claimed to be building that on X but then did exactly the opposite. It's very hard to trust the algorithm isn't being manipulated in one way or another.
On BlueSky it's incredible how much value is already being produced by connecting intelligent and creative folks as compared to what Twitter became.
by chucke1992 on 11/15/24, 10:42 PM
I see BlueSky getting some traction regarding some specialized discussions (akin Discord?), but Twitter will continue to be the public space to go.
by cristaloleg on 11/16/24, 8:52 AM
Shameless plug: shorter profile links https://blskyl.ink/
by rascul on 11/15/24, 10:43 PM
Twitter won because that's where the people I follow are. If/when they move elsewhere, wherever they move to will have won.
by Geep5 on 11/15/24, 8:20 PM
I still think Nostr will eventually be the go-to.
by racl101 on 11/16/24, 12:36 AM
I'd never heard of this Bluesky until this post election reaction. I'd heard of Mastodon but not Bluesky.
by bastloing on 11/16/24, 2:31 AM
X is paying lots now to content creators. And it seems their advertisers are coming back. Strange how that works.
by czhu12 on 11/16/24, 1:13 AM
As a counter point to the comments that say blue sky doesn’t have as much political content. I just opened the app for maybe the third time and did a cursory sample and 11/20 were political, 4/20 we’re about how bluesky has no political content, and maybe 5 were totally unpolitical.
A few screens grabs for proof: https://imgur.com/a/ra8P81G
Please for the love of god someone make a social network that has okay discovery features without political content.
I follow 3 people who post about ML papers. Not sure why blue sky shows me posts from Don Lemon and someone called @CallToActivism
by johnnyanmac on 11/15/24, 10:29 PM
>Currently people can set up their own PDSs, which will host both their identity’s signing keys and their content on Bluesky. Setting this up requires a fair amount of server-level knowledge, but it’s relatively cheap (maybe $15/month USD) and lets people control their own data
Man, really? Domains tend to be around that much for a year.
I guess it's cheap if you're doing this for marketing purposes, but given that this was marketed towards "developers", I thought there'd be more homespun method to get this up.
But aside from that, I don't quite understand the counterargument of Bluesky not being federated/decentralized for custom domains outside of "Bluesky handles DM 's" (to paraphrase). I'm sure most users will more or less choose the centralized approach of Bluesky handling everything, but the fact that you can decentralize off is very valuable (even if it's a different service than ActivityPub)
>The whole Twitter mess has taught me not to attach myself too closely with these things anymore. I hung on far too long to Twitter while it made me feel terrible. My goal going forward is to post more to my own site and aggregate to any social channel I currently care about.
indeed. Don't put your eggs all in someone else's basket. If you're selling, always try to get people on an email list (the only popular standard of federation as of now) so when that basket is taken that your devout followers can keep in touch. Ideally this decentralization of Bluesky (if you take the time/money to set it up) should let you take most of your ball home, but it may not be as easy to just "move it somewhere else". Mastodon's ideals vs. reality certainly show this.
by nerdjon on 11/15/24, 8:34 PM
Maybe this will finally be the time but every time there has been a “migration” it feels like Twitter still holds onto enough of a stronghold that most people don’t move over so you make the move but you end up back on twitter.
Particularly if you are using it as a tool to advertise your company, channel, stream, etc.
I would love for this to not be true this time. But I am not holding my breath.
by fsflover on 11/15/24, 9:52 PM
Beware of enshittification though: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...
by skwee357 on 11/15/24, 8:32 PM
I find it funny how hard people try to push the “BlueSky is better than twitter” narrative. So hard, that my entire BlueSky feed is filled with Twitter refugees who shit post about twitter being bad.
Maybe instead of having yet another echo chamber of short form content, we should embrace long form, well written content with wide range of opinions.
by ryyr on 11/16/24, 1:57 AM
if U want Out , youneed to Quit cold turkey , replacing it does Nothing at all inthe end
by silexia on 11/19/24, 4:46 PM
Unpopular opinion: X is the best social network now because of Community Notes that tell you after the fact if a post you liked was misinformation and often warns you in real time as well. You can also have long form posts on there now. Reali life breaking news is there first.
by Funes- on 11/15/24, 11:54 PM
The author seems to imply that "winning" here correlates with a measure of posting frequency:
>If Bluesky comes out as a “winner” and more posting happens there, I think I’m generally fine with that. At least for now.
If that's what the match between microblogging services is about, I wager Bluesky has no chance whatsoever to come out the winner. It sounds like wishful thinking to me. Mere delusion.
by TheAdamist on 11/16/24, 11:49 AM
Nope. But i wish them well.
If i read some interesting article that turns out to just be a reblogging of an interesting post on a service, the original embedded article is inevitably from xitter, which if i want to read more generally i can't. Either technical or personal issues usually prevent me from being able to read the original source and additional related tweets.
by Uptrenda on 11/16/24, 3:57 AM
Imagine putting all that effort into 'decentralization' and then building literally, the most Orwellian, cucked version of the Internet possible. See the thing with free speech is that a lot of views that might be concerned 'offensive' are in fact defined by society at that point in time. It was once considered offensive to state basic facts about astronomy to the church. It's been that way throughout history that one person's 'offensive' is another's truth. Sometimes objective truth. But usually always an ever-changing target.
Now lets say for the sake of argument that a person's speech is just trolling hateful shit. Contributing literally nothing. I argue that quite often you even want to allow this kind of speech because when almost always when you have 'content moderation' it becomes over-moderation. It's a 'slippery slope' where people are unable to keep their own biases out of moderation. Which brings me back to Bluesky. A deranged, leftist hellscape, designed to enforce the largest possible book of unwritten woke social regulations across the site. Literally stacking the deck against Wrong Think. Or an orwellian nightmare. This is what happens to the internet when you let fucktards moderate it.
Edit: ty for the downvote soyboy. On downvote sites like this if someone doesn't like your post they downvote it and it becomes a popularity competition even if you're right (which is what you're signalling is a good idea btw.) Bluesky is exactly the same. As is reddit. As is every top 100 website at the moment.
by dayvid on 11/15/24, 8:33 PM
Twitter was a really good mix of viewpoints and people, but it’s people so toxically politicized and right wing that a lot of the interesting accounts have left. It’s a weird thing that could’ve only existed because they weren’t focused on profit.
by wnevets on 11/15/24, 8:25 PM
Threads has gone out of its way to make real time engagement impossible. Seeing post about sporting events that ended 3 days ago on your front page is terrible UX. If I was a conspiratorial type person I would believe zuck & elon colluded not to compete in that space.
by mgaunard on 11/16/24, 10:41 AM
I never understood why Twitter ever was a thing.
by briandear on 11/15/24, 10:07 PM
Bluesky is a left wing echo chamber and most of the world has no idea what it is, nor why should they care.
People act like Elon is the devil while using Gmail and googling things. Lol.
by d_theorist on 11/16/24, 10:58 AM
As far as I can tell, the main reason people give for moving off X is that “there’s more hate speech/misinformation/disinformation since Elon took over because he got rid of a lot of trust and safety controls”
So, how does moving to a platform with the explicit aim of being decentralised solve this? Even Elon Twitter has more oversight than a decentralised platform with zero control.
by jl6 on 11/15/24, 8:29 PM
The true rival to X is not using social media at all. If you’re mad at your Skinner box, switching bubbles won’t improve your life.
by helpfulContrib on 11/15/24, 9:58 PM
When I can engage in conversatons with a wide variety of different viewpoints, without any of those viewpoints being repressed through some censorship mechanism, then I'll agree that the platform has 'won'.
But Bluesky is already censoring viewpoints that the collective don't want to see promoted, so its really not much better than X.
The issue is, whether or not a collective, reactive crowd, is really the ultimate form of human discourse. I happen to think not, but its sure interesting to see the dynamics of humans flowing from one echo chamber to another ..
by mhh__ on 11/15/24, 8:34 PM
The only people I've seen moving to bluesky so far in this latest batch have basically been smug lefty types and lawyers. They're free to do as they please but these are not the early adopters that make a culture good.
by paulvnickerson on 11/16/24, 1:52 AM
Can somebody please explain to me why anybody would want to leave X for Bluesky other than the fact that Elon Musk undid the previous regime's censorship efforts (which almost always targeted a particular political viewpoint) and himself makes pro-Trump posts? This recent "mass exodus" seems more like people just upset at the outcome of the US election.
by waihtis on 11/16/24, 10:21 AM
If by "won" you mean the reality-dissociated left have found a new echo chamber then yes.
If you are a normal person and made the right conclusion that Trump / Elon are byproducts of forcefed radical leftist policies you'd be better to steer clear from this platform. X is lightweight compared to what Bluesky is about to become.
by nikolay on 11/16/24, 12:45 AM
Or more like... Ruby has lost!
by andreygrehov on 11/16/24, 2:47 AM
This is the third Bluesky submission in the past week or so. My previous comments were heavily downvoted, so I don’t expect it will be any different this time.
Many people are comparing X and Bluesky, but I think this is a mistake. The two platforms shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence. These are two drastically different platforms. X is a real-time news app, currently holding the #1 spot in the News category on the App Store (e.g., The New York Times is #8). Bluesky, on the other hand, is a social network and the #1 app in the Social Networking category. These are fundamentally different categories, so let’s stop treating them as rivals - they’re solving different problems for different audiences.
by alecco on 11/15/24, 8:24 PM
If interesting people start posting interesting things on Bluesky we'll start going there. But, so far, we only see people posing and shoving it down our throats. Just like this post. We get it, you hate Musk and want to see X/twitter dead. Fine.
I'm not on Twitter and used to be on Mastodon so the idea of Bluesky per se sounds interesting. But so far it looks like a forced, desperate attempt by a very political group of people. And that's the opposite of what people like me would like to spend time on.
by ta8645 on 11/15/24, 8:21 PM
I'm still hoping that X wins. I'm hoping that we learn how to coexist with a diversity of viewpoints. It seems counterproductive to partition everyone up into their own little gardens, without any viable opposition to the dominant views.