[HN Gopher] Maybe Bluesky has "won"
___________________________________________________________________
Maybe Bluesky has "won"
Author : GavinAnderegg
Score : 189 points
Date : 2024-11-15 19:56 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anderegg.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (anderegg.ca)
| nabla9 wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Many of these alternatives are piggybacking off the parent
| site. Google at pone point made anyone with a Gmail account a
| default user for its own social network.
| verdverm wrote:
| It's more about the vision and momentum
|
| Threads is not trying to be a Twitter replacement and is
| another brand in the Zuck conglomerate
|
| What makes Bluesky different to me is ATProto and the
| possibilities for a new social media fabric, that they learned
| from some difficulties with ActivityPub to build something
| better
|
| https://atproto.com
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Everyone who has an Instagram account is technically a Threads
| user as far as I can tell.
| jsheard wrote:
| They probably are juicing the numbers that way, but the
| dedicated Threads app is pretty high on the app store charts
| so evidently people are going out of their way to get it.
|
| YMMV depending on your region but my Play Store "social"
| chart is currently showing Bluesky at #1, then TikTok,
| Threads, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Reddit at #7.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| They are definitely "growth hacking" as much as possible -
| I regularly would see 1/3 of a Threads comment in my FB and
| IG feed and when you click to expand it takes you to the
| App Store to download the Threads app. I'm not interested
| so I just back out but I'm sure it works wonders to get
| their numbers up.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Is instagram usage counted in active threads users? I doubt
| it
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Is instagram usage counted in active threads users? I
| doubt it
|
| It is if they have a Threads account and interact with any
| Threads content on the Instagram app, which is extremely
| easy to do even accidentally, because they shove it into
| the Instagram feed and make it look like Instagram content.
|
| I would not be surprised if a large chunk - maybe even the
| majority - of "Threads users" interact with it exclusively
| through the Instagram app, with many of them not even fully
| aware that it's nominally a separate product.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > they shove it into the Instagram feed and make it look
| like Instagram content.
|
| And also into your notifications now.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| is that Threads, or is that Instagram and Threads? Kind of a
| cheat without calling that out
| lynndotpy wrote:
| I believe Threads active users are artificially conflated with
| Instagram and Facebook. In all my circles, I don't know anyone
| who uses Threads
| cogman10 wrote:
| That's my guess. By having either of those accounts you
| automatically got a threads account.
| changing1999 wrote:
| True. But you don't become an active monthly user. Unless
| there are some shenanigans happening, which is highly
| likely. I think I visited Threads by accident several times
| by clicking posts in IG, that were apparently Threads posts
| embedded directly into IG as a growth hack (my
| speculation).
| criley2 wrote:
| In all my circles, I don't know a single "X" user. Not even
| one. Anecdotes are funny like that.
|
| Facebook monthly active users: >3 billion
|
| Instagram monthly active users: >2 billion
|
| Threads monthly active users: ~275 million
|
| If they're cheating, they're doing a poor job of it.
| slimsag wrote:
| When you post on Instagram, there are opt-out features that
| will 'automatically share to your Threads account too' and
| you can see Threads notifications in the Instagram app and
| such .. so I think it's reasonable to assume they are
| leveraging the Instagram user-base a bit.
| changing1999 wrote:
| Just double checking - there is an opt-out feature that
| cross-posts all IG posts to Threads?
| threeseed wrote:
| Threads is literally built on Instagram so of course they
| are leveraging it.
|
| But that's very different from saying that Threads MAUs
| aren't specific to that platform.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Most people in my circle have given up on Threads (even pre-
| Bluesky mass migration)
| nabla9 wrote:
| I have reasons to believe your belief is incorrect. Thread's
| app downloads, number of posts etc. match the MAU numbers.
|
| In all my circles is unreliable argument.
| dnissley wrote:
| Yes, it's the same argument that people have been making
| about facebook being dead when it's hitting all time highs.
| moralestapia wrote:
| X is at 600 _million_ MAU, for reference.
|
| Edit: Thanks @JumpCrisscross.
| moogly wrote:
| And minus bots?
| moralestapia wrote:
| No idea but bots are not exclusive to X.
| moogly wrote:
| Nope, but I'd wager the share is way higher than on the
| other services as of right now.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hmm ... yeah but that's wandering into "the supposition
| of a supposition" territory.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| 600mm*
| threeseed wrote:
| The trend is what is important. Threads is growing at 1m new
| users a day.
|
| And at least here in Australia, X is ranked #69 on the App
| Store. Threads #2.
|
| Year from now, Threads could well be bigger.
| redox99 wrote:
| App store ranking is kind of irrelevant, it favors new
| rising platforms, and underestimates an existing platform
| with a consolidated user base.
| frgtpsswrdlame wrote:
| Yeah but what made Twitter twitter wasn't really the usercount,
| it was the mix of established voices and complete randos
| mixing. If the journalists and economists and politicians go to
| Bluesky, it will win. I definitely don't think that's a given
| but it seems much more plausible now than it did a few months
| ago.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Bluesky is increasingly getting that way. Every time I check
| it this week I'm seeing new content from recognizable people.
| I think at some point there will be a tipping point where
| Bluesky will have more content and just win outside of alt
| right circles.
| briandear wrote:
| Until they start censoring. Some orgs (like Guardian,)
| don't like getting fact checked in real time. Old Twitter
| is far worse than new Twitter. In the recent old days,
| you'd get suspended for even debating Covid vaccine safety.
| Couldn't even debate it! They even colluded with the U.S.
| government to silence dissent. Crazy.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Kim Kardashian is much more important to a social network
| than any journalist, politician or economist. Perhaps more so
| than all of them combined.
|
| There are many interest verticals on Twitter like politics,
| sports, celebrity, influencer, porn etc.
| rvz wrote:
| > Bluesky has now 15 million total users (how many active?)
|
| That is a very good question. One of the Bluesky developers
| gave the figure at around 2.25M DAUs [0]
|
| This chart shows that they now have 3.74M DAUs and have 9.3M
| MAUs [1]
|
| Mastodon does not give their DAUs, but their MAUs are down to
| less than 1M users. [2]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953421
|
| [1]
| https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
|
| [2] https://joinmastodon.org/servers
| threeseed wrote:
| Threads is closer to 300m now.
|
| According to Mosseri it is now adding 1m new users _a day_.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| You forgot to list one:
|
| X/Twitter has over 500 million monthly active users.
| Retr0id wrote:
| The 15 million figure is several hours out of date, it's
| currently over 17m. (https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats)
|
| 9.4m active this month (and counting), according to
| https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
| hbn wrote:
| Threads artificially juicing their numbers with Instagram
| integration. I can't remember what it was but recently when
| posting to Instagram it offered me an option to enable all my
| posts to automatically cross-post to Threads, very possibly
| defaulted to "on" too.
| bakugo wrote:
| I literally forget Threads exists for months at a time.
|
| Nobody I know uses it, or has even acknowledged its existence.
| I see people on other social media talking about their Bluesky
| and Mastodon accounts and directing people there, but I have
| never seen anyone do it for Threads. I have never seen anyone
| share a link to Threads, I don't even remember what its domain
| name is. I have never seen Threads included in those little
| sets of social media icon links that all brand websites have.
|
| I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe Threads has actual users who
| care about it and aren't just clueless Facebook/Instagram users
| who were not-so-subtly encouraged to also use Threads by those
| apps.
| davidw wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| Threads seems unusable unless they change the algorithm. It
| defaults to For You and For You is 50% Instagram-style
| engagement bait, 50% people you've never heard of complaining
| about things you've never heard of, and 0% people you're
| actually following.
|
| If they fix that it could indeed be quite good, but it still
| feels too much like "broadcasting" vs "conversation", and I'm
| personally not ready to be popular like that.
|
| Bluesky does have a little toxic positivity but it's much
| better, and it's possible to chat with friends on it. (When I
| try enabling the algorithm features they still won't stop
| showing me gay porn though.)
| davidw wrote:
| If you follow and engage with enough people, the engagement
| bait stuff goes away, for the most part.
| astrange wrote:
| I follow a decent number of tech people and I do see some
| of their posts, but then it runs out. In particular all the
| people I follow go to bed at US nighttime and then it's all
| bait until they wake up.
|
| Also, half the people I follow are getting baited by the
| "random people complaining" posts - so I just see their
| replies to it!
| deadbabe wrote:
| I'm tired of threads. In the beginning it was nice but now it
| just gives me engagement fatigue. So much shallow content
| provoking replies and adding nothing to your life. It actually
| makes me feel worse.
|
| And now they will be adding ads. That's it. I'm out.
| hbn wrote:
| Threads is unusable. I'm not sure what I expected, but of
| course it's just the slop-pushing, engagement-farmed,
| censorship-heavy auto-moderated Instagram algorithm but in a
| format made to look like Twitter.
|
| The only posts I see on there that look like they're made by
| humans are jilted twitter refugees trying to convince each
| other they're having fun by sharing articles about how X is
| dead. Meanwhile on X nobody has thought about Threads since the
| day it launched.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| bsimpson wrote:
| For the longest time, I didn't get the appeal of Twitter. I
| started using it a bit more when I was still in the habit of
| using social feeds, and Facebook's was getting actively bad.
|
| I haven't used Twitter much lately since it got bought, and I
| haven't missed it.
|
| A lot of the time when I did use it, it was for customer
| support. I feel bad for my followers who had to see my gripes
| about whatever behemoth sold me crap.
| poniko wrote:
| Too early to call, the momentum must also become normal. I can
| see a future where threads is mainstream and bluesky attracts
| news/politics.
| geek_at wrote:
| Just saw a YouTube video from legaleagle, a lawyer and in his
| videos he usually cites Twitter posts but the recent ones have
| bluesky posts which made me think bluesky has gone mainstream
| so I spun up a VM and hosted my PDS for me and a few friends
|
| I like the feeling and style of the app, it's very comfortable
| coming from Twitter
| mrweasel wrote:
| It came as a bit of surprise this morning when an radio
| interview with a politician concluded with mentioning her
| Bluesky account, not Twitter or Facebook.
|
| Still I feel like Facebook/Instagram, and certainly X/Twitter
| has done a lot of damage, which has cause many of us to be
| sceptical about ever opening another social media account.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| 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?
| the_third_wave wrote:
| That depends on what you use as criterium to decide which
| platform is ahead. For me the best criterium is how much
| diversity of opinion - the only type of diversity which really
| matters - is allowed on the platform and how much real
| interaction (i.e. not just shit fights) between those groups
| occurs. Currently X comes out on top in the former category
| while none of them scores anything worth mentioning on the
| latter.
| jsemrau wrote:
| 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.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| It certainly made them feel more human to me. I wish Kamala
| would have done the same just so people could see her have a
| real conversation. I have no idea how that would go.
| b0sk wrote:
| 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.
| Geep5 wrote:
| I still think Nostr will eventually be the go-to.
| ibz wrote:
| That's how it looks like currently. Nostr is the open protocol
| whereas Bluesky is the more open platform.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| isn't it exclusively inhabited by bitcoiners? and relies on
| never leaking your private key, with no recourse for key
| rotation? or am I out of date
| mandibles wrote:
| Protocols > platforms. Nostr will win long-term because it is a
| protocol.
| cassepipe wrote:
| XMPP would like to have a word
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Yes, that's why people go to Usenet for their discussions and
| not Reddit.
| astrange wrote:
| This isn't tenable because you need to do moderation and spam
| filtering, which require centralization.
| ta8645 wrote:
| 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.
| williamtrask wrote:
| For a nice book on the tech-philosophy of this question
| (recently endorsed by the Dalai Lama, you might enjoy:
| https://www.plurality.net/
| croes wrote:
| Not everything that is written on Twitter is a viewpoint and
| those things became mire and more sind Musk bought it.
| tootie wrote:
| It is functionally impossible to run an unmoderated message
| board that doesn't devolve. Holding out hope that "we" learn
| where "we" is everyone in the world is not going to happen in
| 1000 years. The only way for a forum to remain civil and useful
| is for careful moderation to remove troublemakers and it is
| equally impossible to do that without ever making a mistake.
| ta8645 wrote:
| You're presenting a false dichotomy. Of course, there will be
| mistakes. And of course there needs to be moderation. But I
| support the moderation similar to HN, it's about politeness
| and respect. As long as you're respectful, you can say your
| piece.
|
| Also, X does provide community based fact checking too, which
| works best when there are representatives from all sides
| participating.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > As long as you're respectful, you can say your piece.
|
| There are way, way too many flagged and downvoted
| respectful posts every day for this to be true. Despite
| HN's FAQs protesting it as an illusion, that doesn't change
| reality, which is that HN is closer to Reddit with every
| passing year.
| ta8645 wrote:
| Well, i'm in favor of pursuing the ideal, even though it
| will never be perfect in practice.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I used to think echo chambers are bad. I realized that when
| algorithms force me to consume content that I don't agree with,
| my mood becomes terrible. In order to protect myself, I no
| longer think echo chambers are pure bad. They are a necessary
| evil to ensure my own sanity.
|
| In the real world you congregate with like-minded people. The
| same applies to my social media timeline. And I use Mastodon by
| the way, which doesn't have an algorithm driven timeline.
| ta8645 wrote:
| Yes, I feel the same way. I'm in favor of self-controlled
| filters that let each of us decide what we want to consume,
| and when. Don't think that means you need to go into the
| echo-chamber permanently.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| That's true, but arguably x's only draw at this point is the
| ease of reaching and interacting beyond this bubble. Consider
| the draw of major public figures being openly mocked in their
| own comments! It's pretty rare to see any public figure open
| themselves to criticism.
| taylodl wrote:
| There's a reason waste management becomes so important when
| building cities and large communities.
| ta8645 wrote:
| There's also a reason we don't create zoning laws based on
| political belief, forcing everyone to agree with us if they
| want to be our neighbor.
| taylodl wrote:
| What nobody has figured out how to do yet is re-create that
| physical reality in the digital world. Policing is a
| reality few people want to talk about, and nobody wants to
| point out that graffiti (trolling in the digital world) is
| vandalism and not free speech. Nor do they want to face the
| reality that while graffiti is pretty easy to spot in the
| real world, it's much more difficult to detect in the
| digital world. All those problems are in play _before_ we
| add in the problems brought by advertising and the fact
| that online communities legally look similar to media.
|
| Online communities have existed for over four decades now
| and we still haven't solved these problems.
| ta8645 wrote:
| > Online communities have existed for over four decades
| now and we still haven't solved these problems.
|
| The beautiful thing about digital graffiti is that you
| can remove it instantly, and return to an unmarred
| environment. As long as such tools are provided to each
| person, those who enjoy graffiti can leave it in place
| too. Win-Win.
|
| We do need a new vision, with people embracing and
| promoting digital maturity. Both in a reduction of
| trolling, and in a stronger resilience against it.
| Because not everything that is objectionable, is
| graffiti. You should not hate your neighbor because he
| has a different political sign on his front yard during
| election season. We have to stop equating everything that
| is objectionable, as a catastrophic, intolerable insult.
| davidczech wrote:
| I don't think we should, nor do I think it's healthy. Some
| viewpoints are horrific and should absolutely be suppressed.
| ta8645 wrote:
| That's a very dangerous idea that has been tried in
| communistic countries many times. It always leads to
| horrendous outcomes and the authoritarian control of the
| public.
|
| We should each follow our own moral compass, and oppose
| viewpoints that we find horrific. But trying to
| systematically stamp out disagreeable ideas, rather than to
| influence people with better ideas, is a road to hell.
| davidczech wrote:
| This sort of absolutism is the same kind of garbage middle-
| school level philosophy that Elon Musk peddles, and it
| doesn't work in practice. For example, holocaust denialism,
| or in the most recent example, Sandy Hook massacre
| denialism isn't an opposing viewpoint worth hosting on a
| private platform. The best course of action is to simply
| eradicate it. Infowars being shutdown is a great example of
| a good thing happening.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I hope we get a nice distributed protocol, and I'm not
| completely negative on AT (or nostr) yet. Twitter is a critical
| chokepoint for independent media right now, and the guy who
| owns it is in the coming administration.
|
| Shutting down twitter, rumble, and substack would be a massacre
| for independent media right now. Elon could make an offer that
| couldn't be refused on the other two, and turn on the
| censorship harder than Facebook.
|
| The right-wing free speech heel turn is always the same: when
| you censor, you're trying to prevent the free expression of
| ideas, when we censor, we're trying to prevent the "support" of
| terrorism. Lese-majeste is always around the corner.
| ta8645 wrote:
| I don't think the answer to the potential right-wing
| censorship, is left-wing censorship. Right now, X is actually
| closer to the ideal than any time in its history.
|
| But yeah, if there is a truly distributed system, that had
| facilities and incentives which support and even promote
| diverse interactions, that'd be even better.
| pessimizer wrote:
| X is owned by an opinionated rich guy, completely entangled
| in government (even before the Trump win.) There's nothing
| ideal about a situation where he could be flipping the
| switch right now to turn it back like it once was, or even
| worse. He doesn't even have to care, all he has to do is
| lie back and let it happen. It's the path of least
| resistance.
|
| I firmly believe his posture with twitter has been because
| 1) it's a fun place for him and it was obviously a money
| losing purchase* so he might as well have that fun, and 2)
| his level of censorship is something that he can use to
| negotiate with government over contracts or regulation.
|
| He might even really believe in free speech, but a
| conceptual belief in free speech doesn't mean he'll feel
| obligated to personally provide it if he can make a dollar
| denying it. His speech will remain free no matter what
| happens, he's a rich guy.
|
| -----
|
| * (not unlike say the Guardian, the New Republic, Mother
| Jones, the Intercept, or the Atlantic, or the WaPo,
| aparently, and probably CNN and MSNBC at this point.
| They're not for making money.)
| ta8645 wrote:
| Again, I totally understand your objection, and you're
| right about the potential abuses that exist. The reason I
| said it is better now than before, is that the abuses
| under the previous ownership were not potential, they
| were real and being perpetrated every day. So I see X as
| _currently_ a much better place than it has ever been in
| its history.
|
| But I'm with you on the potential problems and would
| rather have a system that was immune to such issues. What
| i'm really arguing against is people who saw the previous
| regime as correct and just, and are looking to recreate
| their echo-chamber somewhere else.
|
| Part of what it will take to create a healthy town-
| center, that is much better than X, is for more people to
| speak up for ideals of diversity and tolerance. And to
| fight against the very loud and angry segment of people
| who see censorship and authoritarian control as good
| things, as long as they're working in their own favor.
| protocolture wrote:
| Nah, X is worse for free speech than it ever has been. Musk
| shut down Crimethinc just because one of his bootlickers
| went "ooh ooh they did a crime". Crimethinc actually
| produce a lot of great journalism, some of which would
| actually support right wing views... if the right wingers
| who complain about safe spaces and bubbles and "diverse
| interactions" actually read anything. For instance, they
| had a pretty detailed conversation with one of the rioters
| at the George Floyd protests, when all the """left""" wing
| media claimed that it was a minority of bad infiltrating
| people doing the rioting, these guys straight up published
| a source that said that no, it was tactical to lure the
| cops away from the police station. That they incentivised
| and encouraged the rioting internally. They outlined the
| processes they used to split off the mostly white liberal
| element so they could achieve these ends. It was
| extraordinary. And obviously, they should meet the
| definition of free speech.
|
| The problem is that Musk came in and lifted the bans on a
| lot of people who were removed for roughly the correct
| thing, community standards. And then he let those very
| people help him find the voices you do want in the
| community and shut them down. Its gone beyond just echo
| chamber, and now the management has a clique. That clique
| doesnt just hate free speech, they loathe the people that
| largely use such rights like journalists.
|
| Then of course theres all the shit about compliance with
| foreign governments etc. Twitters going to be an amazing
| case study one day in the future that will likely conclude
| against "free speech" as Musk poorly interprets it.
|
| My impression is that the goal isn't to uphold free speech,
| its never done that, its to create a safe space to be an
| asshole. And that if you can hold your own against the
| assholes, then they will find a way to abuse their position
| in the clique to get you banned.
|
| Back in the day you had these coffee shops, that may or may
| not be partially responsible for the success of so called
| western civilization. People would travel across europe to
| visit and exchange ideas with likeminded people. Thats not
| what social media is. People arent having robust,
| intentional, intellectual discussions, they are forming
| tribes and attacking each other with whatever weapons are
| available. People wake up in the morning and check their
| notifications like people in the blitz looking out the
| window to see if their neighbors survived the night. Aiding
| one side or the other of the conflict should never be
| conflated with "promoting diverse interactions".
| redeux wrote:
| People aren't leaving X because of polite disagreement. They're
| leaving because ideological extremism and hate not only run
| wild but are actively promoted by the platform.
|
| Here's how I see it: imagine you like going to a restaurant for
| dinner fairly often. Recently, a group of rowdy patrons has
| started coming in, getting drunk, and making all kinds of
| noise. Strangely, the restaurant seems to encourage their
| behavior. You don't love this--you're just trying to enjoy a
| nice dinner and some casual conversation. So, you leave and
| don't come back.
|
| You can't force the restaurant to calm down or kick out the
| rowdy patrons. They should be allowed to serve whomever they
| want. Luckily, you're also not forced to endure their actions.
| ta8645 wrote:
| > People aren't leaving X because of polite disagreement.
| They're leaving because ideological extremism and hate not
| only run wild but are actively promoted by the platform.
|
| I disagree. I think the definition of hate and extremism has
| been warped to encompass things that aren't either of those
| things. And that's part of the problem. The rhetoric has
| become so hyperbolic that we're having a hard time
| coexisting.
|
| The answer is for us to walk that back, and encourage actual
| dialogue, not run into our own safe bunkers.
|
| You can talk to the people at your table in a restaurant, and
| it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking about
| something you disagree with. The food tastes the same.
| redeux wrote:
| > I think the definition of hate and extremism has been
| warped to encompass things that aren't either of those
| things.
|
| The definitions of hate and extremism are inherently tied
| to personal values. Many people perceive much of the speech
| on X as hateful and extremist because it directly
| contradicts their core values, not because they're
| arbitrarily expanding those definitions.
|
| > You can talk to the people at your table in a restaurant,
| and it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking
| about something you disagree with. The food tastes the
| same.
|
| This analogy only works if everyone abides by a social
| contract. that's often not the case on X. It's like if the
| people at the next table overheard you, didn't like what
| you said, and decided to come over and spit in your food.
| That's the experience many people have on X.
| bakugo wrote:
| > Many people perceive much of the speech on X as hateful
| and extremist because it directly contradicts their core
| values
|
| People disagreeing with you is not "hate and extremism".
| numbers_guy wrote:
| It's very hard to moderate an online forum that allows
| political content without succumbing to your own political
| bias. I don't like the trolls on X, but if X started
| moderating against hateful content, it would just end up
| censoring news and opinions like they used to do beforehand.
| There is just no way around that. I am not going to name
| examples because it would start a flame war, but there are
| enough recent examples.
|
| Also, maybe I'm from a different generation, but the trolls
| can be very easily ignored. What do I care is some no name
| account is posting some stupid content somewhere on X? I
| already know which people I want to follow. The rest I don't
| care about.
| threeseed wrote:
| > coexist with a diversity of viewpoints
|
| Create a new account on X and then come back and talk about
| this.
|
| You will notice that it is entirely right-wing political
| content that is being pushed.
| ta8645 wrote:
| You might be right, I don't have the data to know. But it
| might just feel that way, because previously it was entirely
| left-wing political content that was being pushed.
| Kudos wrote:
| You just received basic instructions to get the data. You
| hold such strong opinions in this thread, I think it's
| important you inform yourself properly.
| ta8645 wrote:
| Actually, my opinions are not reliant on the results of
| such a test.
|
| Anything that X does which favors right-wing opinions,
| and censors or diminishes left-wing opinions, I oppose.
| I'm for free speech, and all of us being in the same
| proximity to hash out our differences, and accept that
| there will be some which always remain.
| bagful wrote:
| Many people hold worldviews which are ontologically incapable
| of co-existence with other viewpoints. By reducing discourse to
| intergroup sparring and affinity signaling, the intermingling
| of various such extremists only solidifies the status quo.
| ta8645 wrote:
| There is a way to coexist, without it being a constant
| ideological battle all the time. If we can talk about the
| things we DO agree about, it makes it easier to talk about
| the things we don't. That's only possible if we're in
| proximity to one another.
|
| Hiding in our own echo-chambers does not solve any real
| problems, and it creates new ones.
| Animats wrote:
| 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?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Setting up a PDS isn't too hard but still requires a dedicated
| IT person right now IMO. If you have a lot of customers I think
| it's worth it (aka you can justify spending budget on keeping
| the PDS up.) If you're small, it's not worth it yet I don't
| think.
|
| Censorship/moderation is based on labellers that label posts
| for content. The default App View has opt-out moderation based
| on the default Bluesky moderation labelers. You can also opt-
| into other labellers if you like. You can run your own labeller
| to get your own moderation. I run my own labeller and my own
| feeds so I can customize my experience but none of it is in a
| state that others could really fork the code. It's not too hard
| to start reading the jetstream (a version of the firehose
| that's easier to parse/read) though.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Doesn't it make more sense to go for Stack Overflow / Reddit
| model instead for a support forum ?
|
| The best responses will bubble up and that really the main
| innovation that makes a forum more practical.
|
| What about hosting a Lemmy instance or and if you have the
| money, Stack Overflow for Teams ?
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| 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.
| Retr0id wrote:
| They make it to the HN front page every so often
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bsky.app
| alecco wrote:
| The top links are mostly from the past week. And a lot of
| links are about Bluesky itself.
| Retr0id wrote:
| That's about what I'd expect from a network that's also
| undergone exponential growth in the past ~week, while still
| being much smaller than e.g. twitter in absolute terms.
| ihuman wrote:
| Only a few of the top links are from the past week https://
| hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| minimaxir wrote:
| It takes a bit for content to go viral. Bluesky was mostly
| irrelevant until just over a week ago.
|
| Since then I've seen plenty of Bluesky embeds in articles where
| there wouild have been Twitter/X embeds.
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| Wait, did I miss something that happened just over a week
| ago?
| minimaxir wrote:
| The U.S. Presidential election and its outcome on November
| 5th was the inflection point for the significant migration
| from X to Bluesky, as a) many were staying on Twitter/X
| only for the real-time news and discussion about the
| election results which ended up not being that interesting
| due to the Trump sweep and b) the results in favor of Trump
| will give Elon more power and make Twitter/X more
| insufferable.
| Kiro wrote:
| Do you have any examples of articles with Bsky embeds?
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| I see a few in some Telegram chats that I'm in
| CSSer wrote:
| People do that when feel it's socially acceptable to do so. It
| feels like it could be a matter of time. A million people
| joined in a 24 hour period yesterday.
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| Saw one for a sports journalist on a subreddit. I think that's
| a clear sign of it making it, given how twitter and reddit are
| joined at the hip
| donohoe wrote:
| Thats a factor of time given how new it is - and likely
| inevitable.
| Retr0id wrote:
| > 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
| adastra22 wrote:
| Sounds like they are confusing Merkle blocks with block chain.
| Retr0id wrote:
| An earlier version of the repo commit format (v2) had a
| "prev" field, which referenced the previous commit by hash.
| This is vaguely blockchain-ish in that you could follow the
| chain all the way back to the first commit*, but even then,
| you still didn't _need_ the prior versions to verify the
| current version. In "repo v3", the prev field still exists
| but is optional, and in practice it isn't used.
|
| *unless the repo had been "rebased"
| kettlecorn wrote:
| 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.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Something tells me you tend to attract harsh disagreements that
| may be interpreted as "toxic". Maybe do some reflection?
| kettlecorn wrote:
| Not true. If someone can make a point honestly and in good
| faith I do my best to respect it even it's "harsh". I myself
| am no stranger to being very blunt when trying to make a case
| for something.
|
| What I consider "toxic" is using slurs, trying to make people
| angry, bad faith arguments, spamming replies without giving
| them much thought, etc.
| caekislove wrote:
| Get real. It's a liberal echo chamber. 90%+ of the posts there
| are anti-Trump and/or anti-Musk.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I agree that it's an echo chamber, but it's not as bad as it
| used to be.
|
| More importantly, your conclusion doesn't follow from your
| premise. Most reasonable people in the world are anti-Trump
| for apolitical reasons, and Elon Musk presided over Twitter's
| downward spiral. Liberal politics doesn't have much to do
| with it.
| caekislove wrote:
| Imma let you finish, but since Trump won the popular vote
| by millions of votes, the word "reasonable" is doing a lot
| of heavy lifting there.
| multjoy wrote:
| "the world" is more than the US.
| protocolture wrote:
| Do you believe that Trump won the popular vote... for the
| entire planet?
| kettlecorn wrote:
| I'm trying to avoid national politics on BlueSky simply
| because I want to take a breather from it.
|
| I'm seeing vastly more signal and less noise on topics I care
| about like game dev, urbanism, art, and tech.
| astrange wrote:
| Other countries exist, but they speak other languages so
| you're not reading their posts. Japan /loves/ short form text
| social media.
| nradov wrote:
| The X Community Notes feature is open source. That is at least
| a step in the right direction, even if the feed algorithm is
| still closed.
|
| https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes
|
| For better or worse, X / Twitter was never really about
| communities. It has always been focused on allowing individuals
| to broadcast their thoughts. If you want a moderated community
| discussion then there are much better platforms for that.
|
| We do have neutral mediums for free speech: HTTP and SMTP.
| kettlecorn wrote:
| Community Notes is a great feature.
|
| But on X too much value was / is being lost due to policy and
| algorithmic choices that discourage signal and encourage
| noise.
|
| I used to go there for critical discussion of various tech
| issues or smart people talking about innovations at the
| cutting edge. As an example I used to use X to learn about
| modern graphics programming by searching certain terms to see
| what the smartest people in the field were saying while
| talking to each other.
|
| It used to be that if a big account Tweeted something often
| you'd see true experts responding as the first replies. Now
| you'll see dozens of Bluechecks spamming memes or gross
| statements before you get to any substance, which inevitably
| has lower engagement.
|
| Too many smart people have been turned away from the platform
| and it just doesn't generate the quality of discussion it
| used to. Already in the communities I care about I'm finding
| vastly more substance on BlueSky.
| alecco wrote:
| 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.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I do not see BlueSky catching on; mainly because the sole
| advantage (if you can call it that) could be summarized as
| "We're not X and we're not Meta." Only techies care about the
| decentralized part; but techies don't define market interests.
|
| That wins an audience, but a niche audience. Movements that
| exist as a solely reactionary force to a larger, more active
| movement; or define themselves solely in terms of being opposed
| to something else, are statistically more likely to fail.
| People like feeling like rebels; but don't actually like
| rebelling.
| caekislove wrote:
| If "Twitter, but decentralized" was compelling to the average
| social media user, Mastodon would have eaten the world years
| ago.
| epistasis wrote:
| 90% of social media is the crowd of people using it. A new
| social media site will take over with having better people,
| which might be caused by getting better features but
| unlikely. Or, it could be that the dominant social media
| site makes blunders that push its users away, like Digg
| did.
|
| Twitter used to be unbeatable for me in 1) areas with
| technical expertise or, 2) following the latest in news.
| Using Twitter to get the latest on news has only recently
| been destroyed, as evidenced by its failure as an
| information source during the recent hurricanes in the US.
|
| And most technical users are now reevaluating the crap they
| have to put up with every day that they didn't have to a
| while back, and finding X lacking. And in science, this is
| especially with a new administration that is dedicated to
| science suppression (e.g. RFK Jr) and X is run by a wanna-
| be oligarch that wants a part in the administration
| controlling their social media without regard to free
| speech. (For example, blanket banning of "cis" made lots of
| discusion really hard. "Cis" is a technical word that is
| used all the time in my field unrelated to the culture war,
| and not being able to use it was infuriating and really
| made a lot of people angry that they were mere pawns in a
| stupid culture war. It is not a curse word or a slur or
| hateful word and nobody's life was made better by banning
| its use, but many discussions became silly.)
|
| Mastodon is more clunky than Bluesky, too clunky to get
| working for most, though a lot of scientists got close.
| Bluesky is easier and is getting the community now.
| epistasis wrote:
| IMHO, there are some great advantages compared to X/Twitter
| (I'm not sure about Threads).
|
| 1) links in your posts do not penalize your post, making it
| much easier to share content and link. It's absolutely
| refreshing to click on a link in mobile and have it open
| directly in your preferred web browser instead of the in-app
| hassle.
|
| 2) You can choose your own algorithm, without having weird
| stuff shoved in it
|
| 3) it's a new network and early adopters are hopping on, so
| it's unusually high signal of interesting people, and
| interesting people are much more likely to follow you because
| there's not as many people.
|
| 4) far far far far less spam and bots
|
| 5) people can't pay a nominal fee to jump to the top of
| replies, which makes discussions far higher quality and much
| more interesting
|
| It's an all around better experience. It may not stay that
| way. Twitter was always an ever-changing beast, as all social
| networks are, but the big changes that have been taken on
| over the past few years all came at weakening the value
| proposition of Twitter in order to feed the ego of a lucky
| narcissist that does not understand the experience of others
| or care about creating a good product. X is now the play
| thing of a wanna-be oligarch, and it's afraid harder to get
| useful information out of it compared to even a couple years
| ago.
|
| Bluesky has already become far more useful to me in finding
| technical material and technical collaborators in just a few
| days, even after years of careful curation of my X/Twitter
| network. I don't know if that will last, or if those outside
| of science/data/programming will find Bluesky useful (and I
| actively unfollow anybody that posts a lot of stuff outside
| that area so I won't know!), but for the HN crowd I think
| Bluesky already has the potential to be a much better and
| rewarding use of time invested.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| An advantage of Bluesky over Twitter that's valuable to a lot
| of people is the degree of control it gives. Algorithmic
| feeds are more precisely tunable so it's easier to get them
| to show the things you want to see, starter packs make it
| easy to follow entire circles at once, and moderation tools
| are robust, which helps tamp down on spam, trolling,
| harassment, etc.
|
| It feels more designed for meaningful interaction than it is
| engagement at all costs, which is probably why it's common
| for people who've moved to have seen much higher numbers of
| substantiative replies to their posts despite having a
| fraction as many followers as they do on Twitter.
|
| It may not catch on regardless, but I think it has the best
| shot of all the Twitter alternatives thus far.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| All these advantages are only due to the fact that it has
| less users and thus it is cheaper to run it and less need
| to monetize it.
| kettlecorn wrote:
| BlueSky's platform choices are encouraging far more signal
| than noise.
|
| X / Twitter is doing the opposite. It's rotting into a place
| where meaningful discussion is hard to have and you have to
| put up with tons of trolls / spam.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| Who on earth is "shoving it down your throat"? Calm down.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| Seems calm to me. It's just a hyperbolic phrase.
| gorwell wrote:
| It also means they will become increasingly radicalized in
| their echo chamber.
|
| It's telling that people who are leaving X are doing so not
| because they are being censored, but because their political
| opponents are no longer being censored.
| protocolture wrote:
| Whoa stop shoving your posts down my throat!
| numbers_guy wrote:
| 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?
| rconti wrote:
| Well, the algorithm only pushes engagement bait so it's
| selecting for morally flawed takes rather than nuanced takes.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| I don't let the algorithm dictate who I follow. I pretty much
| know the big names in all the areas that I want to keep up to
| date with. And for every big name I know their main rivals,
| so I can have a complete picture. It's that simple. If
| Bluesky manages to attract the same diversity of opinions I
| might start using it.
| wnevets wrote:
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| They announced today they are rolling out Lists which will be
| chronological.
|
| So you would be able to build communities around specific
| topics.
| wnevets wrote:
| even that is an avoidance of a real time feed that twitter
| has had since the beginning and bluesky has now.
| threeseed wrote:
| It has had a real time, chronological feed since day one
| i.e. Following.
| wnevets wrote:
| Which has limited value during real time events. If you
| are not preemptively following people who are interested
| in or involved with that event then you lose out on
| following that event in real time.
| okhuman wrote:
| 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.
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| The real issue is that none of these alternatives (Threads,
| Mastodon, Bluesky) offer anything other than "we're not
| Twitter".
|
| Digg to Reddit was a unique case, because Digg very
| specifically fucked up their site, badly, with the V4 update.
| Reddit was in a great spot to pick up users from Digg because
| of not only having a similar overarching purpose as a link
| aggregator, but additional features like subreddits which
| enabled more smaller and casual link sharing and comment
| sections. It was a clear upgrade from Digg V4. I do think that
| Reddit would have eventually overtaken Digg anyway, and V4 only
| sped up the process.
|
| Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong
| with Twitter right now. If you're on there to look at funny
| memes, cat pictures, celebrity news and pornography -- which
| encapsulates about 98% of Twitter use cases -- it still
| functions much better than the alternatives. The migrations are
| happening for meta reasons, either political or ToS-related
| (specifically, X claiming they can use images you post for AI
| training). This isn't a recipe for long-term success, it's a
| precursor for people making bunch of noise for a month and then
| heading back to Twitter.
|
| As someone who doesn't really participate in these large social
| networks -- even modern HN is way too mainstream for me
| honestly -- I do think it's a good thing people get off them,
| though. Smaller communities are a good thing. Shouting your
| loudest, hottest political takes on Twitter so you can pat
| yourself on the back for 10k likes is a fast track to mental
| health issues.
| astrange wrote:
| > Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong
| with Twitter right now.
|
| The Bluesky app both performs better and uses much less
| battery than Twitter does. I think because it uses Google ads
| now, but not sure.
|
| Twitter also has disk space leaks - I regularly find the app
| has gone up to 3GB or so. (And it's not from image caching,
| seems to be an SQLite db of all accounts I've seen posts
| from.)
| jeffgreco wrote:
| Bluesky app is becoming a fine React Native exemplar, and
| it's been a blast watching former Facebook React guy Dan
| Abramov, now working at Bluesky, start using Native for the
| first time. https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov
| lthornberry wrote:
| The decision to promote blue check replies is a product-level
| decision that has made the user experience much, much worse
| multjoy wrote:
| > Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong
| with Twitter right now.
|
| The app is a bin-fire.
| Symmetry wrote:
| It's definitely something that's happened community by
| community. A lot of space news I care about is still just on
| Twitter but urbanism stuff has mostly moved to Bluesky, for
| instance.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Social networks' usefulness is proportional to the size of the
| network so they are naturally winner takes all markets.
| Tenoke wrote:
| 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.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| That's exactly what Threads seemed like when I dipped in, so
| many complaints about non-Meta tech companies.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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.
| mepian wrote:
| HN is also social media...
| alexjplant wrote:
| Only by the loosest possible definition that would also
| encompass forums, IRC, game lobby chatrooms, etc. There's a
| clear and practical distinction between communities driven by
| a specific interest like this one and platforms like Xitter.
|
| Saying that HN is social media is like saying that a taco is
| a sandwich.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Disagree. That's what HN and IRC fans tell themselves to
| draw an artificial distinction between networks they like
| and networks they don't. I don't see a huge meaningful
| difference except in scale and content breadth.
| alexjplant wrote:
| There are _huge_ differences. Compare HN to Xitter et al:
|
| - Barrier to entry is higher and participation is tiered
| by karma
|
| - Moderation and community participation guidelines are
| heavier-handed and more defined
|
| - You can't embed media or have a profile picture
|
| - There's virtually no advertising anywhere
|
| - You can't delete posts after a few hours which means no
| way to nuke your presence after the fact
|
| - No hashtags
|
| - Far less algorithmic manipulation of user attention
| (infinite scrolling, per-user algorithmic feed, etc)
|
| - Encouragement of longer-form discussion because of a
| lack of (at this point historical, from what I
| understand) character limits on posts
|
| - Likes/upvote counts aren't visible to other users
|
| - No official app with telemetry and push notifications;
| in fact, no notifications _period_ for things like
| replies
|
| - No friend or follow mechanism
|
| My taco comment stands. Both a sandwich and a taco
| comprise flat, oblong starches with ingredients in the
| middle. One or two people have called them the same. In
| practice virtually nobody would confuse the two or
| substitute one for the other. People are migrating from
| Xitter to Bluesky but almost none are migrating to HN.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Social media was coined to distinguish between platforms
| based on social graphs and older platforms like forums
| and IRC.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I like going on Mastodon and seeing other people's indie games.
| It isn't the same as the potato chip / crack hit vibe of other
| social media, but it's nice.
| protocolture wrote:
| Mastodon reminds me of the internet before people started
| doing dumb shit with social graphs.
|
| You follow people because they will show you a cool rock, not
| because its a slot machine that pays out massive amounts of
| dopamine.
| layer8 wrote:
| Right. My opinion is that following people/accounts shouldn't
| be the single approach (and that it may even be the overall
| more detrimental one), and that it's generally better to follow
| communities. Like HN, or subreddits, web forums, formerly
| Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, or also more chat-like
| platforms like Discord and IRC.
|
| It would be great if Bluesky could generalize to that. My
| understanding is that it's focused on primarily following
| accounts, and that you don't _independently_ have communities
| focused around topics and interests.
| cmxch wrote:
| Correct.
|
| Essentially you're switching one filter bubble for another
| filter bubble that makes it harder for any contrary opinion to
| pierce it.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| The horde of right wing blue checks that dominate all popular
| political tweets is not a filter bubble. It is a user-hostile
| feature that makes organic political interactions impossible
| on the platform. It turns a peer-to-peer network into top-
| down broadcast.
| mkehrt wrote:
| Really? Switching away from the app that pushes nazis at me to
| the one that is mostly my friends won't improve my life? I find
| that hard to believe.
| emmelaich wrote:
| I follow a bunch of people on X who seem thoughtful but with
| whom I typically disagree with. That's useful for self-
| correction and avoiding group think. I also try very hard not
| to react negatively or dramatically.
|
| I believe it's a mistake for the owner be so busy with his own
| platform but I don't follow him or any famous people. That
| helps too.
| astrange wrote:
| If you want to avoid groupthink, I recommend against
| following "people you disagree with" and instead following
| people talking about completely different things. The first
| group isn't really exposing you to new ideas, and the most
| likely reason you disagree is one of you is talking their
| book (ie lying) rather than some heartfelt disagreement.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Good point, and that's what I do, mostly. My interests are
| history and technical topics. But I follow scifi authors,
| cartoonists, some minor (relatively) politicians.
| skwee357 wrote:
| 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.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Social networks have been algorithmically deprioritizing long
| form/well-written content, with Twitter/X being the most
| egregious offender.
|
| Atleast Bluesky has a chronological feed without shenanigans.
| skwee357 wrote:
| I don't think the problem is the algorithmic or chronological
| feed.
|
| I think the problem is that short form content simply should
| not exit. I don't care what people eat for breakfast, or
| reading the same motivation quote over and over again.
|
| I want to have discussions, with different opinions. And
| current microblogging platforms do not provide that. Hence it
| doesn't matter who "wins". IMHO they are all net negative for
| humanity
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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.
| somethoughts wrote:
| It'll be interesting if Twitter/X does drift rightward amongst
| contributors and still keeps its For You feed oriented toward
| "engagement" and view counts, whether or not it will just end
| up leading to infighting between far right and moderate right
| views.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I think so, extreme ideologues like communists, islamists or
| any other hardcore ideologues fight among each other and in
| their own tribes all the time because they are actually
| divided quite a bit on the implementation details. Once the
| thing they rage against is gone, they will have to rage
| against each other. The anti-jewish Trump supporters already
| begin dropping out with disappointment.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| > It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture
|
| My belief is that there's some very real reasons for that!
|
| First, incendiary posts seem to get boosted by the algorithm.
| It's good for engagement, which keeps people online and hooked,
| which feeds more ads, and is good for the business. Elon and
| his CEO of the company know this.
|
| Second, the more you look at the replies, the more you find
| people who are _weirdly_ into Elon Musk. They 'll bring him up
| even in a thread where he's not mentioned and the topic isn't
| about him. "Thank god Elon saved free speech!" or something
| rather. Just profoundly weird stuff that I can't help but feel
| is designed to stroke his ego. Again, I believe the algorithm
| is intentionally boosting these things. It also serves to
| create a cult of personality. He's not just the site owner, but
| he's its "savior".
|
| Lastly, the company is clearly in trouble financially. Revenue
| is down substantially by all accounts, and there's a very high
| valuation to live up to. They want to get people to pay money,
| look at ads, and keep them coming back again and again for
| more. Being community-first and focused on people having the
| kind of good time _they_ want in their communities just doesn
| 't align with those very difficult business constraints.
| timmg wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Generally, it _seems_ to me that a lot of people are saying,
| basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that
| isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."
|
| I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction
| society is moving toward.
| enumjorge wrote:
| > Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying,
| basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that
| isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."
|
| The issue with Twitter and a lot of social media is that you
| don't often encounter opposing views that are nuanced,
| thoughtful and constructive, but rather hot takes, rants and
| memes. Even when those share your same worldview they can be
| tiring, but when they don't, they can drain your mental
| energy quickly.
|
| Perhaps people do want to live in their own bubble, but I
| wouldn't say we can judge that based on Twitter just because
| of how toxic it can be.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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.
| jeffgreco wrote:
| They do. Since July.
| https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-namecheap
| llm_nerd wrote:
| 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.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > Honestly would prefer all these people and places just
| published RSS feeds.
|
| RSS feeds peaked with 6% adoption in 2005 (this is not an
| exaggeration - actual statistic). It's been all downhill from
| there. RSS is more dead than IE6; which is still being used to
| this day to control older industrial equipment.
| anonyfox wrote:
| Not to disagree with your post, but I'd *love* to support a
| renaissance of RSS. It was/is essentially peak distribution
| of content in a proper decentralized manner, putting users
| first and letting providers use whatever they want freely to
| generate it. No walled gardens. No restrictions.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| And no good tools. RSS readers in 2024 still keep failing
| with the same failing interfaces that failed in 1999.
|
| No, I don't want a portal with a little box for every feed
| I follow.
|
| No, I don't want a listing like an email client.
|
| No, I never want it to show me a piece of content twice
| unless I ask for it. (e.g. as David Byrne says: "say
| something once, why say it again?")
|
| Yes, I expect to subscribe to more RSS feeds than I can
| read entirely so I expect it to learn my preferences like
| my YOShInOn agent does. In a cycle of a few days, YOShInOn
| might find 3000 or so articles in RSS feeds and it chooses
| 300 to show me which I thumbs up or thumbs down. I knew
| such a thing was possible when I wrote this paper
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/
|
| but now it is not only possible but easy.
| palata wrote:
| Podcasts are RSS. I don't think it's dead at all there.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Except when they're on soundcloud, or spotify, or audible,
| etc...
| Retr0id wrote:
| > Honestly would prefer all these people and places just
| published RSS feeds.
|
| both bluesky and mastodon also emit RSS feeds
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| a bluesky appview that intertwingled RSS feeds into my home
| feed would be pretty killer.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| I agree but I fear it would be used as an excuse to no longer
| interact with the public and turn off all reply comments by
| default.
| archagon wrote:
| Well, Mastodon is not a private business. Government agencies
| could post on their own instances.
| jtbayly wrote:
| One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into
| multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As
| Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no
| obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police
| department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay
| on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above?
|
| I'm hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that
| may be wishful thinking.
| palata wrote:
| > I'm hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but
| that may be wishful thinking.
|
| Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Interactivity from the part of the reader
| jjulius wrote:
| This is probably more rhetorical than anything, but why
| does it need to be interactive?
| nullren wrote:
| if it's not interactive and not littered with "likes",
| how will i know to care about it or not?
| dymk wrote:
| You are presently commenting on a platform that has
| upvotes and replies. Even you apparently want to use a
| platform that has interactivity.
| jjulius wrote:
| I sure am! Just because I'm commenting on this platform
| doesn't mean that I actually care about upvotes and such
| (spoiler alert: I don't give a shit what my score is). I
| interact, but I never feel the need to and I don't find
| the interactions to be the important aspect of the site,
| rather the kinds of articles I find submitted here are
| what I appreciate the most. The commentary is secondary,
| "extra" if you will - take it away and I wouldn't care.
| Hell, I have an RSS-based news reader that I utilize on a
| daily basis that provides no interactivity and I find it
| a more pleasant experience than on this site, and you
| know why that is?
|
| Because there isn't a comments section filled with people
| tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous
| interpretation of someone's comment and then going at
| them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking
| clarifying questions to better understand someone's
| thoughts first. ;)
| renewiltord wrote:
| No, you're missing the point. There are read-only sites
| and there are sites that people use, and for the most
| part that splits the universe of sites. For better or for
| worse, even read-only users primarily go to sites that
| others interact with.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Why does _a police department_ need a feed to be
| interactive? Actually, doesn 't it being interactive
| invite improper interactions from citizens that should
| have used official channels?
| TylerE wrote:
| It _is_ an official channel.
| fluoridation wrote:
| By "official" channel I was thinking of making a police
| report, or writing something in a complaints book.
| Tweeting at a PD's account is comparatively as official
| as scribbling something on the wall of the station
| bathroom.
| TylerE wrote:
| No, it's more like dropping a note card in a "Tips" drop
| box in the station lobby. It's literally an officially
| monitored communication channel that is explicitly
| authorized.
|
| If anything, the _transparency_ of a social media post is
| much better than, say, private emails that can be buried
| and ignored.
| fluoridation wrote:
| I don't find it particularly interesting to argue about
| which analogy is more appropriate. My point is that it
| doesn't have the same degree of officialness as a report
| or some other public record, and it existing just invites
| to confusion on that matter.
| gs17 wrote:
| This is a platform for discussion, but if it was the
| example of a police department, why do they necessarily
| want to turn a feed of updates into a space they have to
| moderate (or if they can't moderate it, having to put up
| with most responses being along the lines of "ACAB"?).
| Communities can have value, but sometimes you wouldn't
| lose much by having your feed be read only.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The problem is that departments want to put the news in
| front of people, and people want interactivity.
|
| Right now RSS is, for the vast majority of the public, a
| tree falling in a forest with nobody there to hear it.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > The problem is that departments want to put the news in
| front of people, and people want interactivity.
|
| Views exceed interactions by orders of magnitude.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| But people don't bother looking on non-interactive
| platforms. This is a problem for outreach that aims to
| hit 100% of the public, ideally.
| derektank wrote:
| Interactions draw views. If someone asked the same
| question you had, and had it answered by the original
| poster, that's more valuable to you than a simple feed.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| What _information gain_ is there in most of the
| "interactivity" that is afforded by social media?
| multjoy wrote:
| People seem to like it?
| frio wrote:
| For things like a missing person alert, it provides an
| instant feedback mechanism and the ability to share
| things with people you might know in the affected area.
|
| Otherwise, there's absolutely utility to interacting over
| social media. We're doing it right now!
| flir wrote:
| Why is information gain the correct metric?
|
| We're talking about marketing here. Shouldn't it be
| conversions or awareness or something?
| ianburrell wrote:
| One important one is reposting that shows post to your
| followers who might not see the original. It is important
| way to see other content.
|
| Also, liking it signal that other people were interested
| in the post. I don't global likes are useful for likes
| from people you follow are important.
|
| Finally, replies mean can see interaction from people you
| follow. If you follow interesting people, you see
| interesting discussion.
|
| With social media, it isn't possible to read everything,
| I know I used to try to read my whole Twitter feed. There
| needs to be some way to filter than just time when you
| looked. I think the current algorithmic feed is bad
| because it tries to show other stuff instead of ordering
| things that want to see.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Credentialing. I frequently find myself reading Tweets
| from people I've never heard of because someone who I
| know to be an expert in a particular topic has liked or
| retweeted them. This kind of signaling helps surface more
| obscure content and make it available to people who
| wouldn't have found it on their own. This is a huge deal.
| krferriter wrote:
| Likes could just be part of the RSS feed
| krisoft wrote:
| > Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?
|
| The users. You can put your news on RSS and approximately
| nobody will read them. Or you can put them on twitter and
| it will reach people.
|
| This is true even now when the management of the bird app
| is seemingly hellbent on destroying the site. It was even
| more true when the decision was made.
|
| I guess we can hope (or work) on an RSS based future, but
| the key thing to achieve is users, and then the rest will
| follow.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| To be fair, RSS isn't an either/or. Quite the oppoiste.
| You make an RSS feed and bring users into twitter to
| reach them. Ideally being able to move people to your own
| hosted service and they then interface with the base news
| in the same way, on their chosen RSS. Even if the link
| may take them to a blog instead of a centralized service.
|
| Issue is that the bird app doesn't want this middleman
| between them. They want all the users' attention.
| eduction wrote:
| Unfortunately you are way more likely to get a blank stare
| when you say "add our RSS feed" than when you say "add us
| on Facebook" or similar, especially if you are an
| organization like a police department. Ordinary people do
| not tend to set up RSS readers or know how to handle feeds.
|
| Picking a reader means making one or more choices (for your
| phone, laptop, tablet whatever), adding a feed is several
| steps, and it is easy to get overloaded with too many
| boring items (and too few interesting ones) because
| curation is left to the end user.
|
| Centralized social networks require no choosing of readers,
| let you add an info source in one click, and ensure you
| have neither too few nor too many interesting items -- for
| some value of "interesting" -- regardless of how many
| entities you follow.
|
| I love RSS and decentralization but creating a smooth, user
| friendly experience with such tools is a major unsolved
| challenge.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as,
| say, a police department.
|
| _Their website!_ Now get off my lawn! :p
| hiatus wrote:
| But then you need to go to each website for updates. The
| benefit of these platforms was aggregation.
| XorNot wrote:
| They're a government department. This is literally
| something which should be coordinated by the government.
|
| I.e. police.gov should just dashboard this for you using
| location services.
| homebrewer wrote:
| This was solved 20 years ago with RSS, I guess it's about
| time for someone to rediscover the idea and reimplement
| something like it, push it like a great new invention,
| and make a couple of billions in the process.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It was solved 20 years ago. But companies unsolved it by
| deciding to de-prioritize or even remove such RSS API's.
|
| Getting around that requires some heavy and expensive
| scraping (compared to a lightweight API to hook into),
| and as we're seeing right now companies are at each
| other's necks in real time over scraping.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Good point. If Discord can make billions by essentially
| reinventing IRC...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I feel like that's fine, as another boomer. The internet
| wasn't designed with this idea that you only visit 10
| websites and everything else is on the fringes. Did
| people forget that bookmarks exist?
|
| Back to crushing reality, that's also why I'm a huge RSS
| fan. your feed should be based on websites you want to
| follow, not what the website's algorithms want you to
| follow. RSS puts the control back to the user while
| giving 95% of the convinience of a centralized platform.
| ianburrell wrote:
| ActivityPub is something like RSS. It is based on OStatus
| which used Atom and other standards. But it also does
| multidirectional syncing.
|
| If Bluesky did ActivityPub, that will federate Mastodon,
| Threads, and Bluesky. There are tools for posting to old
| social media, we will probably see tools for the new ones.
| Should be easier since protocols are more open.
| protocolture wrote:
| Realistically I think all social media should have been
| operating on an open standard years ago.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| ideally, yes. Realistically, companies were never going to
| willingly give up their centralization once they started
| chasing ad revenue and then later selling data to 3rd
| parties.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Somehow publish to all of the above?
|
| I would have assumed this one. What's the downside?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think those sorts of publishers should have a script that
| posts notifications to all sort of places automatically.
|
| RSS in the large is a nightmare. My agent YOShInOn lives on the
| wrong side of an ADSL connection and has all its RSS fetching
| done by
|
| https://superfeedr.com/
|
| which I like operationally. I'm following about 110 RSS feeds
| which cost 10 cents/month each. I like having a simple AWS
| Lambda that puts the notifications in SQS and then fetching
| them at my convenience later. It's a steal for a feed from
| _MDPI_ that has 1000+ papers a day or arXiv or _The Guardian_
| but not affordable to follow 2000 independent blogs which I
| would like to do. The poll and poll and poll some more and poll
| again and maybe poll too fast and waste resources and other
| times poll too slow and not only get content late but miss it
| entirely situation is just not cool. I could write an RSS
| poller but it would be slowing down my internet connection or
| adding to my cloud bills and would need maintenance.
| rakoo wrote:
| This is exactly why WebSub, formerly Pubsubhubbub, was
| written. Publishers can push to a relay only when something
| new happens, never having to be polled.
|
| It was created more than a decade ago.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| > These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership
| over their own platform.
|
| The problem is that it's very hard to justify spending money to
| accomplish this when Twitter/X/Bluesky/Threads/etc. is offering
| the service for free.
| segasaturn wrote:
| The fediverse very much is "the commons", at least it's as
| close as you can hope to get online.
|
| Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent
| of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up
| your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should
| be able to make their own instance that they can control and
| plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely
| strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are
| trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which
| is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| But it's not because each node is still controlled by someone
| who can choose what's on it and who has access
| eitland wrote:
| Which is why it isn't each node that is the commons, but
| the entirety of the ecosystem.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're collateralizing bad mortgages and rating them AAA.
|
| I think the central question is how people can
| collectively own a node and organize its decision making.
| Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's
| feudalism.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Huh that's a great way of putting it.
|
| These 'federated' systems are just recreating feudalism
| in cyberspace.
|
| Edit: Well even worse in some ways, since it's not like a
| majority of the 'gentry' and 'nobles' could challenge and
| seize control of e.g. a Mastodon instance from the owner.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Newspapers filled this role once, and they're privately owned.
| You have two choices: privately owned or government run. I'll
| take the private ownership route. Better than prior, now users
| can openly write back outside of "letters to the editor" and
| without paying money. People used to complain about Twitter
| censorship, now they complain about its ownership. One is about
| free expression. The other is about political tribalism.
| orwin wrote:
| > You have two choices: privately owned or government run
|
| Or worker owned, or shared ownership (basically 1/3 capital,
| 1/3 workers and 1/3 local council, ratios are not usually
| that, it is often 60% for the capital owners, but you see the
| point)
| briandear wrote:
| Brain worm infected? Really? Wanting to reduce government waste
| is brain worm infected? And RSS? Really? Aside from "tech
| people," normal people don't know or care about RSS.
| mikegreenberg wrote:
| > Honestly would prefer all these people and places just
| published RSS feeds.
|
| Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They
| are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and
| interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first)
| installations. (https://atproto.com/)
| pier25 wrote:
| So in theory one could publish into the ATP network (or
| whatever it's called) and a bunch of ATP clients could
| receive it?
|
| And Bluesky is a publisher and a client?
| mikegreenberg wrote:
| Correct. Bluesky is dogfooding AT Protocol.
|
| https://atproto.com/specs/atp#protocol-extension-and-
| applica...
| kccqzy wrote:
| Mastodon is not a bloated sloppy mess. Have you even used it? I
| use it every day and it's enjoyable. It felt like 2010s
| Twitter. It both makes me feel good and is also educational
| (because I have chosen to follow accounts that provide
| educational value, not just empty rhetoric).
| TylerE wrote:
| Yes. And it was a bloated sloppy mess I ran from screaming.
| It SUCKED, and STILL sucks.
| fragmede wrote:
| Have you ever tried to stand one up?
| krisoft wrote:
| > That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even
| when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's
| rhetoric megaphone.
|
| When you want to reach people you go to where the people are.
| You fish where the fish is. It is that simple. People did not
| join twitter because the police was posting there, the police
| post on twitter because that is where they can reach the
| people.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Twitter is a place where they can reach some people. Using it
| was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Using it was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not.
|
| That I can agree with. Usually what I have seen, at least
| where i live, is that no public body used it exclusively.
| They still had a website, they still talked with
| journalist, talked with radios, used flyers, whatever was
| appropriate in each situation. (Or at least they tried, not
| saying everyone was getting it always right.)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Twitter almost literally started as a place to get updates on
| celebrities, designed closely to UI's seen in tickerboard
| updates. So the metaphor is more apt than you'd think.
| asah wrote:
| Twitter was never a majority of Americans let alone 80-90+%
| share that justifies being a single outlet for a taxpayer
| funded agency.
| krapp wrote:
| An account costs nothing. You get an intern or someone to
| post on it now and then. It isn't exactly a deep
| commitment.
| apsurd wrote:
| That's not the argument at all.
|
| These public entities post _exclusively_ on Twitter as if
| it's the public square. It's not and it shouldn't be. The
| argument is not about how easy it is to create a Twitter
| account.
| irundebian wrote:
| Please give me an example of a police station which post
| exclusively on Twitter.
| roenxi wrote:
| The people aren't on Twitter, pretty sure every time I've
| checked the stats Twitter users are a relative minority. It
| caters to the sort of people who enjoy communication without
| discussion - that might be the police's target audience for
| their communication but it isn't most people.
|
| I've been annoyed over the years because (not having an
| account) sometimes Twitter won't let me look at Tweets.
| Hopefully none of them contained useful info.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > Honestly would prefer all these people and places just
| published RSS feeds.
|
| To be fair, that is what ActivityPub is - less simple
| syndication.
| mulderc wrote:
| I thought you could subscribe to an RSS feed for basically
| anyone on mastodon?
| nikodunk wrote:
| For those who find Mastodon's default client a little bloated,
| please check out https://phanpy.social. It is one of the most
| thoughtful PWAs and websites I have ever used, and made
| Mastodon a daily for me now. It's feels like Threads but with
| deeper functionality.
|
| It can just talk to your Mastodon server, which as the article
| notes is very easy to set up on Coolify/Digital Ocean, etc
| gfc67 wrote:
| It will never make sense cause Claude Shannon already told us
| why.
|
| When everyone Broadcasts, info explodes, no one hears anything.
| And as a reaction, they shout louder and louder or increase the
| number of times they repeat their message. This compound the
| absurdity of giving everyone Broadcast capability even further.
|
| When you use the word commons you dont even realize the commons
| never had Broadcast (1 to All messaging) for Free.
|
| Technically we can give everyone a radio transmitter that
| support Broadcasting. But no one allows that anywhere on the
| planet ever since Claude Shannons Theory of Information came
| out. Because it clearly shows us everyone can not broadcast
| simultaneously.
|
| Even the human body with more cells and more signalling going
| on than the entire dumb internet does not give every cell
| broadcast capability.
| shombaboor wrote:
| folks should just go to wholly owned websites like back in the
| day. on the other hand most major websites are absolutely
| unreadable with the ads/autoplay videos.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What is the commons then? I think it's the internet at large,
| email, RSS, etc.
| chaxor wrote:
| What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess?
|
| It was my understanding that Mastadon has _far less_ javascript
| than Twitter, not more.
|
| The UI for mastadon always seemed far cleaner, more performant,
| and importantly - capable of actually loading, compared to
| twitter
|
| Essentially, anytime something is shared from twitter I simply
| ignore it, because it may take a good 40 minutes to figure out
| the workaround to view it, compared to Mastadon which 'just
| works'.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess?
|
| Have you tried running a server? Even a single user instance
| is a resource hogger.
| ahnick wrote:
| It's federation that is the problem. Federation leads to
| fragmentation, which ultimately is a headwind to adoption. IMHO
| you need a single network that allows people to choose the
| "channels" that you can view/join and then people that join
| that channel start hosting and replicating the content. Also,
| great filtering controls are critical to the success of such a
| platform.
|
| Not sure if there is really anything attempting to implement
| essentially Twitter with this model or not? I would be
| interested though if someone has run across or is working on a
| system like that.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Your local TV channels and newspapers aren't commons either;
| they're as privately owned as Twitter or Bluesky. Yet local
| governments make good use of them too, and have for many
| decades.
|
| Things do not need to be publicly owned or distributed to be
| useful to society.
| rakoo wrote:
| The ironic bit is that conceptually Bluesky is RSS with WebSub
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub>
|
| - PDS are websites with an RSS feeds, each a publisher
|
| - Relays are WebSub hubs aggregating many sources into a
| central host
|
| - App views, labelers, Feed Generators, whatever are
| subscribers being alerted when a new entry is received, making
| their internal sauce. They're also hubs for pushing content to
| any step that comes after
|
| - PDS are at the end, subscribers of labelers, app views and
| feed generators. They make their internal sauce to have a nice
| social-oriented UI.
|
| A properly decentralized, boring-tech Bluesky can take this
| form. Steps are additive, not all of them are needed
|
| 1. A single, simple server that can receive and emit RSS feeds.
| Emission of RSS feeds must be able to include content from
| received entries. Directly subscribe to the people you want to
| follow, you're done. Social readers
| <https://indieweb.org/social_reader> do something like that
| with indieweb formats.
|
| 2. A network of WebSub hubs to more efficiently get and
| distribute everyone's content. superfeedr.com is one of them,
| https://switchboard.p3k.io/ is another one, but we need many
| more. Also RSS feeds need to have a server-side that sends a
| notification to the hub when something is published. Having
| hubs make searching and having a general view easier. In fact
| we already have something like that, it's called Planets
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)>
|
| 3. Any filtering can happen on top. "People with blue hair",
| "Posts without tuna in them", any algorithm is anyone's to
| build
|
| All the layers already exist, but like any social endeavour
| it's all about the network effect. Having a simple thing to
| install where you can post, follow and search will make wonders
| dayvid wrote:
| 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.
| mhh__ wrote:
| 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.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| The internet is generally left-wing. Left-wingers like to think
| it's because they are the majority, or because the world is
| better as a left-wing place, or it's because they're smarter
| (all actual statements on Reddit).
|
| The real reason, is that left-wing types are the kinds of
| people who have the most free time on a computer. Your garbage
| man who has a family of 5 and a Trump sticker on his truck does
| not have time to argue with Reddit mods. This is reflected also
| in the political gap between white collar and blue collar jobs.
| White collar jobs which lean Left have time to argue online;
| blue collar jobs which lean Right don't.
|
| Edit: Go ahead, downvote, but realize you are contributing to
| why the left is consistently shocked when the right ever wins
| elections. Every downvote you give, is another win for the echo
| chamber.
| palata wrote:
| Care to check how much time blue collars spend swiping on
| their phones? On those few daily hours, what makes you think
| they don't have time to argue online?
| astrange wrote:
| There's plenty of right wing posters on Twitter now. They get
| boosted even. The reason they weren't visible prior to
| boosting is that they only communicate in death threats,
| misspelled slurs and the laughing emoji.
|
| (Far-leftists esp. tankies also communicate mainly in death
| threats, but in a much more literary way where they accuse
| you of misreading a theorist from 1840 first.)
| briandear wrote:
| You don't think the left misspells slurs, communicates in
| death threats too? That's not a left right thing, that's a
| crazy-normal thing.
| threeseed wrote:
| There is no monopoly on what makes a culture "good".
|
| Every community will have its own strengths and weaknesses.
| Retr0id wrote:
| The "early adopters" arrived almost 2 years ago ;)
| someothherguyy wrote:
| How could you possibly know what a million users are
| "basically" like?
| nerdjon wrote:
| 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.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I think the last wave was towards Mastodon but most migrants
| returned because it was too unfamiliar. On the contrary Bluesky
| seems to be Twitter but without the enshittification . I can
| see a future for that. The open protocol/network story being a
| probably small bonus.
| tmvphil wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| And it doesn't penalize links off the site.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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)
| GavinAnderegg wrote:
| If you want to run your own social platform, you can do so by
| running your own Mastodon instance. If you want to do the same
| with Bluesky, you simply can't at the moment. You'll either
| need to rely on other parts of the system that you don't
| control, or you'll need to control the whole system at great
| expense.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Aha, agreed that they are not offering anything for the use
| case of standalone communities. I wish they would, and I
| think the architecture is there for it, it's just that no one
| has used a relay in that way yet. I /might/ take it up myself
| in the next year or two, really I just want phpbb to have a
| second renassiance - special interest, user moderated forums
| like reddit but each community able to fork off to their own
| infrastructure if there's some schism re: moderation or
| otherwise.
| shadowfacts wrote:
| > When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the
| entire network, so its a bad comparison.
|
| That's the point, though. You don't need (nor, I imagine, would
| most people want) to mirror the entire network. If not needing
| to mirror the entire network makes self hosting simpler, then
| that is an advantage for the people interested in self hosting.
| sherburt3 wrote:
| 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.
| queuebert wrote:
| And Twitter is just a spiritual clone of .plan
| tonfreed wrote:
| 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.
| quectophoton wrote:
| 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.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| The average user (non-tech oriented) doesn't really think about
| or care that much about openness. This is the kind of user who
| posts disclaimers on their Facebook wall saying that Facebook
| is not allowed to use their content.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Bluesky released a statement today about data use [0] - saying
| they will not use your data for "Generative AI" (surely in
| response to X's recent change to say they will).
|
| As you imply, this is a bit meaningless for people who don't
| want their posts used for AI, because anyone can grab all data
| pretty easily (at least for now).
|
| But, AI aside, this is so much better for a lively ecosystem -
| 3rd party apps, bots (the fun and useful kind), research, etc.
| A lots of things simply died when Musk decided effectively end
| the API program [1].
|
| [0] https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3layuzbti6s2x
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-
| near... == https://archive.ph/ikPOk
| briandear wrote:
| > until the average user is completely aware of things like
| this.
|
| The average user doesn't care.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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".
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I agree largely with what you wrote but have a small
| disagreement. I don't actually think the character count has
| that big of an effect. I've seen plenty of self-righteous posts
| on places like here (HN) and the LessWrong forums that just use
| more words to do the same thing.
|
| I think the kind of person that's energized to comment online
| generally feels more strongly about the issue than most
| lurkers. This means that online conversations are dominated by
| the most passionate, most invested, and often least interested
| in impartiality. This post [1] comes to mind.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You're right that people can write hateful, divisive and
| othering content with many words. The trouble with the short
| content platforms is that you can't do anything else.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Interesting point, I'm inclined to agree. I'm curious now
| about how many Likes and Reposts a thread on Bluesky gets
| vs a compact emotional response. I run a firehose ingester
| so maybe I'll test this out.
|
| EDIT: I realize you specifically called out politics here
| and that makes me even more inclined to agree.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I agree - short form content doesn't leave enough space to
| have a nuanced arguement and conversely it leaves a lot of
| space open for misinterpretation and encourages hot takes
| and mic drops over expression of cohesive thoughts.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the
| most friendly instance. I have a strong interest in interacting
| with cybersecurity professionals, so infosec.exchange was
| perfect for me, either browsing subscribed or local posts.
| Browsing all is something I do only when I'm bored, because
| many posts are not what I'd like to see. You can always migrate
| your account if you want.
|
| https://instances.social/
|
| That being said, BlueSky is simpler and easier because there's
| no real federation yet, and even if they have a "Discovery"
| algorithm, you get many options to control what you want to
| see. It's feels great, like Twitter before their 2012(ish?)
| IPO.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing
| the most friendly instance.
|
| I was very disappointed to find out that whatever instance
| you choose can essentially hold your identity and content
| hostage.
|
| I'd been hoping for something where my identity comes from a
| private key that I could take elsewhere.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The rational thing to do for someone who (1) thinks of
| themselves as a human being first and something else second
| is to join mastodon.social and (2) cares about visibility
| (why else are you on social?) is to join the biggest instance
| you can find.
|
| Most notably people can only follow hashtags from accounts
| that are on their server so if you insist on joining some
| micro server please save yourself the hassle of putting
| hashtags on things.
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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.
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| >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.
|
| Good! Higher barrier to entry is exactly why Neocities,
| Mastodon and [redacted] are so much higher quality than the NPC
| internet. We need a couple hurdles to keep out the low effort
| posters.
| doawoo wrote:
| Last time I checked that's called gatekeeping.
|
| Neocities is a ton easier to try for "non-engineers"- it even
| has a discovery feed and a WYSIWYG editor...
| fragmede wrote:
| Yeah but is it good gatekeeping or bad gatekeeping? Because
| having to agree to a code of conduct is a gate, but I don't
| think we want to remove that one. And anyway, when did
| gatekeeping pick up such a negative, pejorative tone? The
| gatekeeper is the one who kept people out of the gate. Some
| people were kept out for good reasons, others were kept out
| for bad reasons. Depending on the gate and country
| politics, nobody or everybody was let in through the gate.
| That doesn't make gatekeeping inherently bad. Doctors
| gatekeep who can call themselves a doctor, and while there
| are broader problems with that, fundamentally, some random
| fraudster shouldn't be able to call themselves a doctor
| sell rat poison in a pretty box as cure for cancer. There
| are some kinds of gatekeeping that are bad, but it's not
| inherently so.
| mcpar-land wrote:
| > Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still
| exists.
|
| by the good grace of Meta Inc. and nothing else. Your account
| can get purged because:
|
| - they decide to start purging old content
|
| - they comply with a censorship order from the country you live
| in (or a country you don't live in)
|
| - the CEO decides they don't like you (though that's really
| only a current issue on Twitter)
|
| > Decentralization feels like it's driven more than
| idealism/zealotry than pragmatism.
|
| Decentralization is the bedrock of all the _most_ pragmatic
| internet technologies (DNS, HTTP, Email), centralization is a
| more recent phenomenon driven by a dozen or so very large
| companies.
| TylerE wrote:
| This feels like an argument that stuffing cash under your
| mattress is better than keeping it in a bank. The number one
| cause of data loss - by far - is technical incompetence.
| 99.9% of users do not have the expertise to spin up an AWS
| instance and maintain it.
| josephcsible wrote:
| The difference between Facebook and your bank is that it's
| illegal for your bank to just say "you don't have an
| account here anymore and we're never giving back any of
| your deposits".
| Retr0id wrote:
| I like and use matrix (I'm indeed one of those ideological
| types), but even their nice webapp is janky in comparison to
| discord, with fewer features on paper (E2EE is huge, but the
| median discord user doesn't care). I use it in spite of the
| jank.
|
| With bluesky on the other hand, there really isn't much jank,
| certainly not relative to twitter (except right now when it
| feels like the servers are struggling to scale fast enough...).
| The average bluesky user doesn't seem to be ideologically
| motivated (or if they are, their ideology is "I don't like elon
| musk"). They mostly use bluesky because it works for them,
| regardless of implementation details.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I suspect being spun out of Twitter, developed by Dan
| Abramov, and not owned by Mark Zuckerberg are all inputs that
| make Blue Sky feel like the blessed continuation of what used
| to be Twitter (at least for people in the hacker sphere).
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need decentralization
| are people who are being censored but that's very few people.
| So everyone incurs extra complexity to benefit a small
| minority.
|
| _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_
|
| This is caused by you writing custom software, not by
| decentralization. If you were running some off-the-shelf
| software like WordPress it would probably be updated to keep
| pace with the world so you wouldn't have to do much.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need
| decentralization are people who are being censored but that's
| very few people.
|
| There is a larger group of people who are frequently harassed
| but don't have sufficient control to prevent harassment on
| Twitter, for instance the recent change in what the block
| button does.
|
| With decentralization, one can self-host on their terms, or
| find one with like-minded people and have more stringent
| controls on both incoming and outgoing messages, via blocks
| or defederating unmoderated or otherwise disagreeable
| instances.
| dang wrote:
| 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...
| INTPenis wrote:
| There is nothing to win. Fediverse has always been and will
| always remain an interesting place for sub-cultures.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| 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.
| fsflover wrote:
| Beware of enshittification though:
| https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| 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 ..
| briandear wrote:
| 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.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| 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.
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| I'm still not gonna use anything besides the Fediverse.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >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.
| eBombzor wrote:
| 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...
| chucke1992 wrote:
| I see BlueSky getting some traction regarding some specialized
| discussions (akin Discord?), but Twitter will continue to be the
| public space to go.
| tolerance wrote:
| 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.
| rascul wrote:
| Twitter won because that's where the people I follow are. If/when
| they move elsewhere, wherever they move to will have won.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| 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.
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