Is BlueSky the next Twitter, and if so would that be a good thing? | Hacker News Reader

Is BlueSky the next Twitter, and if so would that be a good thing?

cjr.org

5 pointsjdblair5 comments

This article never really answers the headline question, it just asks more questions. That said, it does have a nice summary of how Mastadon and Blue Sky are different, and captures the angst felt by journalists who found success on Twitter.

I guess the article left me feeling a little irritated. I give it credit for describing the contenders or options, including Nostr, but I got very little out of it other than "we journalists are scared and confused and don't know what to do; we just want Dorsey to give us Twitter back so we can forget what Musk has done to our beloved platform". They kind of dismiss Mastodon as "for nerds" and discuss its problems; the criticisms of Mastodon are fair I think, but the author doesn't discuss potential problems with BlueSky or its opaqueness, or how it will be different from Mastodon or Nostr in practice, or any detailed discussion of pros and cons of different systems. It seemed very focused on waiting for BlueSky uncritically as a resurrected Twitter, without understanding much about the implications of anything. I got the impression that BlueSky could be at its core liable to the same problems as Twitter in the end, and the writer would care less as long as it looked like the Twitter they knew.

So yes, in a sense, it captures the angst of journalists well, but only in the sense that it was written by an angsty journalist who doesn't seem to understand or care to find out how they ended up in the position that they seem to think is so horrible in the first place.

I say this all as someone who is open to BlueSky; there's just something about the social discussion dynamics of all of this that is frustrating to me. I'd rather read an article by a journalist who is being really skeptical and shrewd but also truly open-minded, about true network openness and potential benefits and costs of adoption of different systems, if for no other reasons than practical ones. There's a bit of that on HN, but I don't really see it anywhere else.

I'm still not convinced why I should use this over something more tested and with an already established community, like any of the Activitypub offshoots.

I'm sure it will be just as packed to the walls with child porn as Twitter was under Dorsey. So if you're a groomer, you're excited. But don't say mean words. That's a banning.

Curious if anyone was trying to pressure Bluesky and all other media to adopt the Santa Clara Principles (instead of making stuff up on the fly)?

https://santaclaraprinciples.org/

also, Bluesky was apparently a project within twitter...??

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