Hacker News Reader

Comment by evanmoran | Hacker News Reader

I can’t wait to read the tell all book about Bluesky during this three day period when Threads hits a hundred million users and Bluesky makes the most important strategic decision of its existence.

View on HN

"we shut down new user signups so we could focus on the really important stuff: acting as a frontend for namecheap"

At least they have a sign up. Threads is just an empty website in the EU right now.

With a long wait list.

> Threads is just an empty website in the EU right now.

And it should stay that way.

CJEU declares Meta/Facebook's GDPR approach largely illegal: https://noyb.eu/en/cjeu-declares-metafacebooks-gdpr-approach...

Threads won't launch until compliant with GDPR and Digital Markets Act: https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/no-instagram-...

> Threads is just an empty website in the EU right now. And it should stay that way.

Not launching in the EU is a massive red flag on the data hoovering ambitions facebook have for threads.

> Not launching in the EU is a massive red flag on the data hoovering ambitions facebook have for threads

Not really. It just means they don’t want to wait for EU compliance to launch. It’s fairly standard to have an EU lag for feature releases, in the same way there is a lag for releasing certain content in Asia or financial products in the United States.

> fairly standard to have an EU lag

For obvious reasons, like the reasons the person you replied to mentioned: privacy violating features block apps like Threads from entering the EU market.

That's a good thing.

No it's just that often waiting for legal to validate you're ok to run in the EU isn't worth waiting around for. Better to launch in the USA and deal with the EU as needed.

They dont need a permit or paperwork, they just need to copy and paste the t's & c's from their two existing platforms.

They can no longer do that: CJEU declares Meta/Facebook's GDPR approach largely illegal: https://noyb.eu/en/cjeu-declares-metafacebooks-gdpr-approach...

BTW its not clear if other product like Twitter or Instagram are even compliant, so its not a meta / threads specific thing.

In practice bluesky is also an empty page

Is it? I've heard people claim they got more value out of it than Mastodon already. Which would surprise me because Mastodon seems to be working extremely well. (I don't use it myself, but I follow a lot of people on Mastodon.)

I imagine “In practice” is referring to the fact that massive portion or potential users (including myself) can’t access the app because of the registration limits.

I'm not trying to be offensive in any way with this comment.

Why did you try Threads?

This question comes from a person who doesn't have a twitter account, so if the answer is that you want to replace your twitter usage with something else, could you elaborate the value you get out of these platforms?

It's an illusion of choice. I go wherever my community goes. I've tried boycotting Discord and it just made me miserable and isolated.

I see, thanks!

I tried hard to get a bluesky invite a few months ago. Even put a few bids on ebay hoping to get one for less then $100. The fomo has since passed. Probably wouldn't bother signing up if I got one today.

Really? In my social network on Mastodon, several folks could not get rid of them even for free - nobody wanted them.

I'm surely bikeshedding, but isn't Bluesky a terrible name for a social network?

So is "Threads" in my opinion. But I downloaded Threads regardless.

Threads is an amazing name for an focused around conversations.

wait really? i thought "Threads" was pretty genius. it's a social network where people post threads. people already know and use the word "threads". you post tiktoks on tiktok, reels on reels, and threads on threads.

It's entirely happenstance, but I like the accidental reference to BBC Threads (the nuclear war TV film). Not only is it a "post apocalypse" evacuation site to many people, but the opening narration of the film muses on how society depends on the "threads" between us and others. Essentially describing the network effect that social media platforms live and die by

How is it bad? I hate Facebook as much as the next folk, but Threads is pretty good because it's the most possible generic name you could give a Twitter clone. The term has been in use since the 90s to refer to the format of basically every textual exchange, and IMO it works exactly because it's so shallow.

Also props to the logo designer, I really like the fact that it's a thread.

Threads looks like absolute genius as a brand name next to "Bluesky" although Bluesky also looks genius next to "Mastodon", like how many people picked randomly on the street could even spell that one.

Mastodon at least comes with "toot", can't beat that.

Threads is a fantastic name, in my opinion. It is self-descriptive, it trademarks an English word, like Windows, everybody knows how to spell it, and works in multiple languages. What's not to like?

Everyone made fun of "Twittr" and "Tweets" when it was still new

At least they were reasonably portable words that worked in most Latin-based languages.

Whereas Bluesky is firmly English, and probably tilting more towards American corporate English in terms of "Blue sky thinking". Substitute CielBleu as a thought experiment.

It's also generic. There have been tons of products/brands called "Bluesky."

Loads of names seem bad until they stop being words and turn into meaningless tokens. "iPad" received a ton of criticism, and now basically nobody cares.

But even with that said, I thought "Bluesky" seemed perfectly fine as a name. It's perhaps tying itself a bit to being an "escape" or "clean start" (implicitly "from twitter", now that many people are dissatisfied with Elon's leadership), but nobody is going to forget that aspect of the social media landscape for a while, so I don't think it's a problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com