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Comment by prakhar897 | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky is dead.

Nobody is going to move again. They had the chance of outrun threads but slept on it.

Whatever they release now, will never get initial users to get it off ground.

Well Threads currently doesn’t even have a chronological, non-algo feed I can look at, whereas on bluesky you can have any number of feeds with whatever algo/logic you want. I don’t think I’ll be using Threads much while the one and only feed is the way it is.

And there’s more differences than just that, it’s a bit too soon to do a declaration of death I think

@mosseri has already said it's coming soon.

And the algorithm definitely changes once you start following more people.

Mine for example is chronological with the occasional recommended person in it.

> Well Threads currently doesn’t even have a chronological, non-algo feed I can look at, whereas on bluesky you can have any number of feeds with whatever algo/logic you want.

None of that matters if the people you follow are on Threads but aren’t on Bluesky. And if the people you follow can’t get on Bluesky even if they wanted to, then off to Threads they will go and so everybody else will follow.

People being on Threads doesn't matter if Threads sucks. They'll all just go back to Twitter to wait for the Next Social Media.

>"looking at my Twitter feed is a breath of fresh air after spending 24 hours on Threads. My feed over there is just full of stuff I don’t want to see. Threads just hit 50 million users, but the top complaint is the feed which is the main part of the app"

https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1677134234253774848

But there's a key difference: If your friends aren't on Bluesky yet, it's quite possibly because they haven't gotten an invite code yet. Plenty of people are very interested and waiting to join. I've been inviting friends as I've received codes. It is an entirely different dynamic than just an unpopular social network, and it is perceived very differently (and not at all negatively).

We've been through this process once before with google+. It was the new SoMe which "everyone" wanted access to, but they nerfed their own growth with their invite system.

Sure, it chugged on for a few years, until it was inevitably killed-by-google.

The same thing will happen with Bluesky

You can customize feeds but there's barely any real content getting posted because the user base is so small. Some people with hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter barely get any kind of engagement on Blue Sky. The dopamine hit just isn't showing up for big time posters.

The last two sentences actually sounds like a good thing.

> They had the chance of outrun threads but slept on it.

I don't think that's a fair criticism. Threads is backed by a $750 billion market cap megacorporation, while Bluesky just announced a seed round of $8 million, a mere drop in the bucket for Meta. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan

I mean, regardless of why they are missing their chance, they’re still missing it.

Dorsey's net worth is something north of $4B, not to mention all the connections he has for investment. Raising a paltry $8M was not due to the difficulty of procuring money; not to attempting to scale rapidly was a deliberate choice. It's quite possibly going to end up a very bad choice.

Seems pretty clear typical users don't care about decentralization, verification for themselves, or algorithm customization at all. They just want to post and look at nonsense.

I'm not sure what will become of Bluesky, but I don't think it'll the Twitter replacement. Seems more like a classic case of developing for power users instead of typical ones.

Jack provided the initial funding 2 years ago, but despite all the chatter to the contrary, it doesn't appear to me that he's involved in the company much these days. On Bluesky, he's not very active, and it's not clear he believes in the platform. His most recent post (https://bsky.app/profile/jack.bsky.social/post/3jy3cth45t22r) was 23 days ago, and states that Bluesky "isn't a [Twitter] replacement". He seems to be much more into Nostr these days, judging by his tweets.

I know it's cliche here to ask why things cost so much, why so many employees needed, etc.

But give any competent engineer and friend 8 million, and they'll build you a Twitter on steroids in 6 months.

> But give any competent engineer and friend 8 million, and they'll build you a Twitter on steroids in 6 months.

You are correct, it is cliche to claim this.

It's a very fair criticism. FB has spent the past year shedding 000s of jobs, losing untold billions on metaverse and turning IG into Tiktok.

Dorsey couldn't manage get a head start even with all that? If anything I'd think he was a CEO that gets easily distracted by the next shiny thing (Square, crypto, Nostr), which really doesn't bode well for Bluesky.

> FB has spent the past year shedding 000s of jobs, losing untold billions on metaverse and turning IG into Tiktok.

This just shows that Meta has a massive amount of resources available. They could afford to hire like crazy, which they did, and they could afford to lose untold billions. How many 000s of jobs and billions of dollars can Bluesky lose? (Zero.)

> Dorsey couldn't manage get a head start even with all that?

See this comment about Dorsey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627988

> If anything I'd think he was a CEO

He's not the CEO of Bluesky.

> gets easily distracted by the next shiny thing (Square, crypto, Nostr)

No, that's his main thing. He was distracted by also being CEO of Twitter, and Twitter suffered from that. He seemed like just a glorified mascot, on Twitter to shill for his other stuff. Remember also that Bluesky started as a Twitter project, but it basically got tossed out by Twitter after the Musk acquisition (along with almost everyone else).

I will never even consider using threads, because I will never use Instagram/Facebook. Even Twitter I only reluctantly had an account to follow specific individuals for information. I have a mastodon account but I don’t like it very much.

I will wait to try Bluesky. If it dies before I get the chance, then I won’t be using anything at all. Threads is not an option.

It might not be dead, but it has definitely dropped the ball.

My timeline on Bsky somehow always show people taking a dig at other rivals, and self congratulations. People regularly diss twitter, Mastodon and now the feed is full of people dissing on Threads. This bsky-is-not-twitter identity that bsky network latches onto will be detrimental to itself.

Also there are no federated servers anywhere in sight so far.

I see this on Mastodon too unfortunately. Too much chatter about "the others". Unfortunately many of these people are refugees from Twitter and appear to be in a perpetual state of trying to make the replacement feel like Twitter in '09.

None of them feel special, they all feel like the same thing. I still think there’s something else out there that will sneak up and take the short form social crown. At least I hope there is.

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