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IMO social media websites lives or dies by network effect

if threads get hundred million people in a short period and they start to write and interact with each other then that a good moat for them.

Might be that BlueSky is not trying to be a popular social media platform. But if they want to then having right now their signup closed is a very bad decision.

It is already hard to keep track of where each discussion is: twitter, mastodon, instagram, facebook, linkedin ...

I think people are maybe trying one more from what they currently have.

look at Clubhouse - they tried the invitation idea and died with it in their hands. When having so many platforms available almost no one waits for yet another one for 3 months to get their handle to finally talk with 10%of their existing network as their other 90% still waits their invitation.

Yet users use HN, Discord, and many other forums. I think "there can be only one" is what's misguided.

I did not say there should be only one. My assertion is that there are so many that the piece of the pie that remains for blue sky if the keep this invite only idea will diminish as time goes by.

I think over the past couple of decades the market has proven out that there can really only be one in a niche

I disagree. It’s obviously wrong in the general case (e.g. look at note-taking or messaging apps), and there are all kinds of discussion forums with overlapping topics. Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Discord, Mastodon and Twitter all have overlapping use cases. Maybe my view is colored by not caring about “the market”. But there’s certainly space for more than one micro-blogging platform.

I disagree with you. Facebook, instagram, telegram, and discord are all very different. People use them in different contexts for different reasons.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Discord, Youtube, Twitch all have specific niches in which they are dominant and cannot be unseated except through their own fault.

Messaging apps are a little more loose, I’ll give you that.

HN is not a network.

Discord is not comparable to a forum at all. It’s a messaging app first and foremost. Anyone attempting to use it as a forum is shoving a square peg into a round hole with a screwdriver.

Are you including Discord in the list of people using Discord as a forums?

https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-...

Not trying to be sarcastic, just haven't had a chance to use this feature and wasn't sure if you were taking that into account.

Forum channels are a bandaid solution for those people who refuse to use proper forums. It’s alright at what it does but it’s hardly the same. Far closer to ”Issues” on GitHub. In fact that’s mainly what I see it used for, issues and documentation that would benefit from its own indexable websites.

Hundreds of millions of people writing and interacting with each other is exactly the moat Twitter had when BlueSky was started.

I agree but a moat is not a “stone” - or not sure how to name this.

A series of bad decisions let a lot of people to not want to continue build their audience on twitter.

Sure but the new king of Twitter decided to open the gates and try to burn down his castle because the castle upkeep and providing for his retainers was too expensive.

Clubhouse dropped off because they lost their secret sauce (exclusivity) the moment they opened invites up to nearly everyone.

It's still alive. But it's specifically them scaling up that killed their relevance because it turned out social audio was even better as a place for bullies and extremists than it is as an exclusive popular person hangout.

I personally think that it was Twitter Spaces that killed Clubhouse. Clubhouse was pretty novel when it came out, but it had the major downside that your network wasn't there like it was on Twitter and you needed an invite. It was the cool thing when it was the only game in town but once Twitter Spaces came out people realized that you could do the exact same thing over there without needing an invite and you had your entire network there.

It's the same thing that happened to Snapchat when IG Stories came out. Except in the case of Clubhouse it happened even quicker because their was no technical moat.

Clubhouse died because it was a bad idea. Twitter Spaces hasn't succeeded either.

Calling early winners is a longstanding pastime of tech...the Internet protocol stack was the dark horse candidate in telecom circles back in the 80's. Apple was "done for" in the mid-90's, in the same boat as Commodore, Atari and all the rest.

The reason to engage like this is basically a mindless chasing after of hierarchy: you want everyone to know who their overlord is now. This is very important to a certain kind of mind in a certain kind of position, because they will start engaging with that as if it were already true and make business decisions presuming the winner...and to be right, everyone else needs to go along with it. Otherwise they're the weird guy at the meeting, talking about the also-ran.

I have come to realise that sometimes you should just miss the forest for the trees. Because without the trees there will be no forest and. A social network is the forest.

> For example, Bluesky right now is ironing out a fairly novel moderation system. They are doing this not only transparently, but with the input and active involvement of the users.

So the old Slashdot moderation system, only with multiple layers?

bluesky is a popular-kids club with zero transparency unless you're in the club

I’m still waiting for an invite.

I have given up waiting for an invite.

Its clubhouse all over again.

I am happy to send you an invite! Message me :)

Not the person you replied to, but I'd also be interested if you have any! I just sent you a message on Twitter to the link in your HN profile because I'm not sure how to private message here, I apologize if that's too forward!

I've gotcha if you still need one.

Same with me, signed up for the waitlist months ago. Even asked around about buying an invite code but that just seemed a bit sketchy for me, it's so easy to get scammed doing that.

I'd love an invite eventually so I could try it out and really form an opinion on the whole Threads vs Bluesky vs Twitter drama, but I fear it's going to take much longer and I'll lose interest entirely. Which is a shame because I actually really like Twitter and have actively used it for 10+ years, but man Elon is making it really easy for me to jump ship somewhere.

I've got some, happy to share. Plz dm me on the bird app.