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bsky.app

291 pointsredsolver333 comments

It still doesn't seem to have a public feed though, so you can only view individual posts.

I will say as someone has an invite: you're not missing out on anything. It definitely has far less activity than either Twitter or Threads, but somehow it also just has worse content. You would think they were invite-only to keep the quality high, but everything is either furry porn or hate-filled rage bait, neither of which I am personally a fan of at all. I keep telling trying to tell it as much, but I honestly don't think I've seen one post I truly wanted to see. I tried to do it for like a week hoping it would get better, but honestly it seems like there's just nothing worthwhile on the whole site. Personally, the only way I can see me ever using Bluesky is if they manage to totally invert their userbase. You need to just start over when you somehow get a crowd worse than either version of Twitter, in my opinion.

I get that this rage bait works on some percent of the population. 20%? 50%? 75%? What that leaves unanswered is, why aren't these platforms smart enough to adapt to what actual individuals react to? Sure, they picked the most successful single formula, but you'd think they'd want to increase the platform's engagement at the margins rather than just milking one approach for all it's worth.

I suspect these megalithic corpos are actually in it to make a dollar, no matter the cost to reputation or society. You'd think reputation would matter but it turns out once you reach the point of no return ("I keep Facebook so I can share with my grandma"), you'll come back even if there are rats chewing on your toes

But my point was they could make more money if they had algos that worked on more people.

My vague impression was that Threads clamped down on the rage bait, and as a result it did not get adopted. Is that correct?

You are just describing a (good) recommendation algorithm. TikTok's is infamously good at figuring out your niches and catering to your taste by looking at your minute interactions with the content it shows you. My TikTok "for you" page has absolutely 0 mainstream politics, rage bait, or any other "normie" topics. It's mostly technically fascinating stuff and good absurd humor that caters to my absurd taste.

Optimizing for engagement is not inherently bad, nor does it necessarily result in socially suboptimal outcomes. My TikTok feed is very engaging without having to resort to triggering my anger.

A recommendation algorithm that only sticks to a handful of given topics (rage bait and furry porn?) is not a very good one.

Ah. I don’t use TikTok because I strongly dislike video content.

> It still doesn't seem to have a public feed though

There is one at https://firesky.tv/

I think it exists as a proof that there is activity on Bluesky. If you were looking for a feed that highlights trending posts, this is not it.

Being able to view individual posts, even if there is no public feed, is really important if people are going to post things that may get picked up by other media channels.

As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that. It’s a move that reeks of desperation and makes me not want to sign up. I should feel compelled to make an account if I want to follow someone or post something, not just to read a single post. I’m not sure how they expect to grow when they hide what’s inside and word of mouth is largely negative. Walled gardens have their place, but it’s not the “town square” Elon has been taking about. In the town square I can walk through and overhear conversations without identifying myself or joining in.

> As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that.

This has been a real irritant since Elon Musk took it over and started making a lot of terrible decisions. Depending on what platform you’re on, you could rewrite the Twitter link to nitter.net (just replace, manually or through an extension, twitter.com with nitter.net) and you’ll not only avoid those signup/login prompts but also be able to see the complete thread instead of just a single tweet.

I was never into Twitter because of the noise and extreme levels of anger, but this has allowed me to view the minority of tweets and tweet threads that could be interesting and/or useful.

FWIW, this side of Bluesky definitely exists but if you're diligent about curating your follows and avoiding certain custom feeds this type of content is pretty easy to avoid. There is no blackbox algorithm blasting rage bait onto your timeline.

Depending on how you build your social graph, your experience can run the gamut of anything from peak political Twitter to peak pedantic Mastodon. It's up to you.

I just used the normal hot and trending feeds. I tried to tell it by hiding posts, but I literally couldn't find anyone I wanted to follow to really curate it.

It's lost the initial momentum but it's not dead yet. I'm still holding my breath that the critical mass makes the leap eventually; "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" is a compelling proposition

For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for. A few never came back to twitter, but most did mostly for social reasons. But twitter as a platform gets worse each day, and if it ever truly breaks or dies, bsky will be the schelling point for a whole bunch of people

Most of my people seemed to have landed on bsky. Discussions there get shares and likes, unlike mastodon where for me it's just a few void-shouts per day. Threads appears to be 100% mid celebrities who I am sure Facebook is paying to hang around.

Yeah, I haven't even bothered trying Threads (and don't plan to)

Mastodon puts too much onus on the user to pick a home server

Bluesky got it right by saying "we're going to be exactly familiar to people who like twitter, just open and better". The concepts are an almost exact drop-in replacement, for practical purposes, other than which one your friends are active on

I don't use it much right now because most of my people did switch back for now. But I check in periodically, and I'm rooting for it to succeed

A nice migration story would probably help for Mastodon no? Sign-up on an "index" server, then one button to end up somewhere else?

The problem with that is coordination. All the Mastodon servers would need to align, agree, and implement this new process. The whole point of Mastodon is that it is federated, and so consensus will ensure progress is limited to the lowest common denominator.

Federation works when protocols and standards are negotiated upon, and people do coordinate implicitly wherever they apply the protocol. So I'm not sure if there's anything to explain as if we're at cross purposes.

Why couldn't a protocol and reference implementation exist for a client migration if servers have similar schemas for users and posts?

Do you know how censorship and Balkanization work on Bluesky? On Mastodon this was quite extreme, as entire servers can block each other, without any involvement from the individual user.

This is why p2p will always be superior to federation. I don't want others making decisions for me.

I'm okay with consuming an upstream block/filter list, but I ultimately want executive control over it.

The thing that still grinds my gears about Mastodon is the concept of search is inherently broken. In Twitter I can search whatever and see all the old public posts from the start of time. On Mastodon, I'll get ... some stuff.

With your model that wouldn't be an issue.

People who want such experience just run their own instance.

No because that doesn't solve the problem.

At the moment there’s no issue because there’s still only one server. De facto I can’t imagine any federated protocol that won’t enable servers to block each other, though.

FWIW, many Fediverse instances will be / are blocking Bluesky.

Some instances and individuals will block Fediverse instances which federate with Bluesky.

This is so stupid. Individuals should decide whether they block something.

If you use any of the major (or minor) email providers, you're implicitly buying into a system in which system operators, not individuals, determine what communications are or are not permitted.

That decision-making is quite widely distributed, with email service providers both making their own realtime or near-realtime determinations at both individual message and and network-provider levels (e.g., IP- or netblock-based quality determinations), as well as third-party quality measurements such as Spamhaus and Senderbase / Ironport (long since part of Cisco / Talos).

Increasingly even general Web traffic is subject to similar decisionmaking as with reCAPTCA, Cloudflare, and other services.

Individual decisionmaking simply does not scale to billions (or under IPv6, vastly more) relationships.

There's a give-and-take of blocking practices with Fediverse instances. I'm on a smaller instance maintained by someone I've known online for a decade or so, and who is highly principled in their decisions, though some do rub a bit raw on me. I've brought this up, and may yet decamp to another instance (or spin my own), though I'll also note that blocking fuckwits is a highly effective s/n preservation strategy. (The concept is highlighted in my Fediverse profile as a pinned post: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019>).

And I've been online for going on 40 years. Many of the naive presumptions of kumbaya and universal brotherhood have proved grossly misdirected. I'd once subscribed to many of them. I've grown up (or old).

The difference is that in case of email we are talking about clear cases of spam. In the case of Fediverse instances the reason for blocking are ideological differences. That's exactly what should be left to the individual, as the opinions diverge a lot. For spam everyone agrees that it should be blocked.

Rigid fixation on spam is an overly constrained understanding of the problem.

Email spam is a problem because it directly attacks the utility and value of the communications channel, driving people to other alternatives (or none at all in some cases). Similar issues exist with telephony abuses (robocalls, scam calls, spoofing, privacy invasion and sruveillance, etc.).

In the case of group discussion / social / microblogging platforms, a key dynamic is the nazi bar problem (let one in and you're now running a nazi bar), and the race-to-the-bottom dynamic of various forms of harassment and intimidation: those voices which don't feel safe talking on a platform or channel won't talk on that channel. They're denied a platform, and the platform is denied their voice.

(The Fediverse is actually under fairly sustained criticism by those voices for not having sufficient tools, policies, and/or enforcement.)

For commercial, advertising-supported platforms, an additional consideration is advertisers' sensibilities, and the fact that high-value advertising, brand-safe content, and attractive advertising audiences are all factors which are dependent in large part on content moderation policies. This doesn't apply generally to the Fediverse (though individual ad-supported instances might appear within it, as with Threads). It does strongly apply to Twitter and Facebook's properties generally, however.

There's also the observation that clue flees stupidity and/or banality. The more a channel is taken over by any low-signal content (whether that's overtly abusive or not), the less that intelligent and substantive contributors will care to engage with that channel.

That again is a dynamic I've observed for many decades now online, and am coming to appreciate has a long prior offline history before that.

And also, again, these are all cases where systemic abuse requires systemic response. Your initial comment is not only naive but demonstrable infeasible. It's been tried, repeatedly, and it simply does not work.

The fact that we're having this discussion on a forum in which there are in fact system-level controls over what does and does not appear, and no individual user tools to accomplish same (bar hiding specific stories) somewhat underlines my point.

I disagree. The claim that everything without censorship becomes a "Nazi bar" is ridiculous. It is only defensible if you have an absurdly wide definition of "Nazi". The claim that advertising and "brand-safe" content justifies political censorship is an especially sad one. As for the existence of alleged "systemic" abuse: I don't see any evidence that it exists.

> Mastodon puts too much onus on the user to pick a home server

So don't. There are multiple services you can pay a small fee to to host your own instance with only you on it.

You don't see how that's an even larger barrier to entry than just picking an existing home server?

It could certainly be more user-friendly than it currently is, but no, I think it's more user-friendly than having to pick a home server and worry about whether you picked well.

Mastodon evangelists just don't seem to get why nobody else shares their masochistic tastes. It's not terrible if you want something highly configurable but most social media users want to chat, not federate.

I found that most of the "celeb chatter" died off for me on Threads a few months after launch. Anecdotally, there are a lot of gamedevs I follow on there that have migrated from Twitter, and treating it more like an interest-based network (a la Google+) has bumped it up to one of my daily apps.

After a year or so my mastodon feed is getting better and its more of the same people who were on twitter, less void-shouty than it was.

You've obviously not been to Threads in a while. It has a pretty thriving community, esp now that it's available in EU. There's a reason it's #1 on the app stores in many countries.

> it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms

Compelling for whom? For developers? I’m not sure anyone else will care.

The options this creates are super accessible to non-technical people. You can go on the app store right now and take your pick of bsky clients, and you can browse/search different algos from within the app and keep a list of your favorites and swap between them, it's all very user-friendly

Most of the biggest complaints people have about twitter are client-side problems. So just having an ecosystem of clients (and the competitive pressure that puts on the official client) makes the experience way better

Choice is only good if the options are differentiated and easy to understand.

A bunch of algo and client options sound good for someone who is already a committed user, but for a new user it just complicated the onboarding experience.

Not to mention, it’s unclear what the incentive to put real resources behind any of these clients is.

It doesn't complicate the onboarding process though, because there's an official client and a default algo. That's Bluesky's whole thing: sensible defaults and easy onboarding, so it can be "just twitter" if you want it to be. But the open protocol and ecosystem that give you more options if/when you want them, and put pressure on the official ones to stay good

That's really the key. Most people don't need to care. Bluesky is nice and easy for their needs. They just use the bsky.app website and the official Bluesky phone app.

This is in contrast to Mastodon where people were told to pick an instance and not really guided to any one as the primary one (because Mastodon devs/users don't want there to be a thought that there even is a "primary" instance).

People here on HN can claim picking an instance isn't a big deal all they want, but I can say with confidence it is. I'm in various furry artist Discord servers where people expressed their distaste for having to deal with the multiple instances.

The thread is discussing Blue Sky getting critical mass (ie casual users), my claim is that for this the algo and client choices are neutral to mildly negative value.

Take that away you’re really back to “just Twitter” with fewer features and less content.

I agree that algo and client choice would be a positive for a mature site like Twitter, but it’s unclear how a site with this strategy will get enough traction for the choices to be useful

Also, good.

An idealistic, technical user might put up with the typical quality of early "alternative solution" apps, but seeing enough errors, crashes, unintuitive UX, and other hurdles, several times across several apps, will get most users to give up on the platform.

At least I can have an account on X. Accessible, are you joking?????

For content creators

My whole community has moved from twitter to bsky. The first push was for mastodon, but that died out after a few weeks. But all action is on bsky now, not twitter, so I feel most have migrated fully, not just double posting.

What sort of community?

Cycling / urban planning / environmental in my country. So it's quite niche. A couple of hundreds.

But that's also how I used Twitter. An account specifically for this. Only ever followed or interacted with content related to this. So not using it to consume other content, write about anything that comes to mind etc.

The fact that your whole community was insular enough to move to an invite-only app is exactly what worries me about Bluesky. It's just a bunch of cliques. Is that sustainable? We'll see.

I do like the technical vision, a lot. But I haven't been able to try it out because any time I felt the desire to look, nobody could actually link me to a post or a feed. So I never achieved the required activation energy to even look at it, nevermind adding it to my doomscrolling repertoire or signing up to the thing.

Opening up the posts is a good first step to sustainable adoption. Now next time people are mad at Twitter they'll have an outlet instead of being met with a brick wall when they finally get the urge to try something new.

Here's a few invite codes for anyone to use (maybe reply if you successfully use one)

bsky-social-exnc4-5h2qb

bsky-social-cocv2-coy6u

bsky-social-txqzx-nqhw3

bsky-social-h6snn-255ig

thanks, used the first one.

I used the second one, thanks!

They're all used up. Womp womp.

And a few more here...

bsky-social-yxngj-y5dad

bsky-social-fo32f-lz7p5

bsky-social-6txdl-ppkes

bsky-social-ihhnj-w4e24

bsky-social-3kidb-2tagv

bsky-social-brvm4-gwcnj

bsky-social-llyit-xx3kt

bsky-social-eeqkk-tf6qh

bsky-social-qttr7-gjh3i

All of these are used.

Only got one:

bsky-social-5xbvh-kgbua

Interest has been low among my friends as most seem happy with Mastodon, so here are some codes!

bsky-social-jaixd-xof3h

bsky-social-fzzhr-3ow5j

bsky-social-sns4s-wnuwh

bsky-social-pmqcb-izd6n

bsky-social-bmgi4-bhg5p

all used :(

bsky-social-cqrjv-tsfgi bsky-social-xufsa-d6dvu bsky-social-cz7w7-ypiji

All used as well :(

bsky-social-gpoqz-2s6fo

bsky-social-k2vcy-bbcwf

bsky-social-4z3ir-rndd7

bsky-social-ug2hp-de3br

EDIT: all have been claimed

Got some more for all y'all!

bsky-social-te3n3-yx3ib

bsky-social-3rwal-hj636

bsky-social-mvjpq-mzusy

bsky-social-jtuoi-ktnlj

All used. Don't try these.

I was ready to move. You need an invite? I don't have an invite. Really? Yes. Here's my middle finger. Twitter/X for life!!

As I wrote in another comment, it's a clique that I moved with, yes. Related to urban planning, cycling infrastructure etc in my country. If anything, the move has been nice. No longer daily death threats from car drivers thinking that's a proportionate response for us advocating for a new bicycle lane..

Being a small group of course made the transition easier. Most of us didn't use Twitter to follow all kinds of stuff, just mostly these things.

And while being a clique, with no outside influences, can be bad, the "influences" you now get from blue checks on X isn't anything worth having. Just abuse.

Several communities have migrated elsewhere, some to Bluesky, others to Threads. It's great that there are these alternatives now

> "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" is a compelling proposition

For the average twitter user this is probably the exact opposite of a compelling position. Tech people want more control and less abstraction. Everyone else is happy with their walled gardens and ten layers of separation from the machine code. Its why things are the way they are and not some technopunk utopia that we all want.

Twitter, previously, was the best of both worlds. A first-party app “most” people used, and then a vibrant third party app ecosystem that others, mainly power users, loved.

Threads is this now. API is almost finished / ready for release.

You and I have very different definitions of "now" :)

In the early days, Twitter used to have a very open and friendly API. It's a big part of why users and third-party devs (I was both) loved it. Same thing was true of Facebook and Reddit.

Over time, they shut down their APIs (or charged huge fees) in an effort to intentionally kill off third-party clients and services.

A key goal for Bluesky is to "lock open" the network and the API so that it's impossible to reverse the decision.

Open source clients and algorithms could serve as a foundation for more end-user friendly abstractions and UIs, that let average users very plainly express (or not express) what they want to see, and who they want to be seen by.

Imagine a sort of plug in ecosystem with sane defaults

Could this worsen polarization by facilitating extremist fever swamps?

It's a consumer product and it has to compete as one. We've been pretty aware of that from the start.

I think you're under-estimating what's happening with 3rd-party feeds. That's a core pattern where independent services can integrate into the UX as if they're native to the product. This means turning the client into an open platform for third-party applications.

That's been a success with feeds. They're actively adopted and created by users. Most of the feeds are hosted by skyfeed, a 3P app which gives users a GUI to create them. The author of skyfeed submitted this actually. Talented dev afaict but I've not met them, which is kind of the point. (Looking forward to it though, redsolver!)

3P integration operates by a thick client model. We exchange typed JSON that describes content and interfaces. This lets services drive the client through request/response flows. We can bounce out to webviews when we need, but not executing code means better integration into the app, which means users get access to new experiences within the client and providers get users more easily. This being social protocol means that auth and high level verbs (following, liking, commenting) also come along. The Web 1.0 did quite a bit without client scripting, and I suspect this client can too.

I also want to mention: the product experience right now is establishing a UX on a protocol-driven network that feels good to consumers. Our metric for success wasn't whether it was novel; it was whether we could meet consumer expectations. If we can prove out scaling -- which I'm now confident we will -- then we've established the core of the network. After that we use that core as a backbone for 3P devs to build integrated experiences, and it should lead to a notably diverse product, and I think that's the compelling position for us to offer.

Too early to tell about momentum tbh. Getting networks to collectively move takes time. From a protocol level I think Bluesky probably has opportunity for better UX than Mastodon, which is incredibly clunky when taking actions cross-server.

You still need to get an invite / a waitlist to register or am I missing something ?

I don't know how you can expect people to make the move when they're not even able to sign in

All my twitter friends got invite codes through other friends pretty quickly (days or weeks), many people now have such a glut of codes that they're throwing them at whoever asks. I've got like 10 myself and nobody left to give them to

Obviously they need to drop the invite system at some point (and I am surprised it's been this long), but it's not the reason a given subcommunity didn't make the jump

Could I get a Bluesky invite, by chance?

bsky-social-mjs72-44f7v

bsky-social-hqjo5-ylied

bsky-social-vjfij-soadz

bsky-social-qmeyu-jwmds

bsky-social-2joo4-sjp5p

Thank you!

There is still a waitlist but we're working hard to open things up ASAP. Some people will never believe it, but the waitlist was never intended as a growth hack. It was purely an attempt to keep the network healthy and the servers from catching on fire as we iterated on the app itself.

For devs that want to experiment, we've had a special waitlist for a while: https://atproto.com/blog/call-for-developers

Loving bluesky so far, thanks for making it. Honestly it's the best competitor to Twitter I have seen so far, and after looking at the company / job listings and seeing how incredibly focused you are on the UI/UX aspects.. it seems an incredibly compelling product vision / company. Kudos.

As an aside, do you have any plans to make your choices of domain names / branding less confusing / sketchy looking? (bsky.app, blueskyweb.xyz, bsky.social for user names, 'Bluesky Social' on the app store, etc)

Thank you! And yeah, the goal is to bring an open social media protocol to everyone in a way that feels familiar and easy. The social media problems we face are societal and most of society is non-technical.

The domain situation is unfortunate and confusing. We don't have any immediate solution but agree it's a problem.

not only was it not a growth hack, I've been shocked it didn't kill all of our growth. it was done purely out of necessity

What's wild is that the same people who call it a growth hack also acknowledge that the waitlist isn't limiting growth and overall interest.

Amateurs. you guys blew a once in a life time. Invites/waitlist... For a social media app. Seen it before with that other app who's name I forgot about.

Livejournal?

"keep the network healthy"

You guys know that every single playform eventually go downhill in content quality as the user base grows, right? You are wasting your time. You'd better open up now or never. Nobody will bother looking at your product in a year if Threads gets bigger and better.

I think Bluesky is legit building toward being a Twitter successor.

The big corporate accounts may have immediately fled for the safety and features of Threads, but I've noticed more and more journalists, radio personalities, columnists etc creating Bluesky accounts as they scale back on their Twitter use.

Seems like Bluesky is the grassroots favourite.

yea fail me once...

Threads will support ActivityPub.

So this isn't the same situation again.

I thought I read that BlueSky was envisioned as a migration of all of twitter to a federated platform by Dorsey. Critical mass wouldn’t be a problem if that’s right.

Not a migration, just a successor. Nothing moves over automatically/wholesale

> For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for.

Okay, but I never even signed up for Twitter.

> But twitter as a platform gets worse each day

Can it get worse? Right now I get ads every 3-4 tweets, and several of them are porn ads.

I also noticed ads that are not marked with the [Ad]-icon.

Can't see how it could get lower than this :(

> "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms"

Twitter was like that once. Just people flocking into the next walled garden...

> But twitter as a platform gets worse each day

Well that's just an opinion. I feel that it's better than it ever was. Sorry.

I've tried a few twitter alternatives (including Bluesky) as someone who hardly ever uses twitter anyway. I was a little disappointed how it just felt like ... more twitter. I'm browsing around finding mostly memes or outrage that doesn't have context to me. I fairly quickly get exhausted trying to find / curate content.

I guess I should have expected it, but I hoped that somewhere a different network would have a different style or flavor. However, the content patterns that get engagement and etc seem ingrained in the participants no matter where you go.

Personally I can't help but feel both left out, and not wanting to be a part of whatever these style of social media apps are.

Having said that there's a lot of talk about twitter clones missing features, but for me I wonder if the content is the same, why would a significant number of people move anyway?

Twitter clones thus far have all been cover bands with a different (speaker) stack. Focus seems to be entirely on the backend protocol side - important for decentralization but fixing only part of the problem.

I haven't seen much in the way of innovation on the UX itself, which is what I'm really interested in. I guess its a mix of a) why mess with success, twitter-like design is proven to work, b) a lack of experimental startup product culture that's willing to try new things, c) not having good ideas, and d) just not enough time because they're focused on basics.

> which is what I'm really interested in.

Whenever I see comments like these, my immediate thought is "How interested are you, if you had to put a dollar figure on it?"

Also, you are missing alternative (e): availability bias. Maybe you haven't seen a lot of innovation around UX not because people are not trying, but because those who tried to experiment with different UX were aiming at such a niche that completely failed as social network?

>failed as social network

Is that the case? Serious question, I'm curious about any social networks that have tried some new UX? The twitter clones seem to play things very close to twitter's style. At least it looks that way to me as someone who isn't a heavy twitter user.

Also what is "failed as a social network" when Twitter, one of the biggest bleeds money as it is?

Is the market just messed up?

Or maybe UX where I actually feel like I can find or interact with things I want just doesn't work for profitability (Facebook doesn't show me what I want)?

I'm of the opinion there aren't a lot of good alternative ideas circulating. There's been some work in a design pattern libraries but it's hard to design new features from the outside, and I don't think until very recently people saw starting a rival social network as a good business move, since social networks are defined by their network effect moat. Twitter's meltdown has created some opportunity but it remains to be seen if the attack of the clones is just a fracturing versus a cambrian event.

> I'm curious about any social networks that have tried some new UX?

And I'm curious about flipping this question: can you think of any UX that would be interested for you in a social network?

Some guy here posted on HN about his project non.io[0]

Still hanging around

https://non.io/

> The twitter clones seem to play things very close to twitter's style. At least it looks that way to me as someone who isn't a heavy twitter user.

A lot of this is they're trying to capture the user base of an incumbent and users like familiarity.

> Also what is "failed as a social network" when Twitter, one of the biggest bleeds money as it is?

Twitter has millions of users and it doesn't cost a lot in infrastructure to host tweets. Twitter bleeds money because the company has been mismanaged (going back long before its current ownership), not because putting ads on a social network with that number of users couldn't turn a profit.

A "failed social network" is one that nobody uses.

> Or maybe UX where I actually feel like I can find or interact with things I want just doesn't work for profitability (Facebook doesn't show me what I want)?

There's probably a short-term/long-term thing here. Big companies run on metrics, so they make a change and the number goes up so they keep the change. But the way the change works is by frustrating people into spending more time on the site, which short-term increases the metrics and long-term makes people hate you and be eager to switch away at the first opportunity.

What you probably want here is a service with a single owner who actually uses it and cares about making the service good (and, most importantly, is competent), but what usually happens instead is it becomes a publicly traded company controlled by shareholders who institute the aforementioned metrics-based bureaucracy.

The key is somehow getting the one with benevolent leadership and the one with millions of users to be the same one.

At least for me, I've spent the last ~3 years designing new feature ideas for twitter and twitter-like products as a hobby and been involved in various communities working on these issues. Ways to improve quality of comments, reduce conflict, improve context, build media literacy, etc. I need to get around to publishing these ideas but have definitely put real work in. This is the only one I've published in blog form [1], tho I've put bits of others out on twitter itself over the years. Fwiw I used to run product/design for a social media co and have on and off run communities all the way back to bbses.

As far as I'm concerned the innovation just isn't there in the core loops and UX of twitter-likes, it's all circa 2008 stuff.

[1]: https://nickpunt.com/blog/deescalating-social-media/

> designing new feature ideas for twitter and twitter-like products

Which is not the same as "innovating with UX" in any way that is incompatible with the status quo.

Going by your blog post, do you agree that it is not something that (by itself) a feature so innovative that would make people drop twitter to favor a new social network that implemented it?

No this feature by itself isn't something to attract people to a brand new social network, I hope I didn't represent it that way.

My perspective on the problem is that the way twitter's medium is designed doesn't produce a wonderful signal:noise ratio. Some people might revel in the noise, and some amount of noise certainly generates MAUs and ad dollars, but ultimately it's not living up to its potential as a medium and social network. 'A clown car that fell into a gold mine' still applies.

My theory of change is that in general, features that improve SNR are going to provide a sustaining MAU advantage to products that implement them, because the vast majority of users want better SNR. They want quality discourse, funny memes, kind interactions, etc. Drama and conflict also produce MAUs, but ultimately they're net negative because of the people they scare off.

If you accept that premise, then the question is more when than if features focused on improving the SNR of interactions should be built. Do they meaningfully differentiate and help with the cold start problem? Or are they to be built after some amount of audience has arrived?

From what I've seen on the clones, as they grow they're all running into the same SNR ceiling. I think that ceiling is preventing them from being breakout successes, because whatever differentiator they started with (decentralized, free speech, etc) will fade in relevance as they get bigger and their core experience reverts to the mean. They're just twitter, but smaller.

Would a product that focused more on improving SNR be able to breakout? I don't know, I'm just disappointed nobody seems to have tried very hard.

> If you accept that premise

Personally, I don't. I think the flaw in this reasoning is to think that people join social networks with the sole purpose of exchanging information effectively, but I could probably make a list of 50 reasons that make people participate more than that.

There is also the aspect that SNR is frankly a bad metric. We are quite able to filter things ourselves, which means that in the end we will flock to the places where the total signal is what matters, regardless of how much noise comes along with it.

I think you might be interpreting my point about SNR narrowly and literally, when I meant it in the broadest sense. Obviously social networks are not solely about exchanging information (which I never said...), they serve all sorts of other purposes, connecting and forming bonds being a major one.

I think you're also not being particularly charitable in your interpretations of what I'm saying, or opening yourself up to the possibility for other ways things can operate. If you were to be, you'd find we have quite a bit of agreement about this. Total signal also matters, good point I can see how you read it that way. I'd put that in the umbrella of SNR, as my intent is to advocate for better signal - both in quantity and quality.

Where I think we may disagree is that existing filtering capabilities are sufficient and broadly used. I mean, if you can imagine a world where it takes users less effort in setting up their twitter account to get the same quality output, then we're in agreement that there's work to be done on signal and noise. Currently it's a hell of a lot of effort, and you still run into a lot of unnecessary strife and bullshit. I'd push you to consider that twitter's current feature set around discourse is also not the end all be all of online communication, and there is room for improvement. If you can accept that there is room for improvement in these domains, then we're on the same page here.

In fact I think this very conversation is a decent example of how the design of a medium can cause some unnecessary strife and result in the rather silly situation of being in violent agreement. Food for thought.

> if you can imagine a world where it takes users less effort in setting up their twitter account to get the same quality output

What I am failing to understand is idea that "quality output" is a measurable metric in any meaningful way. The dimensionality of this metric would be almost as big as the number of people you have in your network, so in the end you are just trying to solve an infinite customization problem.

> can cause some unnecessary strife and result in the rather silly situation of being in violent agreement.

Or perhaps it is a good way to illustrate that the strife is actually necessary and should be embraced and seen as a natural consequence of any group of people who are trying to make sense of their internal worldview and how it fits with the real world?

There is no place in the real world where people "connect and form bonds" by following a strict protocol and have all their interaction methods designed. Every attempt at crating those end up with a system that feels forced and boring, like speed dating, town hall meetings or those ridiculous college assemblies where they need to have a mediator to constantly remind everyone what they should and should not do.

Conflict and strife is not a problem to be removed away. If you succeed at doing that, you'll end up removing an important part of what makes us human. What we need is to have better mechanisms to deal with conflict and strife, and I really don't believe that the way to go is by throwing tech designs around.

> Or perhaps it is a good way to illustrate that the strife is actually necessary and should be embraced and seen as a natural consequence of any group of people who are trying to make sense of their internal worldview and how it fits with the real world? ... Conflict and strife is not a problem to be removed away.

I specifically said 'unnecessary conflict' to mean the part of conflict that is induced by the limitations of the medium, the topic of this thread. I too believe that some conflict is absolutely necessary and our communication mediums must be able to hold space for that conflict. We agree!

Again, I encourage you to interpret more charitably and to make fewer assumptions. This is the second time you've put words in my mouth and defended a position I'm not attacking and I'm trying to be polite but it's kinda tedious (can you see this?).

The time could have been better spent in exploration; I still don't know if you see any room for improvement anywhere, you don't seem to be engaging on that. A good design discussion doesn't consist of 'no no no'.

> 'unnecessary conflict' to mean the part of conflict that is induced by the limitations of the medium.

How would you expect to do this without changing the medium itself?

> I still don't know if you see any room for improvement anywhere

I don't see it, no. At least not by adding "features" or by tweaking on the software implementation of the system.

In regards of "social media", I am more and more convinced that the only winning move is not to play, but unfortunately we will never do it. The only option that I see left is to work on "damage reduction", which is why I've spent so much time, energy and money to see if we can get "corporate-free social media" as a viable alternative for the masses.

I very much agree with your sentiment. Glad to see someone else recognize the problem with trying to find interesting content nowadays. I have noticed a negative relationship between sizes(after a certain threshold) of communities/platforms and the ability to find interesting content that is also suited to my preferences.

It seems like a ranking problem, you would think having upvotes/likes/points/etc. would be a good metric. But you just get an outsized influence of posts that have huge critical mass, and the content just becomes generic and clickbaity(i.e. Mr. Beast).

I think it is an optimization problem that has to balance competing needs and bring the best solutions under a wide set of criteria. This has been my experience trying to solve this problem, I already have a system that ingests huge amount of reddit posts from preferred and top subreddits. What I want to do is filter out the best content, then apply that generally to all content sources(YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, etc). Moving away from content that gives a short term dopamine hit to content that is an experience that changes structures in your brain. Ideally sustaining pleasure, intrigue, curiosity for longer periods of time.

There are sites with great UX like Scrolller[1] trying to solve the issue, but its only images/gifs.

[1] https://scrolller.com/

I mean, there's plenty of UX innovation going on in the fediverse, for example. But for some reason bringing that up is consistently met with "that can't ever work! nobody can understand this! it's too difficult!" and complete bafflement from the peanut gallery.

I think tech companies' lack of interest in experimenting with UX might have something to do with that...

> which is what I'm really interested in

Part of the problem is a lot of us don't want "innovation" here. The limitation for the Twitter clones that I've found is none of them (including Twitter these days) have the critical mass of people it used to have.

Well it's fine to have that as an individual opinion about your experience, and we all have had experiences of great products horribly transformed through bullshit 'innovation', but surely there's room for improvement on twitter as a whole. The place is kinda a mess and the medium is responsible for part of that.

Yeah, the problem with the wave of Twitter clones is exactly that: they're clones. You don't make a successful social media site by being the same as an existing site but with different people. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Discord, TikTok, Reddit are all very different in how they function and what types of content is shared. Google+ tried to clone Facebook and was a colossal failure despite hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions of dollars being poured into it.

Fundamentally the issue with Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. is that they don't offer anything different to most users. Yes, they run off decentralized protocols, but most people don't care. Yes, there's no Elon, but most people don't care.

So I'd put it firmly in (c). Bluesky and Threads both tried to recapture the lightning in the bottle which is 2008 Twitter by copying it (Bluesky going so far as to copy the early 00s invite-only model!). Both are either failures or marginally successful, depending on who you ask. Certainly neither are a home run.

If you want to get people off Twitter, don't build Twitter-but-different. Build something better.

I feel much the same way. Facebook tried to sell me on threads by showing me an ad with 2.5 threads visible: one of them was clearly a racist post that I didn't want to see the conclusion of, the other was clearly a liberal outrage thread about how much money Jeff Bezos makes that I ALSO didn't want to see the end of, and the third was a mostly-obscured post by a ceramic artisan I follow. They don't seem to have any idea who they're advertising to if they think these things will get a positive reaction out of me, rather than just closing it and marking it as "show less like this." For that matter, the vaunted algorithm is not very smart if it can't figure out that I only engage with reels and stories about 1% of the time, vs the content I actually like to engage with.

It's like, these social media companies wrote a SINGLE outrage-farming algorithm that they push on everyone's feeds without regard for whether it works on individuals or not.

This all is why, despite it getting worse, I use FB more than the other platforms. Actual content posted by actual humans I actually know with their actual names under them. Not some pseudonym where I can't remember if it's an IRL friend or some internet rando I follow (or why I follow them), a bunch of emojis, contextless junk, and clickbait outrage farming.

This experience always shocks me because it’s not aligned with my own.

Even on Twitter I never saw that junk. I followed almost exclusively tech folk, AWS community heros, NodeJS developers, Architects and Platform Engineers.

I’m not even a developer, but I followed them to be exposed more to that topic.

As a result, my feed was 99.9% technical content and product management content.

I got the same result in under an hour with Threads too - just mute every. Single. Thing. That you don’t want to see for an hour and then kill and re-launch the app. You’ll never see politics again.

Do you spend the majority of your waking hours dedicated to ensuring all tracking (small-t as in habits or content enjoyment, not location tracking or government chip implants) is gone from your life? A lot of people who do get stuck in this revolving door of trash which is targeting those users. Sort of like: you spend your life trying to not be targeted, only to be targeted as the group that never wants to be targeted.

Nope, not at all. Minimal effort in fact.

Even if you mainly follow tech folks, there are many who get very political…

Yeah I follow some music profiles on Instagram and all Threads gave me was their music stuff replaced with their takes on Israel/Gaza.

> just mute every. Single. Thing.

'just' is working hard there. After the 20th attempt at avoiding crap posts most people just give up.

I was in the process of doing that when I came up with an simpler and a lot more reliable method: Deleting the Threads profile.

So, a poor-man's LinkedIn.

No matter how bad that’s probably still better than LinkedIn. When I login there, I don’t see anything I actually am interested in.

I have theory that folks who have established profiles and settings and following underestimate what it takes to go from zero to useful from scratch now as far as curation goes.

> It's like, these social media companies wrote a SINGLE outrage-farming algorithm

They kind of did. The optimal solution of 'just show rage bait' can't take all that long to discover.

Via heavy use of the ”Hide|Show Less|Not Interested” button I’ve managed to get youtube recommendations surprisingly relevant, and a big surprise was facebook reels, which started as complete junk, and is now an astonishing mix of science (startalk, Tom Scott, Physics Girl, colour theory) and nature videos. It’s arguably the most relevant “tv” I’ve ever seen. I suspect curation on Twitter is solvable, but neither Twitter nor its clones have successfully done it yet.

The Twitter algorithm is especially bad if you're a lurker, because the only feedback you can give it is what posts you view and search for. And it has no way of distinguishing whether you're viewing something because it's outrage bait, or because it confirms your world view, or because it offers you new information that you want more of...

One really interesting innovation that Bluesky supports right now is custom timelines. You can paste a URL into the app of any webserver hosting a custom timeline and have it available as a tab. This lets people make and share custom timelines using different recommendation and personalization strategies.

I'm hoping some easily-supported competition for timeline algorithms helps people figure out how to make ones that show content we really want instead of click bait and outrage bait.

Yeah custom TLs have a lot of promise and might be the most interesting feature among all the clones. It's a big ask to (new) users to curate our experience and having turnkey options could really make it easy to get the specific type of value we want right away. I hope they lean into it a lot more in the design.

>why would a significant number of people move anyway?

The reality is it was only a significant minority.

Most people don't care that they /communicate on Mysterious Twitter X/, they just care about communicating and Mysterious Twitter X is just the dominant one of all the social media networks.

Then there's people like me who use Mysterious Twitter X for a very specific purpose. In my case, I use it to follow announcements from my favorite games (FGO, Priconne, etc.) and join their repost campaigns, get info from some game guide makers, follow some Japanese illustrators, and follow a small handful of Japanese celebrities I'm actually interested in. Exactly none of them left Mysterious Twitter X.

For my use case, Musk's takeover was actually amazing because he killed off the political manipulations that Twitter Japan was spewing behind the scenes. Ain't nobody got time for politics when I'm there to be a man of culture.

It's interesting that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok are all looking very different. But all the "open social media" seem to be cloning Twitter.

The protocol that the Bluesky app is built on, atproto[1], is designed to support other social modes. The Bluesky app is in some ways "just" a reference implementation of microblogging, created to ensure the protocol actually works for users and developers.

In early 2024, when the production network is federated, it will be possible to build new social apps on atproto that the millions of existing Bluesky users will be able to use (if they choose) without having to create a new account.

1. https://atproto.com

The only way to truly have a "good" social media experience is to have a small site (a few hundred active people, maybe less who join slowly over a somewhat long period of time) where everyone has at least slightly overlapping interests.

I'm lucky enough to have found a site like this and it's epic. Better than any social media I've ever experienced. People actually care about each other. We have a community.

You managed to describe the many forums of ye olde days.

I miss those days. Has it really been at least 20 years? I'm getting too old for this...

There's still places left where you can find it.

Welcome to twenty years ago, when we could still hope the internet would actually enrich our social lives.

Yeah, but you can still find that experience in a few back corners of the web. Like I said, I've been lucky enough to find it.

I found the mastodon / fediverse space to be somewhat slow paced to start with, but after a while of following interesting people gets to much better interaction space. People and topics you are personally interested in and want to read about.

TY. I might have to give them a spin again.

I got the app but still can’t browse anything without an account. So I don’t use it :| this is user acquisition 101, if you’re behind a login page people won’t use your stuff.

I played a small role in the RSS part of this release, nudging them to go with title-less items in the feed.

If anybody wants a Bluesky invite code, I have a handful available. DM me at @edavis@hachyderm.io or at https://t.me/ejd215. First come, first served!

They totally missed 4-5 events of mass interest in leaving Twitter and now have to scramble for any interest.

Bluesky's big selling point is that it's an open protocol, but it's their own homegrown protocol that nobody else is using. Meanwhile Threads has working ActivityPub[1]. You can see threads posts on Mastodon.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-ac...

Bluesky considers lack of activitypub a feature. They don’t want push-content, they want local organic communities.

I remember so many people who said, “yeah right, Threads will never connect to Mastodon,” and yet here we are. What a time to be alive?

oh boy. if we're marking "what a time to be alive" by having access to a social media platforms version of another social media platform accessible by a 3rd party wannabe social platform, then sheesh, give me the blue pill. i'd rather be part of the matrix.

In all fairness, while yes Bluesky so far has not yet lived up to their promise of decentralisation/federation, it’s still under development. It just hasn’t been built yet.

Though, the whole blue sky stack is significantly more complicated than ActivityPub so I’m doubtful as many would actually set up “instances”.

> it’s still under development. It just hasn’t been built yet.

Someone else was already first to market. Launching as an alternative that is half baked seems like really strange idea to me. Maybe they were trying to gain traction during the surge in Twitter hate, but if the thing you are asking them to jump ship to is a lesser product, only a tiny minority of them are going to stay. Half baked launches into a very well established market just seems like you'd be better off taking your investor's money and having grand ol' time in Vegas.

I agree - they're taking their sweet time. But, they very pointedly and deliberately have not launched yet. They're still very pre-alpha - this is why there's invites (not to try and create some sort of exclusivity).

Naively, I appreciate that they're not trying to rush something out just to compete, but rather are taking the time to build the right thing.

I hate to say it, but when you're a new business on the front page of HN... and people are calling you "pre-alpha"... you're missing the boat. There goes another chance to grab a load of new members.

Is this all about tech?? Not enough funding to get things built?

I am not sure I'm even going to have the patience to wait to be allowed to try this platform. Reviews seem very lukewarm.

On the upside, atproto "instances" (we often call them "personal data servers") have much less responsibility than the typical Mastodon instance. So folks should find them quite cheap and easy to run. One reason is that they don't need to directly support application features such as timeline construction, search, image optimization, etc: they just host your social data.

We have 10 servers federating in production, each housing around 270,000 users, and it all runs on disk and sqlite, quite affordable! We migrated 2 million users off a single large host onto these 10 smaller ones transparently and without need for much fanfare. We're dedicated to the tech and seeing it work in production has been super heartening.

the entire architecture is like if you started with the typical architecture for social network, but then got rid of the organizational perimeters. the atproto instances (PDSes) handle primary data storage, key management, and request routing. they're otherwise quite dumb, which as divy is saying makes them cheap to run and also general purpose for other kinds of applications.

the app-specific business logic lives in the aggregator services that pull from those instances

I'm fine with a new protocol, what I dislike is they marketed it as a main feature and still haven't shipped what was promised. So far Bluesky is just as centralized as Twitter.

ActivityPub has some big flaws. We need something better, but I don't think I trust the Bluesky team to deliver that anymore.

They did recently just federate the core servers. It's no longer a centralized service but blue sky itself is now a proxy for a federation of smaller servers. Users get assigned one at random(?) upon signup and the blue sky api url continues to work and towards to the underlying server.

One step at a time.

Is BlueSky the one running those servers? If so that's still centralized, but yes at least it's a step.

Yeah, that's right. The production network's data layer (Personal Data Servers) are architecturally federated now (i.e. there are multiple PDS hosts) but still operated by a single organization (Bluesky Social, PBC), so it's still centralized.

The goal in early 2024 is to enable federation with other PDS hosts, so that users can choose where they keep their data (posts, likes, preferences, etc).

Can I run my own network today? Is there an open server implementation?

Ed: Apparently you can play in the sandbox, but not set up a seperate network? Or federate with prod?

https://atproto.com/blog/federation-developer-sandbox

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

Yup, you could. Although connecting your own PDS hosts to the Bluesky production network won't be possible for a little while longer. Creating custom algorithms (feeds) is already possible, as it participating in the developer sandbox network, including PDS hosting.

The architecture is explained briefly here: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

Code/docs are here:

1. AT Protocol (atproto) is documented here: https://atproto.com

2. App Web/Android/iOS app: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app

3. API (AppView) and PDS (Personal Data Server): https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto

4. The Relay (formerly BGS) https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo

5. Custom algorithm (Feed Generator): https://github.com/bluesky-social/feed-generator

6. Sandbox PDS distribution: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/SANDBOX.md

Thanks. Would it be possible to set up a real self-hosted, federated instance today, so I could set up a community and let others run their own pds'?

You definitely could but it's pretty technically involved and not as easy as it will be in the future. And it would have to be siloed off from the production Bluesky/atproto network at the moment.

Their homegrown protocol is meant to solve real problems with Mastodon, like that your home server owns your user name and can destroy or steal your account where you have all your followers. Account portability on Mastodon requires your current home server to be online and cooperate with you if you want to transfer your account to a different server. With Bluesky, you can do it as long as you have an archive of your data. The intention is to make choosing your home server into a minor implementation detail where the user is always in control instead of a hugely consequential upfront decision as it is with Mastodon.

It feels like Bluesky missed their chance to be the twitter alternative after how well Threads has been going. I'm sure zuck will find a way to ruin it but its gonna be a long road a head for Bluesky.

As popular as it is among specific groups, I can't help but feel the decentralized push is going to hurt adoption. Maybe not as badly as it hurt Mastodon because they do supply a "default" server to join, but most people in my experience, don't want a decentralized platform and enjoy the benefits of a centralized platform quite a bit.

I suppose time will tell.

Bluesky has the advantage that it doesn’t “feel” decentralized. It just feels like Twitter: you make an account (with an additional screen confirming you want to create the account on bsky.app or whatever the main instance is) and it works as smoothly as twitter does with some extra goodies in the backend that come from it being decentralized.

I do like how usernames are domain names, which gives them a portability similar to email.

Threads still doesn’t have a very good search function, which in my opinion was always Twitter’s greatest asset. Your feed always had a ton of randomness, but if you wanted to talk about something specific that was going on at the moment, you searched for it. Threads just gives a bunch of random results, some in the last hour, followed by 5 months ago, and then another from 15 minutes ago.

I follow like 30 accounts on Twitter and it’s a perfectly enclosed little bubble, I really only see what I want.

But whenever I try Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads as a brand new account without anyone to follow it’s just same US politics shit. Trump, Trump bad, nazis, AOC, Trump, gender, trans rights, nazis, republicans, Trump, gender etc. This is what I see right now on Bluesky What’s Hot, this is what I see right now on Mastodon Explore.

The fact that even Mastodon pushing the rage bait (“ These are posts from across the social web that are gaining traction today”) which is supposed to be the ‘healthy’ and ‘better’ social media site shows how deep problems we have.

If really that’s what an average Joe and Jane sees when they just want to try out these services then no one wonder the world is going worse by each passing day.

Just dug up my old invite code to find this is pretty bad. Basically an app for the small obscure minority who left Twitter in protest including a bunch of ex users you'd only know from memes. Curious to see what this evolves into.

Why is it taking Bluesky so long to launch basic features and allow more traffic? Are there some complexities related to using an open protocol?

They seem to be an extremely small team.

Basic features like what?

Like signing up without an invitation.

Seeing lots of comparisons to Mastodon, Threads, and XTwitter in this thread.

I remember in the days of instant messaging, I had a single client (Adium for Mac OS X) which could talk to AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, etc. It gave me a unified buddy list, and a unified interface for messaging any of my friends, regardless of the underlying instant messaging provider.

Is anyone working on a similar omniclient for Mastodon/Threads/Bluesky/XTwitter?

If we get to the point where most users are using omniclients of this kind, that helps reduce network effects and lock-in. Seems like the Mastodon/Threads/Bluesky teams would have a strong incentive to collaborate on such a client, in order to reduce XTwitter network effects, essentially joining forces in their own unified network. (I imagine that XTwitter will block API access, at least in the short term.)

Don't forget about https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ either.

For Mastodon in particular, people are always talking about the difficulty of getting started. Is there a way to put a porcelain experience on that? Imagine I just enter my credit card info and I have my own instance without having to worry about any sysadmin details. You could monetize the client by charging a small premium above and beyond the baseline server costs.

I want an experience so porcelain that in order to create a new account, I enter my username and it automatically checks its availability across dozens of social sites, then registers me in as seamless a manner as possible. Then when I click post, it by default broadcasts that post across all the accounts I registered.

I suppose this is probably similar to the existing interface for a product such as Hootsuite, no? Maybe the best starting point is check if there's an open-source Hootsuite competitor, then optimize the interface for end users.

Not exactly what you're describing, but https://brid.gy/ is a pretty neat project in this space.

That took way too long, but I already consider Bluesky dead, they had the chance but the stupid "invite-only" system killed it (in my opinion) and then when invites actually started getting sent out I just didn't bother anymore and went back to Twitter

Still hoping for an official “Tweetdeck-ish” interface choice on the desktop. In the absence thereof, deck.blue isn’t too bad while skyfeed.app, although it seems more technically robust, isn’t exactly eye candy. I know there are others I haven’t yet tried; just would love to see Bluesky itself have something like Mastodon’s “Advanced Web Interface” option.

RSS feeds of user accounts was another addition. They're a bit average though in that they don't have media (i.e., images) in the feed. I'll keep using https://bluestream.deno.dev/ for now.

Then just make it an MRSS feed. Seems very strange not to provide a feed with links to the media. Unless it's a deliberate crippling

I assume you mean that Bluesky should make it a media RSS feed. I don't think it is something simple an end-user could do.

I thought you were saying the Bluesky was making content available via RSS, but crippled without media

Yes, they are not as useful without the media included.

I have not paid much attention to Bsky and I doubt I will but from a quick glance it looks nearly identical to X.

Is it basically an X clone that will be an alternative Twitter/X?

Or is there a lot more magic going on? Why are people excited?

(Mind you I dont spend much time on X either, so this is purely from looking at the two and comparing. )

I got an invite for Bluesky from a kind person on HN, but as someone who didn’t use Twitter, I didn’t have a sense of whom to follow. I discovered some nice artists and comics. Any suggestions on people who post nice stuff or comics or fun stuff would be welcome (I really don’t want to deal with political discussions or arguments that are meant to trigger outrage on a regular basis).

Meanwhile, here are some invite codes (I’ll update this list if they’re used within HN’s edit window):

bsky-social-xueut-35ahm

bsky-social-25tsd-crmqc

~~~bsky-social-xxxxx-xxxxx~~~ (used)

Edit: This is my first time handing out invites. I don’t like how the invite system shows me which account on Bluesky was created using my invite code. I’d rather this be hidden from the person sending the invite or at least provide an option to the person signing up if they want their account to be disclosed to the person who invited them. In real life there are usually personal or professional connections with such events, but online these could be (and are) totally random strangers.

Update: all invites above have been used.

No followers, not following anyone, yet somehow this showed up on my feed: https://bsky.app/profile/minedoo.bsky.social

Yup. Bluesky is trash.

Because furries? The last time I looked at the Mastodon federated timeline I was presented with belly fetish posts lol

Not a fan of mastodon either. It looks as if forums and social networks are dominated by rejects and the fringe of society. Be it child looking anime fans, sexualised animal fetishists, propagandists, corporate shills, and so on. Feels more like a sewage rather than a highway of information.

Brosky sold twitter and before he sold it it went from the best to the worst social media, why on earth would I go back there? Elon might be cringe but Twitter is legitimately less neurotic nowadays than it was before he sold it.

Yeah I've been enjoying Twitter quite a bit since Elon took over, truthfully I'm not even sure what he changed to cause the effect but it seems to be working.

I just want an invite. I don't know why they are being so snobbish about it

Literally so crazy I can't just get an invite, it's so stupid

Just emailed you one. I can't give them away...

I have also decided to give up all social media like this until at least February, and the past week has been a big improvement for me

Que cute Sergio, thank you so much!

Per our favorite chatcompletion model, Boas festas / Feliz Navidad!!!

New social media profile, new me: https://bsky.app/profile/arthurcolle.bsky.social

I think this is too little, too late. Threads is already filling in the void left by Twitter and has the advantage of the Instagram user base behind it.

This reminds me of Diaspora.. am I that old?

Don't know if I'm the only one but from a branding perspective Bluesky seems a very bland name.

It feels corporate to me. Probably because of that awful "blue sky thinking" doublespeak.

If anyone from Twitter I know is reading this and wants an invite code ask me via Mastodon DM or email.

bsky-social-awgll-rrqmu

bsky-social-wvq77-dxsur

bsky-social-jb2xl-7pqzg

bsky-social-6hxxo-3ccaw

bsky-social-mnbtp-xctsx

All gone :(

Seriously? Says they're all still unused in my view in the app. Dang.

It's pretty fun seeing "create scarcity" in motion. I wonder if it's a viral strategy or a way for slow, sustainable growth.

I assume the former, heh

I guess more of the later. But yes, its impressive, clean and feels much responsive than the now Twitter.

a few more:

bsky-social-z4lje-plsaa

bsky-social-scxbw-ckemr

bsky-social-cuvie-p5hqn

bsky-social-yo6ut-wewvm

bsky-social-xes62-4cer4

Thank you!

1 more bsky-social-hflhd-y4bfd

thank you!

bsky-social-67gow-jhqz5

bsky-social-h74iv-b2sgb

bsky-social-o4r3k-3f5t2

few more!

bsky-social-fltw5-3psqu

bsky-social-hu64e-ilpdp

bsky-social-utqsi-tlrzw

bsky-social-3x6jr-mzxve

bsky-social-t5gmg-7dkfe

This is why you can’t post codes anywhere publicly without them being snatched up.

bsky-social-li3l6-nsxfn

bsky-social-xwzs7-mwxuf

bsky-social-bsfz6-mf3lg

bsky-social-pnhfr-cejvd

bsky-social-qzt6i-jhtwo

bsky-social-r2iwy-m7fk7

Used bsky-social-pnhfr-cejvd (4th down). Thanks!

(all gone)

bsky-social-g3nsc-vnqji

bsky-social-wdtib-h2pny

bsky-social-dx6u7-gpr7d

bsky-social-twh36-msidy

bsky-social-cd3fm-4j6hg

bsky-social-jgzjd-x7fn3

bsky-social-wfiqb-wdcej

bsky-social-y4x6q-55aiv

Merry Christmas (or happy holidays)

It took so long to get an invite code I unfortunately lost my interest.

I love it, but there are not DMs, which is a showstopper.

Bluesky’s ability to federate was touted, but doesn’t meaningfully exist (otherwise I’d be running a node).

It’s still got centralized censorship, same as Twitter or Facebook.

How does Bluesky compare to Mastodon?

Mastodon uses ActivityPub for interoperability with a wide ecosystem of apps

Bluesky is a different protocol than Mastodon, but conceptually I think it's fair to say they're similar.

I think Bluesky would clean up if it could also interop with Mastodon - people want to leave Twitter but it sucks having to choose between Mastodon and Bluesky and so I think some folks are just in a holding pattern waiting to see what wins. Bluesky feels more like Twitter so I think it would get a lot of folks, but I think people hesitate to bet on it just yet.

Bluesky has a 300 character limit, Mastodon has 500, non-Mastodon ActivityPub servers have a configurable limit. Mastodon can render markdown, has subject lines which are commonly used as content warning tags, can translate posts. It supports custom emoji and non-Mastodon ActivityPub servers support custom emoji reactions. Bluesky has more discovery features like community-curated lists and algorithmic suggestions of who to follow.

The character limit depends on which Mastodon instance you're on. 500 does seem to be the norm. The one I use is 3000.

Partially true, but vanilla Mastodon does hardcode it at 500. Some forks make it configurable (I believe glitch-soc does), and some admins have edited the hardcoded value manually.

Mastodon features a more complex content filtering based on keywords [1],[2] and you can always try to pick instance that fits your needs. Hashtag support is here since beginning if I'm not mistaken. Bluesky has a rather simplified filtering [3], [4] that most likely will be appealing to mass users, tho since service revolves around customized multiple feeds they shouldn't in theory see and interact with the content they don't like in the first place [5]. There's no hashtag support so far - which seems odd because this is a pretty much standard feature on social networks.

[1] - https://ibb.co/km5nGDW

[2] - https://ibb.co/Xpp7t05

[3] - https://ibb.co/QcG1G4d

[4] - https://ibb.co/K2WPvfW

[5] - https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice

Wow!

Im amazed at how fast and pretty Bluesky is compared to other web applications, especially Twitter's.

Really? It feels so slow... interface took a couple seconds to load, and then the actual posts another 3-4 seconds. This is on gigabit too. Overloaded right now?

I was greeted with a spinner..

What's Bluesky? This just looks like a Twitter clone?

"Bluesky is a decentralized social app conceptualized by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and developed in parallel with Twitter. The social network has a Twitter-like user interface with algorithmic choice, a federated design and community-specific moderation."

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/what-is-bluesky-everything...

Good precedent, more please.

This is not a virtue. They have not yet reached enshittification point.

It is not a dominant player that wants to protect its contents.

They have nothing to protect.

Too late, IMO. The invite-only system meant that the "leave Twitter" crowd split between Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. IMO none of them have ended up being great replacements.

Judging by the traffic traces (number of comments on popular posts), I’d have to agree.

Does anyone actually use threads? Everyone seemed to go check it out, but I don't know anyone actively using it.

Threads has picked up quite a bit of steam in a lot of communities recently. Not sure how widespread it is but it seems to be doing fairly well.

It has like, 30x more users than Mastodon lol

For now, it's the most viable alternative for Twitter - for now.

But this is in part because Mastodon UX is very complicated for beginners, and BlueSky is slow as hell to make improvements. It still doesn't support sending videos...

I'm really curious as to what will happen when Threads turns on ActivityPub federation for everyone. At that point, Threads and Mastodon will be the same network, aside from servers that have preemptively blocked Threads.

There are well over 100m MAU so a lot of people are using it.

And it has reached the #1 position in most of the App Stores around the world.

I heard before that Threads is the number one in app stores. If I look right now (23.12) in the Apple App Store then I can’t find it at all in the top 200 (unless I missed something). I see X on 165 and Telegram for example, but no Threads.

Is it really no. 1 or nearby on Android ?

I don't see it in the top 200 on Android.

Some people I know use it. I use it from times to times but the crypto community hasn’t really been active there. My guess is that if you have a big instagram following then Threads make a lot of sense.

Threads has ~100 million monthly active users according to Zuck, while Musk claims ~550 million.

So if you believe that it's fair to say that "people actually use Mastodon" (which has 1.5 million MAUs), then yes — people actually use Threads.

Whenever I revisit Threads, it feels like I'm in the tourist trap of social networks. Celebrities and brands are pushed into my feed, posting vacuous engagement traps.

I felt like I had discoverability issues with Mastodon, and the culture I kept running into there was abrasive. It's all around much better now than it was years ago, and I do seem to get more engagement from strangers than on any of the other networks, but I struggled to stay interested.

Bluesky reminded me of the kind of slower organic growth that you'd typically find in earlier internet communities. The absence of videos and GIFs is, for me, an enormous positive point that I know will eventually give way to popular demand. I like that it's more text-and-images focused, and it seems to be in my sweet spot in terms of... most of what I see feel like thoughtful posts and replies, and not people nakedly building their personal brand.

None of them are going to have the same social cachet as Twitter. It's pretty incredible to see someone spend billions of dollars to completely squander an ecosystem an internationally recognizable brand like that. A fairly unique resource, obliterated by a man-baby with absolutely no concept of the value of the people on the platform he bought.

I've seen many products loose steam due to invite only. It's a failure to recognize heavy public interest and strike while the iron is hot.

Threads has been that for me, but of course YMMV depending on the topics you like to follow. If you haven't tried tools like ThreadLink, Threads Sync, etc. lately, you might be surprised.

What does "too late" mean? I don't like Bluesky; it feels cliquish and insubstantial to me, and I do most of my Twitter-type writing on Mastodon now. But what am I losing by not writing on Twitter? I've been saying this for several months now, but the vibe I get from the current "fragmented" social media situation is of a reversion back to something like the heyday of Google Reader and the "blogosphere". Like: I need multiple browser tabs to keep track of everything?That's fine? It's better than when everything was crammed into a single site, with a single set of affordances nobody really liked.

Can you tell me more about how you see your practice of posting as writing? I don't hear many people talk sbout it like that. Also, what's your goal with it?

I agree that Twitter was a weird amalgamation of different people who wanted to use the site for different things… but for me that’s one of the things that made it compelling. I get to read a person’s musing on JavaScript frameworks and also see pictures of their dog and see them react in real time to a World Cup game.

IMO Twitter was a very compelling place to be during a breaking news event (and I don’t just mean political news, could be cultural, sports etc) and none of the alternatives have replicated that yet. Mastodon is maybe not even technically capable of it (because federation introduces a delay in message delivery).

I do enjoy niche discussions on Mastodon but once you’ve removed time as an influential factor for importance the default chronological view doesn’t feel anywhere near as to me.

I think the point was controlled growth and community quality, not to capture Twitter's eternal September. Let them go to Threads.

Threads actually is pretty nice o.o

It's so dumb.

Someone please explain how a social network is supposed to succeed when it's invite-only? Hype alone won't carry it.

IMO, being invite-only is THE reason Google+ failed. There were so many memes about people getting excited for an invite, getting on, and then finding only a couple people they knew were on it, if any at all.

For a social network to work, it needs to be a network. Limiting on-boarding eliminates the network, and so people lose interest fast.

I think it's supposed to create a feeling of scarcity or exclusivity and make people perceive the network as more valuable.

No, it's because their servers would fall over if it was public registration, and they wouldn't be able to keep up with moderation

> Someone please explain how a social network is supposed to succeed when it's invite-only? Hype alone won't carry it.

It may be that the industry has evolved to a degree that this is no longer viable (I also don’t know if I believe this…), but invite-only or otherwise limited launches formed the backbone of the current web.

Facebook was only available if you had a school address. Gmail was only available via invite. Obviously a service can’t stay in a limited state forever and the hype will run out, but it’s not exactly a new approach to limiting access early in the life of a service.

Google+ failed because Google killed it. I never experienced what you describe, but admittedly got an invite very early, and interacted with people who had also gotten the same thing.

Limiting onboarding does not eliminate the network. It just limits it. Again, to your point, this can’t last forever, but is not by itself the issue as long as they continue to scale up access. There are plenty of other issues that will make or break a network.

Gmail interoperated with other email providers, so invites worked. Facebook limited signups based on email domain names, not invite codes, so everyone in those email domains could sign up at the same time. Google+, like Bluesky, started with invite codes without a way for communities to join organically.

The theory behind invite only is that it increases the density of the network. You invite people with similar interests as this the network can nucleate around some niche, rather than being 10,000 people with nothing in common. It's one of the standard plays for overcoming cold-start problems.

Scaling is hard. Invite codes help with that. They’re not terribly hard to find, I’ve several that I’ll happily share with anyone I know from elsewhere.

Because they didn't have capacity a year ago. Gmail was invite-only as well you know.

I don't know, Google+ seemed fine. It wasn't eating the world, and wasn't clear how it was positioned in their branding, but fine.

Bsky is the same; there's unexplainable pressure I feel in there to keep it to an in-group of nicest of people, but fine. It's not derailing into a Mastodon.

I think bluesky has mindshare and is still ready to be the eventual twitter heir

Bluesky seems to be the "backup" for a lot of Twitter users. When Twitter had their outage a day or two ago the network activity spiked to some of the highest levels seen since like October.

Part of me thinks that's the point, I don't believe Jack set out to make something that could be a meaningful threat to twitter. It seems like it's meant to be just big enough to suck the oxygen out of the room for other twitter alternatives. (Obviously that failed, now that threads is topping download charts and twitter is sitting in the 40s.)

The man has enough access to capital and can easily hire folks with the know-how to make a service that can scale. That fact that this hasn't happened says something.

Since the Threads launch, I barely used BlueSky anymore. Now with the new logo, I opened again for the first time in 4 months or so, thinking that well, there was improvements? No.

You still can't send videos and gifs. That's just, so basic for a social network.

Let alone all the other missing things, and how awful the apps are. They are basically the worst example to show React Native. The app here on Android takes 15 seconds to open (an improvement, it took 30 seconds before). It's sluggy, no animations, etc. Feels like Alpha.

I can understand not supporting video yet.. that's a huge amount of data. But GIFS? Wow...

Gifs require way more data than mp4 videos.

Most of the "GIFs" you encounter on social media these days are actually autoplay videos without sound. So it's not that crazy. I think they're waiting until they have a robust solution figured out for video support before they land "GIF" support.

One of the alternative clients (Graysky) supports GIFs through some integration tenor.com, I believe.

You can post GIFs but animated GIFs don’t work. They get converted at upload.

If you don't convert GIFs on server side it would take much more data than videos. I mean much, much more. GIFs are more or less a long seqeunce of 8-bit images.

Maybe they don't see reaction gifs a useful feature of a social media?

Twitter was interesting when you couldn't post photos or videos. You would link to twitpic and knew that people maybe would click... or not. Reminded me of IRC in that regard.

Much like any art the limitations of the original tweet were what made the medium interesting.

Is threads less... political now? Without saying if something political is even good or bad, I just don't want to see it.

I blocked close to 500 people & `not interested` their posts until I just gave up and stopped using the app.

It seems heavily drive by algorithms

My feed is almost pure politics because I engaged with some

My SO’s in the other hand is all wholesome sunshine and rainbows, I’m trying to protect that by just showing the occasional thing in my screen instead of sending it to her

I think depends on the algorithm, but the algo is fairly broken. I know some people are complaining about "For You" full of "almost naked" persons there...

Mine is mostly about tech, I believe.

Which is a problem for me because I like political things, so I still use X, don't judge me.

But there's a chronological-following timeline on Threads anyway.

The problem is that there's no way to really control the algo timeline. You can't say you don't want these type of posts, or add topics you are interested - like Twitter.

All it cares it's the posts you like. As I like my friends (tech) posts, that's all I get. Plus some cats.

Maybe my approach was wrong. I should have liked more than I disliked as feedback into the algorithm.

It's just odd to me because my Instagram feed is great.

No idea what you're doing to see that. Either view your feed of people you're following, or follow curated or algorithmic feeds to your liking. That's the whole point of bsky, the choice.

You have exactly the same choice on Threads.

> You still can't send videos and gifs. That's just, so basic for a social network.

Yeah, I'd agree if you're looking for a more polished social media client then Twitter, Threads, and even some Mastodon clients will probably better serve you. But the official client primarily exists as a means to an end (building atproto) rather than an end in itself. Those features are still on the roadmap, I believe, but just not a priority at the moment. There are alternative clients (a bunch for web, at least one for iOS) you may have better luck with.

> Let alone all the other missing things, and how awful the apps are. They are basically the worst example to show React Native.

Bluesky has a pretty small team, all things considered. I think they've said in the past it would have been impossible for them to do apps for iOS, Android, and web without React Native. FWIW, Dan Abramov joined them a few months ago and has been working in public on tackling some of the more tricky RN bugs.

To be clear, I'm not even complaining about it being React Native. For sure you can do better with React.

I believe the new Discord client is RN and works fine for me.

They've been far too slow to respond to Twitter/X's missteps to be able to take advantage. Threads won that race by a wide margin, even if it is still relatively lacking in features.

If nothing else, there is one good thing of Elon's acquisition of Twitter, and it's that it has made the case for making social media outlets responsible for their content evidently clear.

For better or worse, when management changed, the narratives and atmosphere in Twitter changed. Its content changed. This would be absurd if social media communities were organic or independent in how they spread ideas, but they are very much not. Either before or after the acquisition (I have no dog in this race, really) the platform controlled its content, and as such it ought to be responsible for it. If Twitter decides which among the millions of messages it decides to publish they are as responsible for that as I am when I choose which among the combinations of characters I output from my keyboard.

Any corporation that pretends they are only doing the proper thing by controlling speech within its platform should be called out for what they are doing: media manipulation.

> If nothing else, there is one good thing of Elon's acquisition of Twitter, and it's that it has made the case for making social media outlets responsible for their content evidently clear.

Agreed. He showed that they were engaging in widespread editorializing of conservative content while lying about being neutral. They should never have been allowed to do that, even under the existing laws at the time. Reddit is even worse.

> He showed that they were engaging in widespread editorializing of conservative content while lying about being neutral.

A 2021 study¹ found the opposite, which is that Twitter algorithms amplified right-wing posts more than left-wing posts. You're parroting Musk's claims, which are feelings-based. Now, of course, X is basically Parler.

¹ https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/blog-twitter...

Social media sites are publishers, they just just algorithms as editors, publish personalized websites and use unpaid writers. They are not utilities.

BlueSky is the only place where I have ever received death threats, the only place where I ended in multiple blocklists for upsetting god knows whom, and the only place where I had to block hundreds of accounts to avoid getting porn and questionable furry stuff in the main timeline, even with moderation on.

But it seems to work fine for a particular brand of extremely online people.

No one wants to talk to everyone on the planet at once except extremely online people anymore, that initial burst of enthusiasm from normies 10-15 years ago was borne from naivety and will never happen again.

Also every platform will get a burst of extremely online people trying to build an audience at the initial stages of its lifecycle. Discord seems to be the only place that doesn't fall into this trap because it's basically private clubs, and not about seeking attention at all times.

Out of curiosity, what action on your part caused the death threats?

Complaining about porn (mostly gay/trans/furry stuff, although even the straight kind is NOT something I want on my phone when idly scrolling on a bus or a train in public, or ever really) routinely ending in the default timeline, which is apparently a capital offense threatening the livelihood of sex workers and furry "artists".

I hate it when I manually opt in to adult content and then adult content shows up on my timeline. The fact that only way to avoid it is to just use the app as it is out of the box is a design flaw

Reread, this is with moderation on. And I only followed a bunch of other electronics nerds.

That’s odd. I’ve used bsky for several months along with 5-6 friends and none of us has ever had an issue with explicit content with moderation on. Coming from Twitter the overall content isn’t particularly shocking, though if you’re coming from Threads it is less tame than that.

Out of curiosity, who were you complaining about the porn to? I’ve seen quite a few dogpiles on accounts that register and then proceed to reply en masse to every account they dislike.

After reading this post, I can't see the new Bluesky logo any other way:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013

Tried to sign up for bs. With valid invitation code. Got an error message after the final stage. Again and again and again.

Social Media Companies that can't get their sign-up funnel in order have already failed.

Sent you an email, in case you're willing to give some info we can use to investigate this. We're always willing to look into any issues like this. Thanks!

This is off topic on this point, but I wanted to point out a privacy issue with invites (as these codes are given out on forums like these to random strangers). The invite codes show which account was created with those to the person sending invites. I’d rather this be completely hidden (just saying that the code was used is enough) or give an option to the person signing up if they want to reveal their account to the person who invited them.

Would it be possible for you to highlight this to the right people in the team?

Typically invites are used by people who are inviting people they know, in which case it's advantageous for them to be able to find each other.

But you're right that there's an argument that it could work differently. We're planning to get rid of invites shortly, otherwise we might consider enhancements to the invite system to e.g. make this optional.

Try to sign up to Instagram on a desktop browser using an email address. That was completely broken last time I checked.

Until I see what Bluesky's AT protocol federation looks like in practice, I'm not interested.

Without federation it's basically Twitter with less users. And even after federation it might be Mastodon/ActivityPub with less users.

Very disappointed in the direction they took to launch. Exclusive beta, no focus on decentralization despite that being the major selling point.

The Bluesky federation sandbox network is up and running as of months ago, which works exactly how the production network will work. The production network is also federated internally (i.e. Bluesky already runs 10 Personal Data Servers) to prove that it operates as expected.

Quite a bit of the app itself is also federated: custom algorithms (feeds) are being operated by many third-party devs on their own servers, domain handles have been in use for a long time, and the API is completely open (all posts/likes, etc can be streamed from `wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos` in a permissionless way, see atproto.com[1] for details)

It's possible to run a PDS (Personal Data Server)[2] in the dev sandbox. Federation for the production network is planned for early 2024. ASAP.

1. https://atproto.com

2. https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/SANDBOX.md

>JavaScript Required This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is.

Not for me I guess. When there's a nitter for bluesky (nuesky?) maybe I'll check that out.

It looks like at least some of the text from the post is still visible maybe

> ( 1.60 is rolling out now (2/5) Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login! You can finally share your quality posts with the group chat or in articles. If you don’t want the Bluesky app to show your posts to logged-out users, opt out in the Moderation tab. 2023-12-22T18:59:01.633Z)

It's ironic that a service called "Bluesky", a word that Merriam-Webster defines as meaning "characterized by unconstrained optimism or imagination", looks so boring and Twitter-like.

They should have done this long ago, they missed the boat

It's basically Twitter.

Does it have j/k navigation yet?

Is Bluesky and Threads basically Twitter with different moderation policies? I can see why someone might leave Twitter for Mastodon but why would you leave for one of those 2? Just block people you don't want to see stuff from.

At this point the ownership of Twitter is the problem for a lot of people, and then there's the change to the system itself, neither of which can be resolved by blocking.

Why would you care which billionaire owns the platform? If he annoys you just block him.

And block their ads. I use X with Firefox+uBO on Android and it's great.

Many of the people that some of us want to follow have now left X.

Often this all gets framed as a "freedom of speech" issue. But I know first hand of women who in recent months on X have been harassed with death threats. When they've reported it has been ignored because the company simply lacks the resources/will to enforce those policies.

And so even if Threads is nothing more than a better-staffed clone that is enough for them.

How are illegal threats made by users the fault of the communications platform?

We don’t vilify the phone company when someone uses a phone to make a bomb threat. Why is this different?

You don’t report crime to the communications service provider. If someone makes a bomb threat you aren’t dialing 0 to tell the phone company.

Interestingly enough, I follow people on both sides of the aisle, and only left-leaning people have left Twitter. I haven't created a threads account because they're blatantly asking me to share every data they could access + their awful content moderation rules. At least there are plenty of options for people to share their opinions.

I think the domain validated handles on Bluesky are a big deal. They help reduce impersonation and let you build a reputation around an identity that isn't controlled by the platform.

No one can squat on your handle and, even though you don't technically own a domain, you get a lot more protections with a domain name than you do with a platform based handle. It's much harder to revoke a domain than it is for someone to kick you off their platform.

Personally I have been pleasantly surprised by how useful Grok is for getting a quick read on events around the world captured in tweets, e.g. protests in Argentina or the shooting in Prague. The spotty coverage of global news by US media leaves a huge opportunity for X to exploit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com