Dorsey hasn't been doing them any favours for a long time, he's all but publicly disavowed it, deleting his account to focus on nostr. He's still on the board of directors last I heard, but if his public statements are anything to go by, he's not actively involved.
Not sure if the same applies to BlueSky, X, TruthSocial etc.
Social networks typically demand large user bases because it goes hand in hand with advertising.
I generally wouldn't trust any social media app that's not used the leadership. Threads is still half baked but at least Mark uses it regularly. And Elon is regularly posting on Twitter.
Some part of that is due to the design of BlueSky. But I think most of it was ironically due to the invite system simply existing. Jack wanted an open platform.
They were actually super early but the invite system squandered that opportunity. For months it was just a tiny subset of oldschool twitter users.
If I was at IG I’d have made the number carry over even if the users were not there yet, seemed catastrophic to sign up day one and see like 10 followers when you have thousands on IG
I've found engagement is surprisingly high, much much higher than Mastodon, but of course it depends on the niche.
Only in a bubble where everybody already has an account I suspect.
2. People may be interested, but they’re people that are outside of the existing niche that is on Bluesky. But clearly BlueSky only wants people that are part of that existing niche. The monoculture.
What?
It was designed that way so they wouldn't have to worry about moderation so much right away.
It just feels... cleaner somehow. The slow trickle has, I think, kept it from being overrun by low effort posters and bots.
You say that as if it's a good thing. Bluesky turned into one of the most toxic networks out there. Just browsing the discover feed should dispell any illusions of a healthy community - most posts are whining about american politics or whining about some other unimportant memes like AI art instead of fostering growth about common interests like Mastodon does.
Bluesky had their chance with invite only and curated feeds (with some really dedicated community admins) but they've fumbled it all by focusing on american culture wars instead of the nice thing they had.
Not my experience at all. This is one such strange online remarks.
Now that I’m on the site though, I feel the same about it as I do Twitter: a) Most posts are uninteresting, exist to virtue signal or are by people who _think_ it’s important to try desperately to be funny (which they often are just cringy and not funny) b) It’s extremely confusing to know any context on a reply post when it’s reply 22 of a 39 reply long thread c) It’s not fun or engaging. It doesn’t really add anything to my life d) I don’t want to post myself because inherently I, like many social media users, have nothing worthwhile to say to the digital world - so I choose not to post while others force it anyway.
It’s not my cup of tea and I’ve considered deleting the login a few times. I think I’ve just outgrown traditional social media.
If you open without connection to any of your peers you first have to find anybody who is active.
This doesn't really matter. It's replicated all of the features that matter, twitter has very few user-facing features that matter anyway. The only thing preventing Blu Sky from succeeding is user interest.
If https://bsky.app/settings/external-embeds - I don't have an account.
I'm curious what the partnership fees with Namecheap look like, if there's even transparency to make that public?
I am working on a similar centralized-aggregation system and integrating-partnering with registrars is one future aspect of the system I've been planning; it's of course always a matter of prioritizing resources, and I'll be at a major disadvantage compared to Bluesky with Jack's early involvement/launching it getting BLuesky plenty of press and at least some momentum.
As around a decade ago I wrote a comment and made a blog post of it, all else being equal, the final layer of competition will be governance - which will ultimately be different nodes that govern well enough - including providing enough value at a fair cost - to gain enough mass to begin snowballing and ideally as many as possible find a stable state; then hopefully they all copy the best features and policies of the most successful; the problem here though is virtue signalling is a survival mechanism, and pretending to offer something that may even appear quite similar on the surface may actually integrate an inherent flaw in the system - say allowing for an ideological mob to more easily form and become indoctrinated, say based on very nuanced decisions on how informatio is presented to end users (can it be more easily gamed by greedy or bad-authoritarian actors, etc).
They don’t mention what the business structure of the partnership is, yeah.
BlueSky has a slightly different take than yours, that you might find interesting. Things are split up into “speech” layers vs “reach” layers on top of them. So “governance” gets a bit weird: at the base level, you can say whatever you want, but how accessible that is depends on the popularity of various things in the reach layer. Nobody can stop you from running a PDS and putting your posts out into the network, but if say, the most popular moderation service decides to not show your posts, users wouldn’t see them unless they use a different tool in the reach layer, say one feed that uses it and another that doesn’t.
Out of principle, I am refusing to beg on the internet and take invites from the cool kids that have been let in, and at this point I can only assume they deleted all the mere mortals who dared request to join early on.
But if you don't bring your A-game when you're competing against the world's best social media company then what is the point. Meta is already feeding behavioural data into Instagram's ads which means they have no need to monetise it anytime soon. And the free advertising they are running on Instagram/Facebook is bringing in new users at a rapid pace. What advantages does BlueSky have ?
And the fact that there are no AT protocol servers means that you have the ActivityPub ecosystem with such a huge head-start and likely set to dominate in 2024.
I stopped giving them away to random people.
For example I dated this girl who was always stopped for a random search in an airport.
bsky-social-zweux-qaqar
bsky-social-4il6n-kuumm
bsky-social-n23po-7dedu
bsky-social-7fey2-v5fw6
Same story with features. We didn't deprioritize the protocol because that's core mission, so we had to put resources there instead of into features. Features will accelerate as core stabilizes.
Shipping a novel technology, building a product, and growing a userbase all at once isn't easy. I wouldn't declare us dead unless we've missed the boat so badly with market timing that nobody bothers, but we have good runway and (IMO) a pretty solid community of users.
¹ Probably. Maybe. Pretty sure.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bluesky_Registered_U...