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Comment by kevinmchugh | Hacker News Reader

I've been on for a few months now. It feels like 2014 Twitter in that it doesn't have gifs or video, so you will see some very good jokes.

A number of people I used to follow on Twitter are over there but seem to have broken out of the posting habit and are quieter now.

When I look at the "discover" tab I don't usually see much stuff that's interesting to me. It's a lot of men posting thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics, and discussion about what's going on on Twitter

Edit to add: people really like to advise blocking. It's to the point that new users are often advised to add a profile photo and an intro post before following people, because you might get blocked just for not having those. I don't know what this is about - possibly because there's no private/locked accounts? It seems really strange to me.

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Regarding your edit, much of bluesky's culture is developing in reaction to Twitter, or based on lessons learned from it. That block-first attitude is a response both to the kinds of bots that are endemic on Twitter, and to the kinds of engagement-bait that made it such a mess at times. New follower looks like it might be a bot? Block. See a skeet from someone who looks like an asshole? Block. Don't feed the trolls, just block and move on. Personally I tend to mute, rather than block, but I think lots of social media would be better if people didn't boost things they dislike for the purpose of dunking or disagreeing.

And to be clear, not all of bluesky's culture is a response to twitter, a lot of it is just the kind of lighthearted playfulness you can only get on a small and new social network.

I mute annoying posters (the frequent users who already have >5k posts tend to be uninteresting to me and obviously show up more often in feeds), that makes sense to me.

How goes my experience improve if I block a bot that follows me? Follower bots is a platform problem

I think it's mostly the same motivation as blocking assholes, partly "I don't want to be part of your attempt to game the algorithm" and partly "I don't want to see this".

What is a "skeet"?

The unofficial name for a post on bluesky. It comes from a combination of "sky" and "tweet". The people running the site don't like that name, which of course only made people embrace it even more.

It's also slang for ejaculation, so there's that.

As Lil Jon might say,

  To the window, to the wall!
  Til the sweat drop down my balls
  Til all these bitches crawl
  Til all skeet skeet motherfuckers, all skeet skeet god damn!
  Til all skeet skeet motherfuckers, all skeet skeet god damn!

Incidentally that's also a big part of why the people running the site don't like the name, and why the users do.

I don't know what's worse, this or toots.

Can't we admit Twitter had the perfect name for it, and now that twitter is gone, we can all just call them tweets?

Its almost absurd. Like if phone companies decided to brand text messages and someone got to "Texts" first so companies came up with "Blurts" and "Yells" or "Phonomails" and now we use a different verb based on which walled-garden we are in.

edit:

In thinking on this more, I do think this might impact the image of the communty. The hot lists and other feeds are dominated by the furry community, which is fine, but not everyone's cup of tea. Now naming posts / the verb be an euphemism of ejaculation... it just feels immature and is everyone going to feel welcome?

I really think "tweeting" worked to make it seem more normal and less serious than "posting", which is the brandless term X and Bluesky (the companies, not the communities) both prefer. Posting is for forums and forums are for nerds.

I harbor some hope that Elon will firesale off the trademark on "tweet" and someone can put it to good use

Tweet is the only one that has made any sense IMO being the sound the bird mascot made, thematically with "short chirps", and birds "tweeting" at each other.

> Posting is for forums and forums are for nerds.

But at the end of the day it is still just post on the internet forum.

I want to live in a world where "Twitter" is a category name, and X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads etc. are simply examples of twitters. And you can tweet on all of them.

> thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics

Maybe the biggest problem with Twitter never was its centralization.

It shouldn't be surprising that cloning Twitter mechanics just to decentralize it would result in the same signal-to-noise ratio as Twitter.

Yeah, I've tried to seek out and post technical stuff but it's mostly people virtue signalling, rage baiting, and complaining about other sites.

I made an account to check it out and was surprised to see it was just recommending nothing but US politics outrage bait, just like Twitter.

I think a lot of that is on mastodon fwiw, and some hasn't left Twitter

I've mostly been able to curate my Twitter feed to not include that stuff. Similarly for Mastodon. The problem is BlueSky tries to add algorithmic feeds while not doing it well enough to learn that I don't want to see it.

I tried to create a curated feed on Bluesky. It didn't go well. It interpreted my unambiguous keyword in the technology space as applying to content in the uh personal massage space. Much, much prefer Mastodon's direct hashtag following.

I think the future has to be feed ingestion that is 100% controlled by the user. To some extent we were there with RSS readers. I'm still able to retrieve Twitter feeds with an RSS reader. Everything comes together in one place, in order.

If this is done on device and everything is archived, it starts getting really powerful. For example, after the 737 MAX door incident, I searched "Boeing" in my RSS reader and instantly had a list of news stories going back over the past year. (The number of 737 incidents that has been happening around the world is a lot more than what sits in the top of the news, but that's another discussion.) A local LLM could even summarize large amounts of stored headlines and tweets going back over years, and that's tech that works today.

I don't want third party ad platforms (which now consists of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and more) measuring, running tests, re-ordering, and deleting on my communications. The LLMs and machine learning advancements are going to just make this more invasive, ugly, and manipulative.

Sure, hn is largely about VC backed startups going on to try to have a multi-billion dollar IPO. It's also about disrupting incumbents. I can't think of a better path to disruption than coming up with business models that choke off their user-bases and end ad monetized surveillance. I for one have no interest in a future where I wear an Apple/Facebook/Google controlled AR/VR headset that has cameras to make sure my eyes are looking at all of the ads which are targeted based on the other pixels it knows I looked at. (I feel like a paranoid schizophrenic writing that, but that is what they are making.)

Look man, I'm a regular HN reader and even I don't buy into this. Are ads really the problem they are made out to be here? I'm asking because I don't mind and haven't mind about seeing an ad in years. In fact, I think they are perfectly good compromise when it comes to monetizing a website. Even HN has ads for gods sake. I even was okay with those old porn ads in The Pirate Bay or in 4chan, etc. Sure, if it's too much of that it can get annoying but whatever. On the other hand, the vast majority of people don't even know what RSS is and haven't even noticed a change in Twitter in the last few years. I'm sure most of them, believe it or not, aren't even aware of the transition to Elon Musk.

I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but perhaps you and the tech industry in general are vastly overestimating a extremely niche opinion and a "nothingburger". For example, cookies. Now we have extremely annoying cookie banners everywhere, when they didn't matter at all. Why? Because if I'm using an icognito browser, what are they going to track? Do you think I REALLY care? What are they going to do with that? Track me and offer me catered ads? I don't think "they" can, but even if they do, big fucking deal.

I'm a lot more worried about Know Your Customer policies on everything, or social media platforms (or even hosting platforms) deplatforming you if they don't like your opinion, or the FBI planting child porn on your site if they want to take it down. Do you think I'll worry about an AD out of all things?

BlueSky lets people add their own algorithmic feeds, and customize which feeds they subscribe to. Currently I have "Following" (strictly reverse chronological feed of the people I follow), "What's Hot Classic" (reverse chronological feed of posts that are "hot", by some unclear metric, but not tailored to me), and "Discover" (described as "Trending content from your personal network"). I can remove any of those feeds, and use any others I want, including curated feeds of: scientists, furries, black users, cats, authors, people you follow who follow you back, people who follow you that you don't follow back, or just create your own feed.

If you want to only ever see a strictly reverse chronological feed of the people you follow, then remove all feeds other than "Following", done. If you don't want to see reposts, then turn off seeing reposts. If you don't want to see replies, then turn off seeing those too. I'm not sure what you experienced which isn't easily solvable. The only QoL feature I can think of that isn't yet supported is the ability to selectively turn off reposts from individual people you follow.

IMO the biggest problem with Mastodon is that for a while decentralization was the biggest selling point. It led to the place being full of a lot of pedantic dorks. The situation did improve as Twitter exploded and various communities migrated in herds though.

This is sadly a bit of a problem with most Twitter alternatives right now; many more niche communities haven't moved over (or have only chosen to go to one of them), so there's a good chance you won't find content you're interested in. Mastodon seems to have more of the tech crowd from what I can tell, but even then it's maybe 1% of the audience you might have had on Twitter.

They aren't going to move over; the reddit/twitter model of 'crosspollination' is fundamentally flawed - if trolls can just stroll over from their little trollzone at any time they will do so and every conversation will get derailed with politics/gender/whatever gets the most engagement; character assassination will be the dominant paradigm.

Silos are the answer. Open to all but topic focussed and with no cross-referencable userhistory. Or 100% anonymity with no userhistory i.e. futaba type message boards.

Most "Twitter alternatives" don't deal with the fundamental, sensation-seeking oriented flaws in the medium and just turn out to be Twitter with more perpetually upset losers.

It's disappointing, because a lot of work has gone into these. Especially Mastodon and Pleroma.

I somewhat like Mastodon's model where you can have mostly focus on members within a community that maintains/owns the instance. Federation completely optional, though connecting communities more explicitly would be really cool!

it's very 'scoldy' too

It will be interesting to see how the fragmentation in the post-Twitter landscape eventually consolidates. To your broader point, I think it's an interesting time where there's trepidation over just becoming Twitter 2.0 versus making some improvements that improve the experience of the platform. Even before Elon, Twitter definitely had some pain points, such as repetitive gif-replies and toxic political stuff, as you alluded to.

Yeah, I strongly dislike this blocking culture there, because blocking also affects the other person's experience on the site - they won't be able to follow threads where you're involved. There's no reason to not use muting instead if you just want to get someone out of your view, except if you do it out of spite.

Maybe this will give it critical mass -- with more people able to join, perhaps more will stop visiting twitter and We Can Have Nice Things Again.

The network effect is very strong.

Just echo chambers doing echo chamber things.

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