Bluesky is rolling out Hashtags | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky is rolling out Hashtags

bsky.app

77 pointsulrischa69 comments

I like most things I read about Bluesky, as it matches nicely to some of my ideas on how a decentralized social media would look like, except hampering message length (couple hundred characters). I think it's counter productive for any kind of serious discussion. Look at HN and how insightful comments can be when you leave room for a couple of paragraphs.

Same issue with Mastodon, except I host my own ActivityPub instance set to 5000 characters. Which should be accepted by most Mastodon servers.

I really loved a good Twitter thread. Breaking down points and ideas into sections forced people to build organization into their rants instead of rambling paragraphs. I found redundancy and reiteration much more rare in the golden years of Twitter.

This was an important differentiator for Twitter; even if you use a thread reader, the author can’t assume that’s the format their text will be read in. So they have to make the best of both worlds, distill the content into its essence and build long form content where each paragraph stands on its own. Bluesky has an opportunity to have a great first-party thread reader experience.

Longform content where the author is incentivized to see how it reads in chunks is an underrated thing.

This is exactly the reason. In my SSB days, we had an extremely high character limit on posts. People became enormously long-winded; someone called it “full contact blog hockey” and that was about right

The message chunking is a feature. It keeps people focused on editing their paragraphs into a form that works for feeds, and it enables replies to and reposts of inner chunks (which is close to a model for transclusion).

For longer writing we have two good options

1, make threads work better (composing and rendering) 2, support longform embeds, which people already do via screenshots of text

We’ll probably do 1 but I’m interested to try 2

I’m on Bluesky and tried to get my friends on there too, but without much luck. I don’t find myself using it often.

In my opinion, the problem with Bluesky is that it assumes people want old Twitter/social media back. Beyond their protocols (which the vast majority of social media users do not care about), there is little innovation in the UX or platform. Old Twitter had its moment, and was relevant for a time. But the ship of the last 20ish years of social media has sailed, and people either want something new and different, or they’re ready for it to go away entirely.

I am in a similar predicament. I tried Threads and that had some traction due to the built-in instagram connection but it doesn't take long to see that the Instagram and Twitter audiences are very different. Bluesky is starting from scratch which is very unattractive to anyone who's built an audience on Twitter from the past 10 years or more even if it seems X (Twitter) is mostly bots these days.

From what I can see so far on Bluesky, it seems like a journalist circle jerk.

> From what I can see so far on Bluesky, it seems like a journalist circle jerk.

Out of all the circle jerks out there, I do not find the fourth estate very annoying.

The C-Suite circle jerk seems far worse. Unlike all other platforms aside from Mastodon, Bluesky is devoid of that top-down control, and I really appreciate that.

I thought was only me. Right from the beginning I felt stale smell.

I think this model is kind of of date and for what is worth we have way too many social networks anyway.

Funny bug in the current implementation, the # emoji is also working as a hashtag.

But they are considering keeping it.

https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3kmjlcds4ie2q

I know on Twitter/X the hashtag emoji isn’t a functional link, but curious why implementing functional hashtag emojis on Bluesky is considered a bug.

Sort of related, I’d been waiting like 6 months and finally gained access to Bluesky but never used it because they didn’t allow me to use my emoji domain name(s) as my handle.

More of an accident. The hashtag emoji is a combination of code points and guess what the first code point is? ‘#’

The handling is a little wonky but if it doesn’t hurt anything we’ll clean it up and keep it

Life is funny, just last week I learned about a bug on some blockchain explorers where they display certain emojis in code point in base 10 though I think it’s: &#

Got to enjoy these kinds of coincidences and happy accidents.

It’s not ‘the hashtag emoji’, it’s ’the number key emoji’.

>they didn’t allow me to use my emoji domain name(s) as my handle.

Not that I've been trying to keep up, but this is just about the first Bluesky decision I've heard that I 100% agree with. The usability line needs to be drawn somewhere.

I've used bsky during the invite-only time and lack of hashtags was a problem for me trying to find the content I wanted but even more so it dawned on me that I don't like the Twitter format. Instead of looking for tweets with #art you are better off just using the /r/art subreddit if you want a constant stream of art.

Couldn't you simulate a subreddit my making a hashtag #/r/art and filtering for all the matching posts?

Why do that when I can just use /r/art?

I realize that you mean in general, but specifically today... on r/art vs #art on bsky, a crazy significant portion of new bsky users are in Japan. So there is one difference.

My point is that it's a whole different art scene.

Hashtags are great for “right now” or ephemeral topics that wouldn’t fit into a hierarchy.

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

Haha right, I'm getting major Battlestar Galactica vibes from this launch.

The BlueSky UI is scarily like Twitter's UI. Wonder if they'll ever get sued for that...

Tangent question: These days i struggle with "Is this mobile app made by the actual developer?". How do you handle this scenario?

For example, i wanted to install Bluesky on my phone, if there was an app. The website doesn't link to an app that i can see. Three links, Business Blog and Jobs. I can of course search the Apple App Store, however then i have to verify if `Bluesky PBLLC` is the right account.

What's the ideal UX here? Am i as a user being dense?

Nah we need to get those links in there

Wrong prio: videos and animated .gif is 100% the ONLY thing anyone at that company should be spending ANY time on.

This does seem to be a good opportunity to retire the obsolete and wasteful .gif format ? (Or maybe at least limit it to maximum pixel area ?)

But you just meant looping animations, right ?

.gif is better than video if you have a small area that changes on the picture frame by frame.

.gif can handle transparency.

.gif will never be obsolete.

Also dithering is an aesthetic!

GIFs can be highly optimised for tiny simple animations, but 99.9% of the GIFs that people actually want to send are not in that category. webm (for example) can handle transparency too, has cross-platform support, and better compression ratios than GIF for anything remotely video-like.

GIF is only wasteful if it's used as a substitute for video.

Which it largely is.

DMs is what we need first.

can you explain the rational? DM are for private interaction. Social media are more publishing platforms (ie. Media plaftorm with a social aspect). Messaging apps allow for interpersonal interaction but they definitely don't have the same impact. Which use case do you have in mind for prioritizing DMs? Usually DMs are for sales, or harassment (which is sometime the same) If you have friends, you usually have other ways to communicate with outside of bluesky. So I am genuinely curious why you would think that DM are a priority?

Speaking for myself, I’ve met three or four people on BlueSky I’d like to have a private communication channel for. I didn’t know them previously.

HN doesn't have DMs either, but we usually figure things out one way or another (e.g. contact info in bio)

Only if you are willing to publish contact info in your profile. I am much more willing to open my DMs than doing that.

I realize that open DMs are not an option for high profile accounts, but for most people probably safer than publishing their email or - god forbid - their phone number.

Are there user profiles on Bluesky? You could make an email account just for your Bluesky dms and then write some random string on your profile and auto delete any emails that don't include that string as a sort of filter against spam. You could also post a public key there so you can have encrypted comms al la old school pgp.

The email solution I use has no lightweight account creation and regardless, I like to keep my contact surface small and additional email addresses are detrimental to that. I was happy with DMs on Twitter and I wish Bluesky had them, that's all.

"Social media are more publishing platforms "

That's what social media companies want them to be, but it's in our hands to decide if we use them for consumption only.

I agree that DMs are often abused and not the best medium for one-on-one communication, but without DMs how would you upgrade a conversation to a more suitable medium?

It’s a social communications platform. We should have DMs

Both videos and gifs are currently handled by media players, which is honestly just fine for me.

Hashtags help a lot with discovery, which imo is the correct priority.

Add link card? Ok buddy!

Oh cool, another platform that optimizes for dopamine above all else! Definitely a fresh take on social media.

Come hang out on the [redacted] social network:

- you're required to post at least 1 video every day or the platform doxes you automatically

- video content autoplays with audio

- surge pricing

- every video within the viewport autoplays, with audio

- the audio volume of each video is based on its trending score

- posts disappear unless you share it within a (random/variable) time limit

- no video longer than 4 seconds

- LOWERCASE GETS YOU BANNED

- dark mode for premium subscribers

[redacted] Social: we were worst first.

No, they need DMs. They have embedded videos, autoplaying videos and gifs are tacky.

Coming soon hopefully, says one of the lead devs:

https://bsky.app/profile/pauljessup.com/post/3kmkrhnupd726

The post you linked is not from one of the lead devs, and from what I hear DMs are pretty far down the roadmap but I don't have a reference on-hand.

Considering the entire protocol design I don't think DMs will be that easy to implement. They'd need some form of asymmetric key encryption scheme for personal data servers and messages would then need to be read directly from the relevant personal data servers as the app view servers would not have the necessary user private keys to decrypt stuff. Will be interesting to see how they solve it for sure. But as you point out, probably far down the road map.

That’s about right. It only gets really daunting if we decide to do e2ee, which we’d really like to do but have to decide if we can afford to spend that kind of time. Might be smarter to just make signal username sharing btwn users easier in the short term.

Damn it, my miss. Thank you for the correction.

Are you going to pay the freight for videos you consume, or for videos you post? Which one? (There is no third option.)

Exactly. Every video has to be transcoded on upload, then stored for both fast delivery and then shifted to long-lived-but-cheaper storage after a set time period. There’s nothing trivial about it.

The only reason to give it away for free is if that allows them to ship the app with video-based ads — but it’s pretty much impossible for advertising to coexist with a decentralised messaging protocol.

And as a regular Bluesky user, I don’t miss gifs or video — it massively reduces the mindless attribution-free reposting of popular TikTok videos you see on Twitter, IG and (now increasingly) Threads.

I'm perfectly prepared to do that as I did yesterday with Add Link Card BUT I need bluesky to SHOW the damn .gif and not have users have to click on a URL!!!

It's a one second change.

companies can often do more than one thing at once...

I have not see innovation out of Silicon Valley like this since Steve launched Copy and Paste on the very same day.

With Twitter imploding we now have 3 competitors that have nearly the identical user experience as Twitter. The federation concept is interesting, but if it at the end of the day it's just a Twitter clone then I'm rather disappointed.

Does anyone still use hashtags? I often searched and tweeted them back in the day on Twitter, they worked well for organic discoverability. But I don't see many uses of them now.

You can follow a topic without having to follow specific people.

On Twitter they got destroyed by spam and then de-prioritized by the platform in favor of the "sidebar" guessing what people were talking about.

They're fantastic on Mastodon where there's no algorithm trying to force you to something more stupid. Or spambots, or grifters, or nazis, or pornbots. Hopefully Bluesky is going to follow a model closer to that than the current state of Twitter.

#yes #all #the #time

No, every platform apart from maybe Tiktok will apply a heavy negative weight to your post if you use them.

Tumblr is the only social media site that has a successful tagging where the tags actually are meaningful for discovery and it's all due to the community not really the implementation.

The word hashtag has almost become a pejorative word. People seem to use like "hashtag whatever" as a taunt.

It's like the word karma has become tainted because people only use it to mean something bad as a taunt to someone. In Hindu there is good and bad karma like yin and yang.

Ex-Twitter devs rolling out a feature that if you used it on Twitter during their reign it would harm your post in the algorithm.

You seem to imply that the founders of Bluesky were the ones pushing for those algorithm changes at Twitter? Do you have any more information on this? I find it hard to believe that this is a decision made by developers.

Using a hashtag on twitter reduced your posts discovery on twitter? Why did they do that?

I would guess that on the whole hashtags provide negative value to users. It's a neat idea but it almost immediately devolves into SEO spam.

Users _invented_ hashtags and the platform subsequently provided official mechanics for them. Just as users invented retweets and used to do them manually. People really value discovery, it's just that it's so vulnerable to the SEO arms race.

There are no ex-Twitter devs at Bluesky and only one ex-Twitter employee who started this month.

Custom feeds on Bluesky are federated so that anyone can create a new one using any algorithm they wish. There are already many thousands to choose from.

Objectively wrong.

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