Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
theverge.com
theverge.com
I am here: https://bsky.app/profile/benhouston3d.bsky.social
I used this tool to find accounts that match on both platforms:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...
Maybe that is the future for BlueSky as well, but at the moment I am enjoying it and more people I followed on Twitter are making the move.
Does Bluesky change this dynamic?
I have a couple of informational bots. It's a lot easy for me when I can just download a cli tool and run that to post than if I have to signup to a platform as a developer and then write custom code to login via OAuth.
Actually if I have to write code to talk to OAuth I probably won't bother.
Currently using bsky to post to BlueSky and paying for IFTTT because I have to make time to sit down and get twurl working.
bsky would do.
I have an account there because so many people seem to be moving from Twitter to Bluesky instead of Mastodon, for understandable reasons, but I expect Bluesky to be be awash in bots, AI and Nazis within a year. That's just the way things go now.
If i block someone they are gone from my timeline, their replies are gone from my posts even to other people..
If someone re-post me and i don't like the context i can go there and "disconnect" my post from their re-post..
Also Bluesky has public block lists anyone can create and sign-up for, those accounts would be noticed very fast and included in some block list if they start getting any traction..
So while it is not impossible for those accounts to exist, it is much harder for then to get traction..
And if they get traction it is much easier to hide then from our and our followers view..
Echo chambers are, by default, less combative.
As Twitter becomes more hiveminded, you can expect it to become less combative, as well.
Could it also be that people who left Twitter are simply less politically minded, and by definition will be less combative if they get to focus on their interests instead of their differences?
I left Twitter in 2017 because I was only there to get one liner jokes from professional comedians and follow some record label releases. I’m not joining any platform where memes and other low quality opinions are the primary modes of communication
Similarly, I expect Trump and Elon will have a falling out rather quickly. Two megalomaniacal narcissists don't generally play nicely for very long. When that happens, Elon won't be able to help himself from whacking the bees nest he's created, by criticizing Trump. I expect the combativeness of twitter to skyrocket soon afterwards.
Hardly appealing for someone like me who goes on twitter less because there's too much politics
The network effects of Twitter/X are just incredibly powerful. Even many people who ostensibly dislike the fact that it has become a right wing propaganda tool seem reluctant to actually leave.
I think there'll be a tipping point where nobody of value is posting enough for anybody else to bother checking in, death spiralling its usefulness. It's already 80% bots, grifters, and engagement farmers.
The problem is I don't see much interesting on Bluesky. It's endless people saying "Hello, bluesky! I'm new here!" or "Hello, new bluesky users! Follow me!" Feels like there's less focus on content and more on the individuals themselves. It's further exemplified with weird stuff like "Bulgarian game devs with webbed toes between the ages of 33 and 47 Starter Pack". These starter packs get spammed nonstop and it makes it feel very cliquey, with lots of them being groups that had some degree of twitter "influence" trying to bring it over to Bluesky as-is and without others butting in.
Another thing that's strange to me is that lots of bluesky users post selfies almost nonstop and half of users have selfies as their profile photos. Which, I mean, that's their right. But I feel like with twitter, nobody cared what you looked like or what your background was.
I post on both, but I mainly browse twitter despite having no fondness for the dude running it. I never interact with political slop on twitter so its algorithm only suggests me incredible art. I never interact with selfies but bluesky keeps throwing them at me. Like, no, I really do not care about your cute new lipstick or whatever. I don't care about political hot takes. I just want to see art. And like 50% of it is art. But the other 50% is an endless feed of "look at me! As in literally, look at my face!" that I just cannot get rid of.
Maybe someday the novelty of it being the "new" thing will fade and the selfie obsessed people will go away while content will rise up, like it did with twitter. I hope so.
Honestly that sounds like it could be bots. Although maybe it is just people making new accounts.
https://bsky.app/profile/andrewdessler.com/post/3laphnufp222...
It is in pre-enshittification phase.
> The problem is I don't see much interesting on Bluesky.
You have to search for things, follow a few people, and give the "Discover" facility something to work with I think. Also use the Feeds tab - search may bring up some feeds which are also super helpful.
When I delve into art or gamedev feeds and whatnot, I'm still hit in the face with selfies and people talking way too much about their personal life. I feel like I really need to dig for content, whereas with twitter, the top 10 things I see upon every refresh is some great art.
I know lots of artists have left it permanently for bluesky, and I try to follow them whenever they leave, but there's still a massive imbalance in the quality of content that the algorithm feeds and it's heavily in favor of twitter.
Totally agreed on this part, and, this lead me to a weird thought: maybe we're witnessing human adaptation of "[the users] are the product" phenomenon. Twitter the product was sold to a rich kid way over valuation and in form it can't be used commercially, like a consumer branded prepackaged food that are too blatant to serve at a restaurant.
IOW, it was sold at profit, with no opportunities left on the table. And a new instance of the product is being manufactured.
What I'm trying to say is, I think there is a chance that that's just how enshittification, social media, freemium-minus-mium model, etc works from this point on, as if it's junk food made of DAU.
Having avoided twitter throughout its entire existence for these reasons, I absolutely agree.
Political commentator Matt Christman has a great vlog episode about the inherent problems with platforms such as Twitter, including the societal cost of being an impediment to real progress.
MIND FORCE: FIBONACCI SNIPER | CushVlog 4.29.30:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsuTh1aK7Tc
https://cushvlog-catalog.vercel.app/transcript/OsuTh1aK7Tc (transcript)
Bluesky isn't yet aggressively working to boost engagement. There's the discover tab, and feeds, but those are more opt in types of things. Blocks also work differently, perhaps increasing the echo chamber effect, but also tamping down on squabbling.
And it's not just from the perspective of the creator. Lots of people would write blog posts for free, if people would read them. But then Google dumps them out of the search results in favor of YouTube videos that take ten times as long to tell you the same info, and then the bloggers stop writing because nobody is reading.
What we need is a search engine that goes back to giving people what they're looking for instead of showing what pays the search engine company more.
I disagree with this take. I hate learning by video unless it's for physical stuff where seeing it is useful (e.g. how to wire something), and thus I always prefer text content when searching for information (due to the higher flexibility in moving at my own pace instead of the narrator's).
I've never had issues with Google pushing videos too much in search results. You have an initial "videos" results block I just scroll past by, and that's that.
The much bigger issue is the narrowing attention span of people. Thanks to social media, like Twitter, but also Stories, Shorts, Snaps, Reels, TikTok, etc. people's attention span is going down. Many people would prefer watching 10 tiktoks instead of spending 10 minutes reading a blog post.
The issue is that some large portion of people don't do that, they watch the video because it's listed first. Which drops the readership of the later-featured blogs below the threshold where the author keeps making them.
FOR-PROFIT CONTENT CREATION
When I reflect on how awesome the web used to be, the one common theme was the creators were doing it for free, because their passion for whatever they were creating was simply that strong and authentic.
Fast forward to today's hellscape, and we can see the main reason there's a firehose of mediocre/low quality content is because everybody is desperate to make a buck.
And they seemed committed to giving researchers and academics lots of access to understand and share how the network was working, look for disinformation & "foreign influence" campaigns.
Now there's no one at the helm and all the researchers and civic interests have been given the boot. They are being threatened by ExTwitter to the tune of 1.5c per tweet accessed if I remember correctly. These people were helping you but there's this sense that finding out what's happening is risky for business, that it could hurt, when in fact the network is just being overrun, turned into the maelstrom, and is deeply into rot and decay stages.
Twitter's bot fighting teams back then had basically ceased to exist. They had existed once, but at some point the management decided that the biggest abuse problem on the platform wasn't bots or even misinformation but just people being mean to each other. So everyone working in that department had switched to what was basically semi-automated tone policing. By the time I talked to them they were years behind the state of the art in detecting automation.
As for academics and researchers, Twitter 1.0 didn't have the sort of rosy relationship with them you paint here. Researchers had access to the global feed if they paid for it like many other parties did, and Musk started charging much more for that access, but the feed wasn't really useful for finding misbehavior. In fact Twitter 1.0 was pissed off with academia long before Musk arrived on the scene. Academic research into social networks, disinformation and hypothetical foreign influence campaigns is nearly 100% pseudo-scientific garbage pushed for ideological reasons. In 2020 Twitter execs went public with their frustration [1] in a blog post where they pointed out that academics were using an "an extremely limited approach" that was full of useless signals, like:
• Usernames with long strings of digits (the default username generation pattern)
• Lacking info in the bio (even Twitter employees often don't fill it out)
• Posting many times per day (lots of real users do that)
Twitter 1.0: "the threat has evolved and the narrative on what’s actually going on is increasingly behind the curve". Given that there are tens of thousands of such papers coming out of universities, all of them justified by claiming they're ahead of the curve, being constantly behind it is a damning assessment. And that was from people ideologically aligned with academia!
Booting these people off the system was certainly a good move both for Twitter/X's business and frankly, for academia itself. They certainly weren't trying to help.
What that means is moving is easy, meaning competition is possible, without the need to migrate platforms and rebuild followings and the network. Beyond that, ATProto supports custom record types, so one can build all the social media application types (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Substack, ...) on the same social media fabric (ATProto)
I'm inclined to say the custom record type is a fifth core component that now exists thanks to ATProto. Monetization hasn't been widely discussed yet, Bluesky team has something besides ads in mind, but haven't publicly disclosed.
Yes, but if platform API allows using customizable third-party clients it is not really a problem for me (e.g. I can just enable chronological timeline, filter out all the ads and noise).
Twitter isn't the problem, Musk is the problem. Twitter was fine until he took over. Bluesky is Twitter - Musk.
I'd like to see a platform where after a certain number of people join, a new server is automatically created and new users are redirected there, similar to how MMO servers worked.
1. Your username can be your domain name. I’m @bradgessler.com, which means I can build more “equity” in my domain than I can on other platforms. It’s also really great for brands or open source projects that have their own website.
2. Lots of technical folks have come over from Twitter and the signal to noise ratio is much better. There’s less weird random videos, less people screaming past each other, less porn bots.
3. When I share a link on Bluesky, it doesn’t get penalized.
4. It’s a global namespace so I don’t have to worry about what server people are on that I want to follow. I struggled with this on Mastodon.
5. The UI is as good as Twitter. There’s been a few times now where I forget what network I’m using by just looking at the app.
6. Starter packs are handy to bring folks from your communities over. I created one for Ruby devs at https://go.bsky.app/HXB2cPh and one for companies built on Ruby at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u
I fully expect Bluesky to become completely enshitified over time, but I think it’s going to have a pretty good run for a while. They’re doing a lot of things right and it has fun early Twitter vibes, but without the fail whale.
Once you do the algorithm is TikTok style in its sensitivity i.e. very.
A simple, privacy preserving solution: ask me! When I sign up, offer broad categories like art, tech, sports, celebrities etc. don't put everyone into one "probably likes celebrity gossip" box on signup.
But it's even worse than that. I already have an Instagram account! They know there that I like art, tech, webcomics, music. I know that's all shared with Threads even if I'd rather it wasn't. But my feed is still filled with celeb trash.
I kinda like the IDEA there, but no idea how you separate things like “I’m concerned about my individual rights” from politics?
And usually when people say “no politics” they mean “no politics I don’t like “.
Still in sympathize with the idea, I want to hear from people about what they’re doing and so forth, not a rehash of the news.
It's worse than that. You end up with lesbians posting about their girlfriends or small business owners posting a meme about a regulation they have to comply with and then getting blocked for politics if their tribe is the outgroup.
What you really need is for people to not be so intolerant of the other tribe being the other tribe.
How can you justify accepting and tolerating someone who’s point of view is I think you should have less rights than me.
Essentially you should be tolerant of others, unless they themselves are intolerant.
No, it's called a paradox because there is no "easy" answer to it. Also, who determines the exact line between free speech and intolerance? It is impossible to do. The reason the world is polarised today is because everybody thinks they have the simple answer to a literal ethical paradox that has none. The simple answer being: "those that share my beliefs are OK, those that don't should be canceled/demonised/hidden somewhere I don't see them." Thus creating echo chambers so people get more and more radical.
Free speech is the only half acceptable answer, which means free speech for anyone, whatever their point of view, however offensive you deem them to be. Rowan Atkinson explained it more eloquently that I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUezfuy8Qpc
I agree free speech must be protected, whatever it is, but it doesn’t mean we should accept manipulation and deceit. The goal should be to foster genuine dialogue, not to create echo chambers or allow harmful lies to spread unchecked.
b) You can switch to the chronological feed which is much better. But as you say you can't make it the default.
I manage a number of business X accounts which are publish only and all switched to showing right-wing politicians, pundits and extensive amounts of Elon Musk. I created a new account to check and same thing. Even though when I selected interests I specifically chose non-political topics.
For me it was very clear then that whether it's Musk or Zuckerberg no one should have the ability to push political content.
It is the right call, by frikking far.
There are a 3-4 horsemen of the apocalypse for online communities. The first two are most definitely politics and religion.
If these two topics are allowed on your forum, you are pretty much done. Flame wars, harassment, brigades etc. are going to be the highest you can expect.
This is going to force you into high amounts of comment removals and bans. The velocity of action, and anger of your users will mean that you can no longer communicate the rationale for your bans, or maintain transparency.
On top of this, you will start to attract groups who will want to use your community for astroturfing, or for targeting. So now you have to deal with the worst kind of adversarial behavior.
Getting rid of politics, is just simply better for the product.
I will also argue that there should be such product experiments conducted in the economy. We already have a multitude of platforms where we can discuss politics.
What you need to do is distinguish between politics and partisanship. Political discussion is not only fine but important, as long as it's civil. Partisan signaling, on the other hand, is poison, because it's flamebait and does not lead to reasoned discussion.
The problem is that the right has largely moved politics into a cultural space. When you can't talk about being trans or being gay is that really politics? Self-identity isn't a political position, but it has been forced to be one, as those people are under constant attack.
In addition, they're the "out group", so they will actually be targeted. Certainly, nobody cares if you post your girlfriend, but if you post your boyfriend now it has become political.
Such rules aren't equal.
It's become a meme, but there's some truth to it. There're two genders, man and political. There're two sexual orientations, straight and political. There're two races, white and political.
It is when policy is changed to prioritize self-identity over material reality.
The outcomes of such policy are often harmful, for example: https://4w.pub/male-inmate-charged-with-raping-woman-inside-...
And, to be clear, the vast majority of rape is performed by heterosexual men who are not trans. Trans people are an incredibly small amount of the population. They're merely a scapegoat, because they're "weird" or "gross" or "perverted". It's nothing new, it's the same things people said about homosexuals.
There's no forcefield around women's restrooms, for instance. One does not need to take 5 years of hormone therapy and surgery to walk into the women's restroom and sexually assault someone. Men already do that, right now, and in MUCH greater numbers.
Also, as a sidenote, these TERFy articles and such should be taken with a massive grain of salt. Typically, when attacking minorities the strategy is to take aim at vulnerable populations, usually women and children. When homosexuality was breaking the mainstream, the main concern was pedophilia, because that's how you harm minorities. Naturally, any aim at transgender people will do it from the lense of "protecting women". Never mind that trans women are already at high-risk of sexual assault.
None of this means I think people AMAB should be allowed in women's prisons. But you have to understand, for people who are transgender women, if they go to men's prisons, they WILL be raped. Without a doubt and with no exceptions.
The problem isn't as simple as conservative pundits would like you to believe. Women don't want burly, masculine trans men in their restrooms either, for example, which would be the end result of a lot of conservative policy.
From what I can see, bsky mostly consists of rebels. And since users flock where everyone else is, it will be an uphill battle for them to get Twitter’s userbase.
Admittedly I ran into less straight forward combativeness and that’s nice.
But still the content was just as inane and hot take heavy.
Granted I accept that “pretty much another twitter” is what the users want.
Twitter's greatest flaw—no, I won’t call it "X"—is its obsession with engagement to promote tweets. This creates the worst feed you can think of:
- People ask the dumbest questions, just to bait responses.
- Someone makes a reasonable point, and along comes the dumbest reply. Why? So others can pile on, calling them out, driving up engagement.
- External links are buried. Good articles? Forget it. They’ve vanished from my feed.
- The most toxic people are constantly pushed to my feed. And it's a losing battle to block them all. Keeping my feed politics-free is borderline impossible.
- The fact that you can buy a subscription and ensure that your tweets get highlighted more is absurd. It has made it really easy to get the worst accounts in your feed.
It’s exhausting. I am just there because I think it is still a good marketing channel. But I am not sure anymore if the pros outweigh the cons.
As for it being an echo chamber, that’s a function of who chooses to join. Again, there are no algorithms, so no viewpoints are favored by the site (unlike on some other sites, ahem). And the protocol ensures you can’t really be banned.
I find it great because there is a ton of interesting people. It is not a website for discussions, it is for one off messages.
Even before the election results on Tuesday, the vibes on X have been steadily been getting worse from my perspective, and the fact that Musk will get more power and influence from a Trump win may have been its Digg 2.0 moment.
I have replaced my Twitter contact information in my HN profile with my Bluesky contact info, and will be doing the same on my personal website soon.
I'm sure there's a huge cohort of people active here have never heard of Digg except that it was a thing that fumbled and made Reddit bigger.
Twitter was always terrible and I was hopeful Elon’s mismanagement would finally destroy it, but I think its clear that its never going anywhere.
For the ultimate example, see WeWork’s old ‘community adjusted EBITDA’, which was pretty much just revenue.
So it definitely is dying. It will just take another year or two.
Someday Twitter will be AOL, but so will TikTok and Facebook and all the rest of them, because nothing lasts forever.
People who think it's going to die immediately are just hoping that it will, but that's generally not how it works. They die when something else replaces them, and even once the thing arrives the replacement takes quite a long time.
And X has competitors in Bluesky and Threads both of which have seen record user numbers and growth. For example, Threads has grown to 275m MAU in 1.5 years.
There is no reality in which X should be remotely compared to any of the other major social media platforms. It is failing at an unprecedented rate and based on user growth in Bluesky/Threads is continuing to rapidly decline.
Hence overpaid.
They've also lost advertisers, which is obviously bad for Fidelity but not all that relevant to the people using it. And it's not clear to what extent that has any staying power because companies get a one-time story written about them when they do the initial announcement and soon they're back to wanting to run ads everywhere they can because running ads that reach a different user base gets them otherwise-unavailable sales.
> And X has competitors in Bluesky and Threads both of which have seen record user numbers and growth. For example, Threads has grown to 275m MAU in 1.5 years.
Threads is Facebook. It has users because Facebook is pushing it with both financial resources and the network effect of an incumbent social network, and even then it has fewer users than Facebook itself and its users are disproportionately converts from Facebook/Instagram rather than Twitter because that's where it's being pushed.
Bluesky has like 7M users. It's the sort of thing that could replace Twitter, in ten or twenty years.
> There is no reality in which X should be remotely compared to any of the other major social media platforms.
It has hundreds of millions of active users.
> It is failing at an unprecedented rate and based on user growth in Bluesky/Threads is continuing to rapidly decline.
Musk changed some things and a small percentage of people left, many of them performatively because they later came back. Network effects are strong.
And to the extent that Elon believes Twitter was useful in attaining his current position, it doesn't really matter if it's profitable on the balance sheets or not - it's a loss leader.
They remember fondly when left-crazy ruled Twitter. They forget that the opposite and more-enduring right-reaction formed as part of the same dynamic.
If Twitter had never existed, Donald Trump would still just be playing a rich guy on The Apprentice, and licensing his name to developers of hotels and colognes. Elon Musk would just be pushing electric cars and rockets and solar panels.
Which is why this effort to rebuild Twitter as BlueSky is not good news.
I know it seems that we all need to develop a fever again to dislodge Trump. I don't think we do. Incumbents have gotten wrecked all over the place. The world is not getting better. Four years from now, Team Trump will be the incumbents, and the voters will express their dissatisfaction again. This will happen without efforts to make society start boiling over again. Those will just cause more blowback. We don't need another Twitter.