Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
joelgustafson.com
joelgustafson.com
Contrast this with early Twitter where everyone was just super excited, and eager to follow new people. I don't get it, shouldn't a new social network be full of people looking to create new... social networks?
It’s very off-putting and alienating for normal people.
Every feed on the site is its own algorithm, and most are made by third-parties. Some of the more interesting ones have fallen over and broken a little as the volume of posts has increased. The various "catch up" feeds that show the most popular recent posts give a good impression of what's happening site wide (minus any blocks/mutes).
If so, you're probably looking for the "show less of this" feature rather than muting?
I'm pretty sure most "normal" people would react in a similar fashion, which kind of makes this a notable catch-22 for wider Mastadon-adaption.
Maybe you should get over it?
Sure, and those who have a technically savvy audience can use Mastodon can post on multiple platforms.
In this instance of bad changes X has made, the majority of those who are moving away from X this time round are more likely not going to engage on Mastodon as a second platform.
Too much hassle for them.
They are more likely to engage on platforms that have more engagement, like Bluesky or Threads.
I cannot see artists, journalists, etc going to Mastodon when X makes changes to their platform time and time again.
(Not that it’s a guarantee of anything; notably, SecondLife is essentially _only_ furries.)
Yeah, I know, I'm supposed to register on another instance, but AFAICT there's no way to link the accounts?
What's the goal? Why not just mention other account in bio?
https://fedi.tips/using-multiple-accounts-on-mastodon-and-th...
Someone in the community recently built a searchable directory of Bluesky "Starter Packs" (which are a way for a user to publish a set of interesting people & feeds to follow, primarily to help newcomers bootstrap their experience):
https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
Dan Abramov posted about it earlier today, saying he liked it and:
"the fact that it can be done in the ecosystem is awesome. let the ecosystem cook" [1]
And maybe more poignantly:
"seeing random projects pop up in the atproto ecosystem reminds me just how much public web common were stifled by social companies closing down their APIs. an entire landscape of tools given up on and abandoned" [2]
Because channel names are not hashtags. The syntax is purely because IRC is a text-based protocol, so you need a special way to distinguish channel names from regular text.
> The Iconfactory was developing a Twitter application in 2006 called "Twitterrific" and developer Craig Hockenberry began a search for a shorter way to refer to "Post a Twitter Update."
Evidently the people running the bots don't really care whether or not you give them an API to work with.
https://www.reddit.com/r/webscraping/comments/w1ve97/virgin_...
I would usually get support to manually unlock it after a few days by emailing them and mentioning why I didn't want to give them a phone number. Now the process only involves solving captchas. (and maybe some hidden waiting)
As an example my feed is completely free of US politics, allowing me to curate an experience where I can go to enjoy myself instead of constantly being exposed to ragebait.
I think one of the fatal flaws tech companies have been making is locking things in. But what made the computer so great, what made the smartphone so great, was to make them hackable. You build environments, you build ecosystems. Lockin only slows you down. I mean how long would it have taken for smartphones to have a flashlight if it weren’t for apps? A stopwatch? These were apps before they were built into the operating systems.
I'd been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now there's some real heat to it as things pick up.
Hopefully this surge is real, has certianly gotten me to be much more active.
I check time to time but basically it's 0/50
https://bsky.app/profile/nasa.extwitter.link
Also, some game companies do maintain a presence on bluesky:
Since it leverages Instagram and has pretty fantastic photo features.
Are there easy tools that allow you to post on multiple platforms from the same content, that also supports replies?
And the world is sick of Elon Musk and US politics.
I gave up on Twitter when I opened the app in public to find a porn video playing in the main feed, despite not following or interacting with any accounts of that nature previously. That was ~6 months ago and I haven't looked back.
No offense but it's mostly Americans screaming at other Americans about how important America is. It's a little bit tiresome how much headspace that site and owner occupy these days on certain parts of the internet.
[1]https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/number-of-twitter-users-by...
Threads is a half Twitter, half Instagram hybrid strong in creative, travel, social etc type content. Bluesky is original Twitter with strengths in news, politics, science etc. These days not sure it will ever be possible to have one app that does it all.
Which leaves X as the new 4chan.
Honestly, I've had more positive interactions and learned more on 4chan than I ever have on Twitter. I wish the few tech people I care about who are still on there would just move (to clarify, move anywhere, not to 4chan obviously).
I'm genuinely excited to see if bluesky manages to moderate them.
I also run my own Bluesky labeler and Firehose ingester so I've been following as event throughput has roughly doubled over the last 3-4 months.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...
There is an obvious need for Twitter-like platforms, but Twitter/X has become too right-wing for many users. The left needs a place to talk and vent about the election, and Twitter is no longer friendly to that. Therefore, Bluesky is taking off due to that event.
I don't know why, but I always felt like the hype went over me head, and it was a bit boring.
Though I'm tempted to check out Bluesky, the AT protocol seems really interesting.
Mastodon is cool, but it's hard to consistently find that local info. Bluesky seems like it has a chance of supplanting Twitter in this way, but it's not there yet. Some of the accounts I used to follow on Twitter are on Bluesky, but they don't post. If they started, I think they'd get tons of followers now.
I signed up for twitter once as it was an effective way to get customer support from my bank :-/
In general it seemed to be celebrities that I didn't care about and people posting shower thoughts.
For those (like me) who don't know what bluesky is, it's basically a carbon copy of twitter circa 2015, down to an almost identical UI. Except that there's no monetization, no ads, no growth hacking, which means that in the main features are there to serve the user. My favorite example is the simple expo/react native based mobile app, which lets you open links in safari rather than a useless in-app browser.
edit: my big worry about BSky is the lack of any coherent monetization plan. This isn't community-funded stuff like Mastodon, it's VC-funded software - there will be a need for revenue at some point and then what happens?
Strange. Have been on Threads since launch and have never seen this.
Nor have I seen any growth-hacking dark patterns other than the For You algorithm pushing high-engagement content which they've said they are sorting out. But a lot of this is because Threads has the legacy of being built on Instagram.
That's a reasonable concern. I assumed there would be ads at some point, but that's not the way that they are going for now.
> we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames.
Wow, that's just like Mastodon.
1) Better (optional) algorithmic feeds. Mastodon's "explore" is weaker than Bluesky's "popular with friends" and "discover"
2) Quote-tweets.
3) Easier onboarding. Mastodon forces you to care about which server you're on and it does matter and migrating later is hard. Meanwhile, BSky has "starter packs" that people can produce for each other with lists of users to follow to easily jump into a community.
4) Username-as-domain is better than the Mastodon "confirmed links in profile" thing for self-verified accounts.
I wish the properly-federated OSS community-funded one had won but I'll take either to be done with Twitter.
Basically: governance matters.
The world is much larger than American or Western internet drama, and there seems to be no way to escape it. As a European reading any mainstream social media, BlueSky included, makes me roll my eyes out of their orbit.
I do not care about politics or gender identity or keyboard activism. Can we please have something else on the menu? Literally anything else. I wonder if I should learn Russian or Chinese to be exposed to something new which isn't US politics or which gender people are most attracted to in their private lives. Who gives a damn. /rant
(I enjoyed Nostr tech-wise, but it never broke past the cryptobro phase and that saddens me)
That said this is definitely not the week to try to calibrate that, since everyone currently has Big Feelings even if they're normally not overtly political.
On these social networks, either you are (un)willingly enlisted in the American Culture Wars, or you're best served not using them at all.
So you have complete control.
Not sure how that interacts with the fact that the company raised a substantial amount recently https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/even.westvang.com/post/3laob7tefxk2...
If I ever get blocked, banned, deplatformed, whatever—people would see my domain and be able to go there to determine what's going on. In a sense it's "censorship-evident".
I think this will be great for businesses—it's so much more less ambiguous if I can @example.com a business and get a response. I put a starter pack together of SaaS built on Rails that's already doing this at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u
I really like what BlueSky is doing and hope it doesn't get enshitified as the future plays out. Even if it does, it seems like now is a goldilocks moment where things are feeling really good there.
I highly recommend spending the 5 minutes it takes to setup an account and point it at your domain.
I’m @bradgessler@ruby.social, but I’m more than a Ruby dev.
I could run a Mastadon instance for bradgessler.com, but I have no desire to spend even 3 minutes figuring out how to set all that up. Maintaining my own instance sounds even worse.
Bluesky gets the ergonomics of this right: the usernames feel like they occupy a global namespace and I can point the aliases at my domains in a few minutes without having to worry about a bunch of standards that I don’t really care about.
For some reason I can’t explain, it also really bothers me that I have to @ people on Mastadon via @brad@bradgessler.com. I don’t want to say “@“ twice if I’m verbally telling somebody where to find me when presenting and “@me@bradgessler” is weird too. Much easier to say “Follow me @bradgessler.com”
Am I lazy? Yes, but most people are. Bluesky strikes a nice balance of control and identity that I’m comfortable with for the amount of time and effort I’m willing to put into it.
Also I took a look at https://mastodonapp.uk/@stephenfry as an example of a verified profile and the UX is quite bad. Green check in a green box with a green border. The title tag just says "Website" and there's no indication of what it means.
How, exactly, are the embeddings derived?
Glad to see I am not the only one having problems with hierarchy.
Interesting work at many levels (no, no pun): starting with the bluesky data availability, the processing and the visualization algorithms.
But its not quite clear where to place these visualizations in the data science spectrum. Conventional numerical graphics have (over time) developed a sophisticated grammar that allows fairly precise reasoning and inference. So they are heavily used in scientific publications, in the financial sector etc. for real information transmission (People might even reverse engineer a plot to recover data!).
With networks and graphs, besides a general feel for the topology / connectivity or clustering its kinda hard to pin down what is the transmitted information. Not clear if useful grammars covering such large graphs are yet to be invented or if this is the nature of the beast.
Threads has extreme normies, bluesky has the nerds, and twitter seems to have just the right mixture of both.
> You grant us permission to: Use User Content to develop, provide, and improve Bluesky Social, the AT Protocol, and any of our future offerings
And it's been in the top 3 ever since it launched a year ago. X is #69.
I open it, get a few random engagement bait posts, maybe reply to some and then close it. No meaningful discussion will happen.
i find this very surprising. i don't see a lot of technical people out there, except for the bsky devs or devs who are building apps on top of atproto.
i've visited bluesky enough over the months, and to me, there's 3 types of users you will always see on the Discover or What's Hot timeline - journalists, furries, and people who post nudity.
tech people are still on twitter. i feel like the "exodus" of tech people following the election are just them making an account, and then returning to X after some time. it happened then during the private beta, and i feel like the same is happening now
Also, this may seem silly, but I like the butterfly logo.
I can see some amount of protest, people who are anti-AI/pro-copyright might find a better niche on bsky, but everything you post there is public so it's legal for anyone to scrape and train with
The other thing is reach. Twitter, Fb, Instagram are global brands. It'll be really, and I mean difficult to move the rest of the world to other platforms (TikTok is the exception because they went ahead with video from the get-go).
It's inevitable that left-leaning people will increasingly leave Twitter, as long as it is run by Musk
So what? He's been clearly far right leaning since before he purchased Twitter.
He's been one of the main supporters of the Trump campaign and he's vocal about his political ideas. Twitter has no credibility as a neutral platform as long as it's run by him
In the end, people will choose their echo chamber no matter if they know it's an echo chamber. I try to be as impartial as possible. I use Twitter, Reddit (specific subs), and occasionally, IG. I have a tiktok acct but I rarely use it.
Twitter is far from being a neutral platform.
It changed to require opting in to bridging because many mastodon users got very mad about it.
So not quite 13M but almost half of them, pretty cool nonetheless
Another thought since Bluesky is a pretty inclusive place, are the LGBTQIA+ folks clustering into their own respective labels, or is everyone mixing together? Is any of this behavior similar or different to what we see on other social networks?
Social media is dead
What makes scraping illegal?
At no time is management obligated or even remotely motivated to tell end users the real reason for making the change, because users believing that the platform is just a greedy corporation is better than them realizing that the platform will just roll over if the police presents them with a subpoena to snitch on a user.
X is turning out to be where Conservatives are going to be living, Bluesky, Reddit and Treads will be for Liberals. These platform don't outright ban opposing views but I think moderation policies and the users will shift these groups into one or the other.
I'm not sure if one can have a platform where respectful discourse can take place. The only site I've seen so far is HN and its due to its small community and the relentless effort by Dan.
The days of having everyone connected on the same platform is now dead, which might ironically usher a revival of the old, non-centralized web.
Any barriers, legal or otherwise, that existed between twitter and the state should be assumed gone once the new administration transitions in, especially considering it's an administration that has promised to abuse state power to target it's opposition.
I like the sound of that. Surely there's usefulness in that observation.
Does anyone know if it is the first time that a truly open source app has hit that top spot?
no, but nothing can stop you & a bunch of people from exporting your tweet archive and visualizing that!
brew install websocat
websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos
With luck bsky keeps growing and researchers invest effort in studying a more open-by-design platform.
websocat wss://jetstream2.us-west.bsky.network/subscribe
Later, Twitter banned a comedy account, the Babylon Bee. That pissed Elon off enough to buy it.
Both are back on Twitter now, both the comedy account, and the politician who will be President for a second term in January, having won both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
That's just two examples, but I would call them salient ones.
It's flipped now, Elon has tweeted that using cis to describe not-trans people is a slur. Which seems like going the other way on "free speech absolutism" but whatever.
"“A new [Twitter Files] investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics — all in secret, without informing users,” Weiss wrote in a tweet Thursday."
It's a very enlightening document, I recommend a full read through
Joe Biden laptop was blocked before, J.D. Vance dossier is blocked today.
It's pretty similar to a project I've been working on for the past year, scraping Facebook instead of BlueSky (which is a bit harder since FB doesn't expose an API for that). I currently have about 140 million nodes on my scraped graph and a GUI with pathfinding and stuff like that.
It's a shame though because as nice as the thing is, I'm not sure I can publish it online, given it contains names of people. I don't think the GDPR would be very happy.
Which is why I'm a bit surprised you published this, aren't you afraid of people, uh, disliking the fact that they're present in your dataset?
I get the idea behind the GDPR and it's nice to protect consumers but I'm scared for hobby projects like this.
IANAL but at least in the U.S. I'm pretty sure publicly-available data is generally excluded from whatever protections do exist on PII. I'm not sure what, if anything, has been said about this in the EU.
I'll just share some irony. They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X/Twitter.
The irony is that the 'holier-than-thou' crowd, who are against hate and for love all over the world, overwhelmingly post negative political comments and are rooting for X/Twitter to collapse.
This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.
What, that people are mean about a very special website sometimes? Seems a rather niche problem, tbh.
There is nothing inherently wrong with people being negative. If you had a social network where people could only be positive about things… now, that would be unhealthy.
Stop thinking in us/them, everybody hates someone or something and that's fine. That's not what hate speech is I think. Take one example from the Canadian govmnt:
> The bill defines “hate speech” as the content of a communication that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.
> These grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered.
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/chshc-lcdch/index.h...
That's just one "official" definition of many obviously.
What I find ironic is that BlueSky has many openly anti-Trump posts, while X/Twitter tends to have a significant amount of pro-Trump content. Because many minority and marginalized groups lean anti-Trump, again, these opposing viewpoints naturally clash, often leading to Twitter being labeled as a "hate speech platform". Yet on BlueSky, there’s no problem with people openly criticizing or spreading negativity about pro-Trump people. Since Trump supporters don’t typically fall into minority categories, it seems BlueSky users have the "privilege" to freely bash the Twitter crowd without facing the same scrutiny. Essentially, BlueSky is shielded from the hate speech label despite fostering a different kind of polarized environment.
Also, if you're in a group of people that trumps policies target (immigrants with undocumented family members, women and trans people who want bodily autonomy, Arabs with family in Palestine) then all that pro-trump positivity starts to feel pretty hateful too, just in case you haven't looked at it from that angle.
Here is a relevant article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Is it really fare to compare a political cartoon to the garbage twitter is allowing? I might still visit twitter if it wasn't so out of control.
The only reason Hacker News avoided that fate is due to downvote/flag mechanisms.
It hasn't avoided that fate. If you doubt me, go into a thread about US politics and praise Donald Trump and watch as your comments get not just downvoted, but flagged so that they are hidden. This will happen no matter how good your arguments are.
Make no mistake, this site is ideologically polarized just like all the others. The only saving grace is that the vast majority of topics are about tech, not politics, so the polarization is usually hidden.
That discourse comes in waves each time a major migration happens from twitter to bluesky but it settles down fairly soon after each time. Give it a few days and people will have moved on to the new topic of the day.
Also it's worth noting that the "Discover" feed is trained specifically per person so while the defaults aren't great, if you use the "show more like this" and "show less like this" options on posts (under the triple dot) then pretty quickly it tunes in towards content you care about vs content you don't.
> Also it's worth noting that the "Discover" feed is trained specifically per person so while the defaults aren't great, if you use the "show more like this" and "show less like this" options on posts (under the triple dot) then pretty quickly it tunes in towards content you care about vs content you don't.
This is the first time I clicked "Discover". I haven't logged into BlueSky for almost two years.
I've recently created a brand new account on X for a project. Looking at what was being recommended to the brand-new account with no interactions or likes or anything, they are not wrong.
- a post about how Canada is overrun by Indians
- a post about how Melbourne is overrun by n-worders (they replaced the Gs with £s)
- a post about how a trans person is ugly
- 2 "nudes in bio" bot posts. This was not hate speech, and arguably the most positive posts I got.
This is not counting the Elon posts and the Trump posts, which were the first and second thing that got recommended. Nor the posts from Elon Musk imitators, who I assume are trying to take advantage of the fact that Elon Musk gets special treatment from the algorithm.
When you create a new account, X asks you to follow an account to determine what your interests are. I picked NASA. I did not get recommended a single space photo.