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Comment by loevborg | Hacker News Reader

I'm part of the wave of users who migrated to bluesky last week. I have to say I really like it so far, which surprised me a bit given that I had been underwhelmed by mastodon before. I already spend more time in bluesky than in twitter.

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.

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Given that Bluesky is VC funded, I imagine it'll just be a matter of time until the monetization, ads, and growth hacking start. Enjoy it while you can, I suppose.

Or avoid it if you value your time and effort: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42119658

Bluesky is a Public Benefit LLC: https://bsky.social/about/blog/2-7-2022-overview

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

AFAIK all the "public benefit" aspect does is remove the ability for investors to sue the company for failing to maximize shareholder value. Given sufficient share ownership, it's still possible for VCs to force Bluesky to do whatever they want.

Enshitification. 100% guarantee if VC funded.

I tried it, the tech seems cool but I'd like more diversity. Now that Twitter mostly is crypto scams and American far-right political nonsense, I'd like something a little more interesting than American far-left political nonsense.

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)

If you are good about curating your follows, you can get a nice nonpolitical feed on Bluesky.

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.

Fair enough. My issue is that it seems people have Big Feelings for one reason or another since 2015 and increasingly so. I really do not wish to have to work to train the "algo", especially when Twitter-like social media is worse than useless. It takes no time for my favourite people I follow to suddenly start spamming my timeline with the drama-du-jour.

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.

No no that's my point: Bluesky has no algorithm. You see only the posts of people you follow, in order, and nothing else (unless you deliberately subscribe to "discovery" feeds.)

So you have complete control.

> 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

Wow, that's just like Mastodon.

BlueSky's big killer features that Mastodon fails at:

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.

I don't think either platform is going to "win" in the sense of reaching the size and influence of Twitter, but both will hopefully be more resilient than Twitter was.

Yeah, "resilience" is my big concern. After Facebook and Twitter, I'm mostly concerned about a social network getting compromised by a moneyed political interest. Obviously I'm a liberal so I have my political opinion on the interest here, but the point stands for any alignment - I'd rather see something like Mastodon where people can fund and run their own servers that reflect their own values and interests, and then those servers can federate and defederate as is appropriate.

Basically: governance matters.

How does it compare to Threads?

Anecdotally, I see a lot more “normal” human to human engagement than the addressed-to-millions engagement bait I see on Threads.

At some point Threads started to suppress (or at least, not boost?) political content or news. Which sort of crippled it as a "current events + hot takes" Twitter/X competitor. Bluesky doesn't appear to have this limitation (though perhaps for some this is a feature).

https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-ou...

The loudest complaint I see about threads (lack of hyperlinks) doesn't apply there. Also, Threads seems covered in growth-hacking dark patterns, like the notification/activity screen being flooded with "picked for you".

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?

> notification/activity screen being flooded with "picked for you"

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.

It mostly seemed to happen on the web client - I tend to avoid "apps" I'd click the "heart" to check my notifications and it would be just a firehose of "picked for you" streaming in. Also iirc it launched without a chronological feed.

> my big worry about BSky is the lack of any coherent monetization plan.

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.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a

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