1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day | Hacker News Reader

1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day

bsky.app

125 pointsdavidbarker132 comments

When I joined it, just as when I joined Mastodon, most of what I saw was just anti-Twitter and anti-Musk content, which I didn't really care to read about, either for or against both of them. It might just be who I was following but the people I followed were similar in both Twitter and Bluesky / Mastodon, mostly indie hackers and other small time SaaS founders, and even these people started posting a lot of anti-Twitter stuff, more than even talking about their own products. On Twitter, the same types of people just...didn't give a shit about any of the drama and I actually learned a lot about product building from their threads.

It seems like if you start a platform mostly as a reaction to another platform, you're gonna get the same sort of social media bubble, only of the opposite variety. That's why I still use Twitter currently, I just don't see the same issue that other people seem to have, and that's likely because I don't engage in politics or respond to trolls on there.

it's starting to change now - definitely give it another spin in a week or so - a lot of organic non-musk/twitter content there now

It will take a lot to break the network effect of X, probably more so than many other platforms, because it's very detrimental to their reach (and income/revenue share) for people with a lot of followers to move. So the important people will mostly stay, and they will attract back the people who leave, we've seen this a couple of cycles. Contrast that to something like Facebook. It had large network effects too, but all it takes is a few of your best friends switching at the same time, and nobody is losing a lot of reach by leaving. So they keep posting to both, but that takes work to keep up.

> the important people will mostly stay, and they will attract back the people who leave

Important people on the left (broadly, not just lefties) are starting to leave. I think Kara Swisher just deleted her Twitter and migrated to Threads.

What I'm seeing here is lots of echo chambers getting created as we speak. Threads, bluesky, etc... I don't use Threads because I don't use Instagram that much. Everyone will have their safe space and the world will continue without any issues whatsoever. Heck, there are countries where Facebook is the "internet". Other than the left (US, UK, Canada?) posting on any of those platforms, nothing will change for the rest of the world and each one will capture what the other side said and post it on the platform.

> lots of echo chambers getting created

And X transforming into a right-wing one.

> nothing will change for the rest of the world and each one will capture what the other side said and post it on the platform

Network effects almost guarantee each country will choose one. My guess is Europe will migrate away from X, mostly, while South America mirrors our left/right split.

This is interesting. We know twitter was left-wing all the way to the top and after Elon took and put both sides on equal footing, it suddenly became right-wing? C'mon man. Media is run by the left.

The EU is increasingly trying to suppress dissenting voices on one side of the aisle. We'll see how long people will put off with that before things get out of control.

South America is starting to divide itself between socialism (Venezuela, Bolivia, etc...) and center-right ideas (Argentina, El salvador). Time will tell.

Yep. There's this massive blind spot created by years of "moderation". All the media has been heavily left leaning, as well as all social media platforms. So sure, when a major social media platform removes restrictions it will of course feel to them like it's moving right, when in reality it's just balancing out. It's unacceptable for left leaning people to be subjected to any dissenting views, so they move elsewhere.

I’m skeptical it changes much. You don’t need different platforms to have echo chambers, a given platform can support more than one.

I don’t experience twitter as a right wing app at all, for example

I've moved sharply right in the past 4 years. But I still see plenty left content on X so it doesn't seem like a complete echo chamber to me.

It could be that the "left" content that reaches me is whatever enrages the people I follow, so I get an extreme view of what the left thinks now. That is a danger in the "for you tab", but I also follow plenty of people directly on the left of the spectrum.

> because it's very detrimental to their reach (and income/revenue share) for people with a lot of followers to move

That's a problem for, like, Twitter-celebrities, sure. What percentage of Twitter users are actually interested in these, tho? I don't think, back when I was on Twitter, that I followed anyone who made money via Twitter; the only Twitter celebrities I followed were dril and a cat, and I don't think either were making money on Twitter (at any event, both dril and the cat are now on Bluesky; the cat is also on Mastodon).

I'm sure there are plenty of people selling, like, get-rich-quick schemes and so on who are dependent on Twitter, but, well, who cares about them?

I think that just based on the properties of the network/graph, it's unlikely that enough important accounts will leave, and therefore people who are interested in them can't leave. Anyone who's built a good audience is unlikely to want the platform to die, that's a big risk to them. Some people are just famous in general, and they might have an easier time migrating to new platforms and have people following them, but still, why give up all your followers?

You see people like Yann LeCun announcing his leaving. Then he comes back and posts "teasers" of his Threads posts, and he's retweeting posts showing that he's still active. And this guy works for a competing social network!

Maybe this time is different, the left's hate for Musk runs deep now, but my bet is X will be fine in the end.

Hrm. Very little of my Twitter usage was following ultra-high-follower accounts, and of those I did follow, most of them ended up simul-posting on Mastodon and/or Bluesky. I'm not sure how typical a use pattern this was, mind you.

I just joined -- contrary to this, my 'Discover' feed (equiv to Twitter's 'For You') is mostly dogs and nature photos, rather than anti-Musk content.

Still not really what I'm after, but that's what the 'Following' tab is for.

Same, except I mostly got cats and some stuff about video games and book quotes. There was another thread here the other day where someone was complaining that the first things they saw were furry drawings. It seems like there's a variety of first things people see on Bluesky.

Just posted another comment, I have 0 following and followers and I see political content as soon as I log in: https://imgur.com/a/XHmidRt

Maybe you should follow some people?

My point is that it should not be that vitriolic as soon as someone joins. When I joined Twitter, I got actually interesting content, but of course that was way before Musk and "the algorithm" now. Sad to see that Bluesky is basically replicating the same thing that Twitter is doing currently, instead of how Twitter was in the beginning.

That appears to be your "following" feed

As I mentioned above, I have 0 following and followers, so it takes the discover tab content to show on the following tab, even though the correct behavior would be to show nothing. Therefore, since Bluesky deliberately does this, I don't see it as being better than Twitter at all, engagement chasing wise. After all, it is VC backed and will need to make money somehow.

> even though the correct behavior would be to show nothing

I think I see the problem. There's room for disagree about what the "correct" behavior is in this edge case of a user making unusual decisions about how to use the app. I can see it either way and there are probably pros and cons but "show them whatever bullshit" is not obviously incorrect compared to "show them nothing at all."

If you're refusing to use even the most basic tools to shape your feed or give it any clues about what to show you you're kind of in UI UB territory.

I understand your point but I find it interesting that others cannot.

IMHO, online bickerers don't care for understanding. Understanding requires responding, not reacting. If we take a step back to contemplate your words, we lose the stimulation in the exchange.

I've thought about that for myself: missing the other person's point and debating imaginary outrages isn't actually fun or even winning. It's just stimulation for an internet addiction.

What country are you in? I'm seeing mostly nature photos and other non-political content (albeit I'm viewing signed out), but I'm not in the US.

I joined recently and haven’t seen any of that. In fact it just feels like old Twitter where people are having fun instead of being pompous trolls

Mine is like the old Twitter and is rife with political meltdowns and “own the libs” memes.

I also basically only follow indie hackers and some “thought leader” types like Naval Ravikant.

Every time I launch the X app on mobile, it automatically switches me to the algorithmic “For You” feed, so it’s hard to miss. This is apparently not configurable in the app.

When I’m on desktop, the Control Panel for Twitter does a good job of getting rid of most of that.

I tolerate X, I wouldn’t say I like it but I like reading and connecting with certain people and their only platform is X.

I think that’s what keeps X going: network effect.

You should be able to stay on Following, they made that change a while back. I.e., once you choose Following, you will keep going there till you change it.

That's not how it works on my iPhone or iPad, unfortunately -- and I just replaced and clean installed my iPad this week. It even happens when I quickly switch from and back to the X app.

Maybe my user account isn't in that feature pool yet?

I just logged in again, I have 0 following and 0 followers and this is what I see [0], straight up political content, even on the Following tab, for some reason. I simply don't care to see political content right when I log in, and this phenomenon shows me that it has the exact same problems as Twitter, people posting ragebait to get engagement, just on the opposite of the spectrum.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/XHmidRt

And why do you think that is?

Probably because that's what people engage with the most and is thus shown to users who just start off on the platform, as I mentioned. Note that while Bluesky is open source, its feed algorithm actually is not open source, so it can be just as bad as Twitter.

If you don’t follow enough people or feeds to fill your Following feed it can add some of the most popular posts of the moment, just to make sure there’s something there, which right now will be about a major political event that just happened. I’m not sure what else you would expect?

If you don’t like how the algorithm works you can write your own (that’s what feeds are - custom algorithms).

If these are the most popular posts on the platform it is a clear indication of BS having the same lopsided political bias as Twitter had before it became X and with that it is just a refuge for those who prefer a platform with a similarly narrow window of allowed discourse also known as an echo chamber. If that is what you like BS may be appealing but for those who like to voice dissent - even if only to rile up the regulars - it is probably less than welcoming.

I don't like the format used by X, BS, Mastodon and all the others so I do not use any of them but I do passively partake of what is posted on them. In practice this comes down to probably 95% X, 5% Mastodon/Pleroma and that's it. I have yet to find a BS post of interest and won't use Threads because I don't do Metafacebookthings.

Obviously it’s left-leaning. X is pushing to the right. People are voting with their feet as a natural result: “like Twitter but not an alt-right foghorn” is a good enough selling point. It probably won’t stay that way as it gains traction.

However, it’s not just that. If you want to see more tailored content you have to follow people. Expecting to see anything other than the most currently-popular posts when you’re not following anyone and haven’t set any preferences is frankly ridiculous.

One thing I will say though is that although BSky has good science and arts communities the tech community seems to be sticking with Mastodon.

Because that is representative of the largely unpleasant user base.

unfortunately you have to train the algorithm to your liking by blocking everything (IIRC there's also a dislike button somewhere?)

not unlike reddit where the first thing you should do is unsubscribe from every single default subreddit (if you visit the home page at all, anyway) - this has been true for as long as I've been there (a decade, and I haven't really visited for the past couple years)

I don't have an account and all I see on the front page is posts about how bluesky is better than Twitter and how trump is Satan. There was one digital art piece of the moon over a lake.

When I joined mastodon like a decade ago it was mostly "meta" content. People talking about mastodon and ActivityPub itself. It was honestly great and there were many interesting folks & nerds talking about interesting technological stuff. It was more like hacker news, unlike now. I am a bit sad that it got more popular but it's still quite good. So yeah, some people actually want "niche" content and not mainstream content.

I think as a site starts, you might see that, but as it matures it diversifies. Definitely on Blue Sky, which doesn't default to an algorithmic feed, what you see depends on who you follow and as more groups move there the diversity of content increases.

You can see how that's going with the Blue Sky Starter pack directory https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all which currently has over 12000 entries across a wide range of topics.

Twitter shows you what you want because you have been a long time user and have tuned the feed

Any other platform you adopt will likewise need the same tuning, and it should be no surprise that if it knows nothing about you, you will see content that is widely appealing to the rest of the community (who just left xitter)

I’m new to bluesky and am making liberal use of the “show me less of this” button as I try to discover people with reading.

It will take some time until it reads less like the front page of Reddit and more like a feed I want to engage with.

>Twitter shows you what you want because you have been a long time user and have tuned the feed

You have way too much faith in how fancy these algorithms are.

Agree. I don't understand why anyone cares. If you talk to Jack and Jill on Twitter, why does it matter if you now talk to Jack and Jill on <insert platform here>.

It's not going to change your life or any situation you are in. Nobody outside of this circle is going to care or even notice. But that's true of all these online things, petitions, social drama, and so on.

Everyday life goes on. I'm having a late breakfast. Then doing some important work.

It feels more snappy to me than Twitter/X.

This seems to be a USP: https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds

And no addictive cat videos please.

Bonus points: install this for facebook: https://socialfixer.com/

This is my hide posts section of socialfixer:

Reels and short videos

Join

Sponsored

Reels

I’d really recommend muting the words “Twitter”, “the bad place” and “the other place” - really makes your feed better

> When I joined it, just as when I joined Mastodon, most of what I saw was just anti-Twitter and anti-Musk content

Was this during one of the major outflow events from Twitter? If so, hardly surprising; most new arrivals would have just left Twitter and would be irritated about the whole situation. Over the last week I've noticed a good deal of that sort of content in my Discover tab, but it's largely eased off now (yesterday was probably peak leaving-Twitter day, until the next stupid Musk thing happens; today is the day that the new TOS goes into effect).

This was a while ago during their private beta, perhaps 6 months ago? Regardless, this is what I see on my Following tab when I just logged in now, even though I have no following or followers: https://imgur.com/a/XHmidRt

> even though I have no following or followers

Ah, yeah, that might do it. You're probably just getting ~whatever's currently most popular, with no other guidance.

These days, when you sign up, you apparently get asked for interests, and it pre-primes The Algorithm(TM), but yeah, that wasn't a thing during the closed beta.

True, I joined during the beta. They really should have some default filtering of content for those who have not yet followed anyone, because seeing the homepage like I posted above made me not want to even interact with Bluesky anymore, which is likely how other people would feel as well.

Yeah, ditto. "1M people" seems great but it turns out that you don't really want people who joined due to the result of an election.

I joined yesterday and was overwhelmed by the same things, but I found the mute keyword feature and with a few muted keywords, it's a lot more useful for me. No need to mass mute/block the users, just mute twitter, musk, trump

I joined shortly after it was apparent that Twitter was turning into 4chan. Bit of a ghost town at first, but in the last few months it turned into a perfectly suitable replacement for what Twitter used to be.

Then after the election I deleted all my social media accounts. I'm taking the next 2 years as a mental health break. I decided staying on top of which political out groups are being shat upon on a daily basis wasn't worth the the mental toll it was taking. I'll see you at the polls in 2 years.

So I've mostly sat out on social media in the past 20 years - I never hopped onto the Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, anything bandwagons - and I conclude I've been absolutely fine missing the minute-to-minute beat. I certainly have no problem keeping up with the times vs. other friends, nor have I accomplished any less, nor diversified my activities or knowledge any less.

Everything of true, lasting value gets repeated by friends in group chats (my preferred online social fix), or referenced in articles, and reaches me soon enough.

Social media is the text equivalent of mindlessly scrolling TikTok/YouTube Shorts. Can be entertaining (and entertainment is important), but is mostly just a waste of time.

Sure, from that aspect it makes sense. But there are companies who use Twitter, Discord, Facebook, et al for support and notifications (which I'm not a fan of). It's hard to avoid in those situations.

Seems pretty easy to avoid those situations to me? I've never had a Twitter or Facebook account, tend to participate in the modern economy at least as much as the average person if not a lot more, and never once have wished I could tweet at a company for some reason or the other.

I'm sure I'm missing something - but I'm also equally as sure that it's a net gain in my life vs. a loss.

It's quite possible to interact with nearly every company out there without using social media.

Whilst it's still developing I think Bluesky is doing quite a lot of things right.

Specifically the starter packs and lists make it easy to find the kind of content you're interested in and the openness to third party integrations and API mean that people can easily build cool adjacent services.

One small example I liked of this is the list of Kubernetes org members https://bit.ly/k8s-bsky which is updated automatically based on Github profiles with Blue Sky links in them, who are in the org.

Is the link correct? It's behind a login wall.

Seems to be, think you need to be logged in to Blue Sky to see it.

As much as I hoped Mastodon to win (even backed their Patreon for a year), they kept underestimating the onboarding friction and now that the general audience was ready to switch, of course they went for the twitter clone that is easy to join and looks familiar.

This is true. The trouble is, I don't see anything preventing it having all the same problems. I actually like Mastodon because it feels a bit more like the old internet. I'm thinking maybe onboarding friction is a feature not a bug.

As an anecdote, an online comment responding to someone asking if their choice of server matters (e.g. if their Mastodon account would be visible to someone using another server) was roughly "no, as long as your servers federate with each other."

I would be able to parse that, but it seems rather out-of-touch for trying to attract the bulk of Twitter users. Meanwhile, Bluesky offers a de facto server with some (lesser?) amount of decentralization that's largely invisible to end users.

Yes, it's almost as if the general populace actually like centralization, even as many tech people on HN don't want to believe it.

“Liking it” is a stretch, I’m sure most normal people don’t have a real opinion on the subject; they just want to use whatever is frictionless and easy to understand

I should've said "prefer" rather than "like" then, as it's not a conscious understanding of centralization vs decentralization but that the centralized one is nicer and easier for people to use.

For me Mastodon misses some common workflows I have. When I find someone interesting I like to easily see who they follow with bios and then I may follow some of those. In Twitter and Bluesky this is pretty easy, in Mastodon it's hard and has a lot of friction points.

Bluesky aka "this time it's different". I found my home in the Fediverse.

Is there anyone here who uses Bluesky for its own sake rather than protesting against Twitter/Musk/etc.? Trying to understand if it have any inherent pros in terms of design or operation. IMO all these platforms thrive on network effects and their value grows exponentially as their size grows.

The main advantages are the lack of bots (for now) and the lack of the paid blue checks. The former is a major improvement because it improves the overall quality of the tweets.

My major reason for using it is how open the platform is. I run a community project that involves posting pictures to multiple social media sites at once. Posting to Twitter was fine up until Elon's takeover broke a bunch of things. My API access got turned on and off repeatedly for unknown reasons. Checking the Twitter forums showed that this was happening to other developers as well with little response from the team there.

Bluesky on the other hand has been open first. You can now host your own Personal Data Server (PDS) which means if you ever want to post to the network you are basically never blocked from doing so.

I kept posting on Twitter manually (along side automatic posts to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads) because people were there but with this latest shift in interest having to post manually is a pain so I'm dropping Twitter.

I use BlueSky because others seem to be using BlueSky. I think this is the simplest and most common reason.

Why would this be any better or worse than Twitter?

Won’t it be the same with fewer but growing number of users?

It's oddly different. I think the reasons are subtle, but exist.

I know one technical difference: if someone quote-tweets to dunk on you, you can stop it.

There must be more like that, because the effect is readily noticeable.

It doesn't stop the dunking because people will quickly adjust to use screenshots instead of detachable quote-tweets, but you're less likely to stumble on it, everyone remains in their bubble.

Although it’s strongly left-leaning at the moment it’s not exclusively that. I’ve seen some conversations where the “bubbles” (as you say) crossed, which would have exploded on both Twitter and Mastodon. Being able to cut out people when they start screaming and being abusive definitely helps to maintain a more chill atmosphere.

It adds _friction_ to the process, though. Never underestimate the laziness of annoying internet people.

Whatever's good enough to preserve the atmosphere is good enough.

For a side project I created a new account on X and on Bluesky, both before the election.

Bluesky asks what my interests are. I said software engineering, science and tech. Bluesky showed a lot of posts of cool space photos.

X asks me to follow an account from a list. I chose NASA. Out of curiosity I checked out the "For you" tab on this brand new account. I did not get recommended space photos. X pushed a lot of political posts, some bordering on hate speech (one used the n-word).

I don't quite know what explains the differences between the new-account experiences, but I had a much better time on Bluesky. I don't know if this will last, or if Bluesky is destined to follow in Twitter's footsteps once more people start joining, but I think right now Bluesky is in a good spot.

Did you try Mastodon?

No. I should probably give it a go

(I have a mastodon account from 2017(!), but there was so little activity back then I think I just forgot it was there.)

- No pay-for-attention model.

- Third party clients available.

- Blocklists and other more sophisticated custom moderation available.

- Threads and profiles accessible to non-logged-in people (note that you can read the linked post and its replies without being logged in; on Twitter you at minimum couldn't see the replies, and depending on the account/phase of moon might just get an error for the actual post.)

- Less deranged leadership (at least now that Dorsey has flounced off).

- Blocking works.

For now.

I was a private alpha tester "when it was cool" but I get the feel they're taking the discord approach of things.

I predict that in a year you will soon be charged for uploading videos and or something of the likes.

Last week I deleted my account. Now proud to be 99.8% (HN, LinkedIn) social network free.

Yeah, their plans for monetisation seem to be along those lines, vs Twitter's pay-for-attention thing.

I am personally curious into what Linked will devolve eventually.

Is linkedin not already in a devolved state?

It's hard to imagine it being more off-putting than it already is.

The only useful part is the Rolodex of past co-workers and bosses to message when you’re looking for a job or looking for someone to hire. As long as they don’t ruin that, it can’t get worse than it already is, because nothing else about it matters.

What's Bluesky monetization strategy? Are they net positive financially?

I ask because if they are operating on red, chances are they might start doing some of the things Twitter currently does.

They've started charging for an easy verified domain thingy (https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan - Doing it yourself involves messing with DNS records), and I _think_ they said they'd charge for longer/higher quality video uploads (video currently limited to 60s) and profile customisation stuff. They've claimed they won't do targeted ads; we'll see how long that lasts.

While this seems like a reasonable way to start monetising, I would add that the domain verification is very straightforward for anyone who's touched nameservers before. As an aside, their use of domains seems like a relatively clean way to inherit existing identity verification, particularly for organisations.

> I would add that the domain verification is very straightforward for anyone who's touched nameservers before.

This kind of feels like a bit of an example of this: https://xkcd.com/2501/ :)

Perhaps one in a thousand people on earth have ever even _heard_ of a nameserver. I'd agree that if you've done anything with one before, the domain verification is fairly trivial, but most people have not.

Right, I really just meant the last sentence in your comment but that could have been phrased more clearly. I definitely support having the easier option!

I'm not sure you're aware of what's happening on Twitter, but for starters it's called X now for some reason, crazy I know.

Everyone knows. That isn't remotely related to my question though.

The owner of bluesky doesn't artifically inject themselves on top of your feed.

People can't pay to force themselves to the top of the replies.

I'm pretty nervous that neither Wayback Machine nor archive-dot-today appear to be able to snapshot Bluesky posts. Between this and paywalls, I'm not aware of an alternative user-accessible check against edited / deleted posts.

Might as well be a Telegram/Discord channel, or a Futaba Channel site. At least vBulletin could be archived.

Looks like there's a page on https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Bluesky for it though.

Maybe they just didn't add the functionality yet? There's another post somewhere here from someone saying that consuming the entire bluesky firehose (which I take to mean all new posts) costs them $2.50 a month.

Maybe the world would be better if we just didn't have a service that allows everyone to shout whatever is on their mind in to the internet void?

I'm glad X is dying; is a replacement really needed?

> Maybe the world would be better if we just didn't have a service that allows everyone to shout whatever is on their mind in to the internet void?

The older I get and the more syndical I seem, the more I agree with this. The problem is its no longer just "the internet void". That would suggest that nobody ever reads some of the nonsense.

It should have been obvious though when you give everyone an opinion that their ramblings are some kind of 'insight' and should be heard. It's exhausting, I hope the next stage of social media is it's boycott.

/rant

I remember the backlash to livejournal among the web forum community that I frequented over a decade ago.

Little did we all know that in just a few years the entire internet would pivot to the most inane, short-form, self centered and low information content possible, and that most people would become addicted to it.

Seems like many people disagree, but at least a few of us know this is correct. More people will learn the same lessons eventually, though not likely enough people to stop history from repeating.

Personally, I enjoyed old!Twitter, and am glad that there are two (or charitably three, but I don't really _get_ Threads) viable replacements. No need for you to use it, naturally, but I'm glad it's there.

Forums. Back to forums. Heavily administered/modded, stay on topic, small communities. No, not (sub)Reddit.

Is this worth trying? I tried Threads when it came out and very quickly regretted it. Is this a legit replacement for X/Twitter?

Yes, it's basically Twitter without the paid blue checks.

Yet.

Maybe we’re all looking for a replacement for something that can no longer exist on the Internet. Maybe we don’t miss Twitter as much as we miss the Internet of yore.

Maybe not, but worth thinking about.

I can't get behind a build platform that requires you to login to read

I don't really do any twitter style social media but just from checking the occasional post I can tell it's taking off because angry right wing trolls have started appearing in the replies.

I'm guessing the technical and social response to that (ignoring and blocking seems to be recommended, dunk-quoting their idiocy actively advised against) will determine the long term success as a useful site.

> I'm guessing the technical and social response to that (ignoring and blocking seems to be recommended, dunk-quoting their idiocy actively advised against) will determine the long term success as a useful site.

One thing that Bluesky has over Twitter is the first-party concept of a moderation list; people can maintain lists of accounts, and people who trust those lists can use them to mass-mute/block the people on the lists. This actually used to be a somewhat common user-driven behaviour on Twitter (I once managed to offend Milo Yiannopoulos on Twitter, back when he was still a darling of the far-right, and use of mass-block-lists was the only way to remove the hordes of angry teenagers from my at-mentions), but it was always clunky due to lack of first-party support, and post-Musk it became increasingly difficult with the death of the API.

I get the sense that the sort of people who move to Bluesky are against the things such platforms need to do to make money.

And yet such platforms need money to run.

The problem with X is, even if Elon is totally committed to free speech (I believe he really is) the perception is hard to shake as he is very active politically. Maybe this is why tradition media has usually had a political leaning.

He bans journalists and others who criticise him. Why do you think he is committed to free speech, rather than speech he likes?

> The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

He bans journalists?

That's troubling to hear. Can you give an example of a journalist he has banned?

https://newrepublic.com/post/186423/elon-musk-x-suspends-jou...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/x-temporary-ban-jo...

Who did he ban?

Most notably there was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensi...

But it has been ongoing, eg https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-st..., https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/15/elon-musk-led-twitter-suspen..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-mus...

I checked your first link.

“ On December 16, 2022, Musk stated that account access would only be restricted for seven days[2][3][5] and on December 17, 2022, some accounts were reportedly restored with Musk citing Twitter community polls as the reason for the reversal.”

This was something to do with tracking Musk’s location and sharing it on Twitter, according to your link.

I can’t be bothered to validate your secondary links.

Posting publicly available flight ADSB information (you can even set up a tracker at home to track overhead flights) is not "tracking someone's location" or private info.

> I can’t be bothered to validate your secondary links.

That’s a shame. They’re more challenging for you to refute.

Some are here https://observer.com/2022/12/elon-musk-suspend-twitter-accou... There was also Dell Cameron for reporting about a Twitter hack; Liam Nissan, TrueAnon, for poking fun at Musk; Ken Klippensten for sharing an embarrassing document about JD Vance before the election, Alan MacLeod & Steven Monacelli for who knows what.

He frivolously sued orgs whose speech affects his bottom line in order to bankrupt them, like the Center for Countering Digital Hate, MediaMatters or Global Alliance for Responsible Media. There was him folding without a fight to censorship requests from India and Turkey. There's him banning the use of 'cis' and 'cisgender' on Twitter, and Pro-Palestinian phrase "from the river to the sea".

Altogether, it paints a picture of someone whose stated commitment to free-speech is not backed by facts, and entirely self-serving.