How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers | Hacker News Reader

How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers

zdnet.com

61 pointsohjeez50 comments

If you don't own the domain your content is served from, you have nothing. With control of the domain there will always be some way to redirect or migrate, but without that, you'll always be at the mercy of the domain owner. I don't know if there were any alternate proposals, but it is a shame of internet history web and email weren't focused on domain ownership first, with different subdomains proxied/routed to other services.

Unfortunately, realistically, you can only really rent your domain, no?

The POSSE model prevails here (post on your own site, syndicate elsewhere)

See also: the US Postal service almost giving everyone in the country an email address. It didn't have to be this way!

Hey that seems like an interesting tidbit of information. Do you have more details or do you remember where you learned about that? I would be interested to know why it did not happen.

I can't remember where I originally saw it. Hopefully another commented can assist, but it's at least discussed in chapter eight of this report https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ota/Ota_4/DATA/1982/8214.PDF

Really wish people were migrating to Mastodon, or even to Threads, since Threads can federate.

IMHO, the lesson from the corruption of Twitter should be don't build your social network on a proprietary walled garden.

I like Mastodon better too, but non-technical users seem to find it too complicated/nerdy. Threads is easy to use but apparently suppresses posts containing political content and perhaps as a result of inheriting Instagram's userbase, has an issue with users accusing other users of posting engagement bait, which isn’t conducive to building and sustaining a community.

Mastodon and Threads have also been comparatively slow/reluctant to respond to community feedback. With Mastodon this is understandable because it’s open source and resources are limited, but with Threads that’s not a problem which suggests it’s intentional.

Threads is another train wreck waiting to happen. The expected purpose of Meta can't be other than capturing a new data well.

"The corruption of Twitter"? Whenabout do you pinpoint that? For me, it took place when the platform went from being a place where virtually every user was just a regular person and it got raided and invaded by corporate media, "celebrities" and politicians, so pretty soon. Shortly afterwards it began curtailing freedom of speech heavily by way of very suspicious and surreptitious means (deplatforming, suppression of ideas, removal of posts, shadowbanning, penalizing certain keywords, collaborating with governments to silence opposition and dissent, etcetera). Only since Elon Musk took over all of those vile tactics went out the window globally, though I admit I don't like the walled-garden nature of it all one bit, but at least one can express oneself there more or less freely now, and community notes are truly a boon to every sane individual--albeit certainly not to legacy media and woke cultists.

With regards to federation, I think in this case it just takes the worst of both worlds, but to each their own. I'd prefer a truly decentralized approach.

Musk still does those things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Twitter_in_Brazi... he just has to be prodded a bit more (read it affects his wallet) or it has to be in favor of his particular politics https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/how-elon-musk-uses....

If you want to see the outcome of an unmoderated platform without consequences or accountability see how anonymous message boards evolve every time.

Society and face to face discussion has its own inherent methods of moderation so I don’t really understand this absolutist desire for an anonymous town square we can all yell vitriol at each other. And twitter isn’t even that.

I’d rather not respond to the user below (because I don’t have the energy to talk to anyone who uses the word “woke”), but I did find this pre-print interesting re potential Twitter algorithm manipulation: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/253211/

Thanks for the link!

>because I don’t have the energy to talk to anyone who uses the word “woke”

You did this to yourselves. You pushed the term (and the whole ideology--extreme constructivism under an abhorrent mockery of morality). Don't spit in the wind.

>Musk still does those things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Twitter_in_Brazi... he just has to be prodded a bit more (read it affects his wallet) or it has to be in favor of his particular politics https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/how-elon-musk-uses....

He doesn't. You didn't link to anything regarding what I explicitly mentioned. How dishonest of you (no surprise there). In fact, I knew someone would have the very same knee-jerk reaction you had and link that wikipedia article or a similar one. Go ahead, downvote me all you want. Silence my post just like Twitter used to do with non-woke standpoints. You won't have provided any real arguments to counter my original post, still. You're pointing to a whole other problem there: complying with court orders. And you can thank Lula for that.

>I don’t really understand this absolutist desire for an anonymous town square we can all yell vitriol at each other.

That's quite a ridiculous way of caricaturizing free speech. Whenever the truth emerges through the filth, it's "vitriol" and "hate speech" for your delusional lot. Wokeness lost. Own it. Now everyone can see everything for what it is, with no corporate, partisan or governmental censors trying to manipulate reality to fit their abject narrative.

“collaborating with governments to silence opposition and dissent” he reinstated the ban of opposition accounts in brazil at behest of Brazilian government. not sure how much more direct an example I could give.

It’s apparent that design decisions are made keeping Musk in mind. I won’t be surprised if a lot of people have blocked Musk on X as they don’t want to see propaganda being spewed. And, he wants them to see it. I cannot think of any other reason why this decision was made. Are there any?

That's not the way the change to blocking worked right? I haven't used the site since he became owner, but isn't the recent change that if you yourself have been blocked by someone, you will now be able to see their posts if they're public (just as if you were logged out) and you stumble onto them somehow?

So if Musk is being blocked all the time, he wouldn't be able to see posts from the randos who blocked him. His posts presumably would still be hidden by those who blocked him?

If you don't follow him and use "Following" instead of "For You", you will basically never see him.

"Following" is invariably better anyway, because then you're seeing the things you want to instead of the things that the algorithm suggests.

> And, he wants them to see it. I cannot think of any other reason why this decision was made. Are there any?

Yeah, because it didn't make any sense. All you had to do to see blocked content was to log out of Twitter.

It added friction, and that's often all that's needed to stop low-effort harassers (which are BY FAR the most numerous). Hell-bans work even better, and still do nothing that can't be seen publicly.

I guarantee you that they knew this. Everyone doing anything social knows it. It's an industry standard because it's extremely effective.

If you know the content existed, which in many cases you didn't. Like, most of the time the only time you saw blocked content was if somebody you followed quote-tweeted it (or they reply-tweeted to it and you investigated). Otherwise? It's like it doesn't exist at all.

It became even more difficult to see blocked content after Twitter nerfed the logged-out view of the site so you couldn't even see comment-threads.

It wasn't a perfect solution obviously but it helped. Helping is good.

On the other hand if someone blocks you yet your Twitter circle keeps interacting with that person–maybe because they are a big player in the space–your feed is full of "You cannot read this message" tombstones. It's stupid that you can't just see the tweet/reply at that point. And no less provocative.

I guess they could hide quote-tweets from people you follow if they responded to someone who blocked you but that has major drawbacks and is weirdly heavy handed. (Why should someone blocking me prevent me from seeing tweets from people I follow?)

I think Elon's change to the block system has the most sensible trade-offs in this example. If someone blocks you, their tweets don't show up on your feed, but you can still see them when they interact with other tweets and when people quote-tweet them. It should really just prevent interaction.

Blocking from interacting makes sense and from showing up in the feed/search results also makes sense, blocking from viewing at all encourages trolls and deceivers.

E.g. I’ve noticed cases where user A replies to user B, writes something pretending to carry on a conversation, then immediately after tweeting goes to block user B such that it looks like, to passing readers, that user B made a decision to stop responding.

Which of course, in addition to wrecking the credibility of user A and deceiving user B, slightly reduces the credibility of every other conversation chain on the site and the site itself, every time that is discovered.

I agree that that's a problem but this is the wrong solution. Letting the blockee see the blocker doesn't help them correct the record if the blocker has replied to them before blocking. They're still not permitted to reply. You can unblock-reply-block and do that all day under either model.

Imho the right answer is just to

a) Hide the blocker's replies to the blockee in an expand-to-view mode (like Twitter's View Hidden Replies feature) so that in a large conversation the non-blocking parties are the emphasized ones.

and

b) When shown explain that the reply was hidden because the reply-er has blocked the reply-ee.

I assume they want to make blocking semi-secret so it's not showing dirty laundry all over twitter to people who aren't involved in the feud, but either way if party A and B had an argument and then one side unilaterally prevents the other from continuing it, that should made visible to the reader.

Lately I've noticed on Reddit people blocking me the second they respond to me so that they have the last word in an e-fight*. Horrible implementation.

*yeah, 20 years on the internet and I still have that dog in me

Yeah reddit is full of shady tricks like that, either as design choices, admin policies, or by mod coalitions of major subreddits.

Edit: And probably via other ways I haven’t heard of.

So much so, and considering it has gone uncorrected for many years, that it seems likely that’s the intended purpose of the system, to dupe naive teenagers and other susceptible groups.

But I'd still be able to do my banking at X, right?

Title of this article is total b.s (although so was flagging this on HN).

However, the tool it mentions is pretty cool and frankly I'm surprised it even works considering Twitter shut down APIs a while back. I just tried it out and it helped me connect with over 200 folks on Bluesky that I'd been following on Twitter that I didn't know had migrated. Pretty handy... while it lasts.

pretty sure the article is confusing follows and followers -- you are definitely losing your followers

You’ll be happier with neither, but i support anyone getting off of X.

People about to learn the power of network effects.

Over the years social media companies learn this lesson as well. Maybe that time is here for Xitter.

Even if it is, Musk won. He got his $44 billion value back through getting premium position for all his government-contractor companies by becoming the President's right hand man. This is reflected in his share values climbing.

If this kills Twitter, I think Musk will be annoyed but it's still a net success for him.

On the other hand, spending huge amounts of money to become a Presidential advisor and then advising in a way that favors your own companies arguably is anti-competitive.

Next time Democrats are in control he may be looking at an antitrust lawsuit.

> Next time Democrats are in control he may be looking at an antitrust lawsuit.

The rule of law looks pretty ineffectual at that level. Only one of the various trials against Donald Trump got a verdict in the 4 years that he was out of office. Everything else ran out the clock and at this point is dead in the water.

That dog has no teeth anymore, and it likely won't in better health after Trump's people restructure the FTC and the Justice Department - considering Trump and Musk's respective run-ins with financial regulations I think it's safe to say those won't be stronger in 2028.

Given how fickle Trump is, and the fact that he is already talking shit about Elon ... it seems too soon to predict a massive success.

Heck, even the S&P 500 has already taken back all the gains from the post-election spaz. I don't think the economic prospects for Elon or anyone else look assured at this point.

Of course depends on how long Trump keeps him around. Once X is useless, does he have any use for Musk?

I sense an ego clash coming regardless.

The man is so egotistical that every penny he loses hurts him a lot. Losing this amount of money will bother him massively.

I don't follow Musk's personality foibles closely at all, but from what I have seen, I get the sense that profit is not one of the things he ties closely to his aggrandized self-image. Wealth, yes, but only in the sense that it is for spending to do great things, even if the profit isn't there, like "protecting freedom of speech" (there aren't enough quotation marks in the universe). I.e. Tony Stark, not Gordon Gekko.

Another name to throw out there when discussing time in the limelight versus numbers going up: Larry Ellison.

Don’t assume network effect trumps all else. The annals of the internet are full of dead social networks where the network effect was overwhelmed by operator stupidity (see Friendster, MySpace, Digg, Livejournal, arguably Tumblr).

[flagged]

Ok, but please don't fulminate on Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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