Bluesky just crossed 20M users
bsky-users.theo.io
bsky-users.theo.io
I was searching for an apolitical, more progressive, and intellectual space, but this didn’t meet those expectations. A significant number of users appear to spend their time copying and pasting tweets to comment on them without engaging directly on X, which I find odd.
For context, I’m not a Truth Social user, and I haven’t used X for several years. I prefer to keep my political views private, confined to the voting booth. My goal was simply to find a platform for sharing and discussing ideas.
Which makes it all the stranger that you're complaining about others doing the same.
It’s not for me; it may be for you and apparently it’s worth a try for at least 20 million individuals.
This is a concept I struggle with. HN tries to be culture and politically agnostic, but culture and politics drive everything. I think it's intellectually lazy to suggest that this shouldn't be a place for smart people to discuss important issues because the reality is that those places are woefully uncommon.
Begging for forums and content to be apolitical is just willfully wearing blinders. It may be great for mental health, but it's probably not great for society. It's on the same philosophical slope of "I don't want to be political, I just want to make great bombs for whoever."
Politics is still largely a national affair. One will often observe online discussions of some topic which isn’t in itself nation-specific get derailed into tangents about US national politics - and for non-Americans, that can be an annoying and alienating distraction. So an online space with cultural norms (or moderation) against political tangents can be more globally inclusive as a result.
Even transnational politics tends to be somewhat region-specific: Brexit was a much bigger deal for people in France than for people in Japan, for cross-strait or inter-Korea relations it is the other way around
Of course, intellectually curious people will often be interested in reading intelligent takes on the politics of the other side of the planet, even if it has minimal relevance to their own life. But a lot of online political discussion isn’t like that, it is just tribal point scoring and repetitive predictable talking points that have been said a thousand times before
Plus, when i try to think of something apolitical, HN is clearly not the first thing that pops to mind. Yeah, it 'tries', indeed
A few days back when I was starting out, the Discover feed was mostly random.
What does 'apolitical' mean, though? At some level, everything is political. Like, unless you want to restrict it to entirely cat photos, I'm not sure how this would work.
I'm a fan of Elon and Twitter, but post-Elon, my Twitter feed is far more filled with culture war nonsense, political flamebait, etc.
Here are some examples of political links (from HN / Reddit): "Trump picks Dr. Oz to run Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services", "If the US tries mass deportations, what happens if all other countries refuse to take them?", "Marjorie Taylor Greene Suggests Releasing All Ethics Reports, Not Just Gaetz's: "If We're Going to Dance, Let's All Dance In The Sunlight'", "Russia says Ukraine attacked it using U.S. long-range missiles, signals it's ready for nuclear response", "Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary says ‘there is no climate crisis’"
While this trope is always parroted, not everything has to be political tbh. Normal people I know will classify the first group as "apolitical" while the second group as "political" discussions.
Every workplace has “office politics” - e.g. managers fighting over which team does what or which projects get funded. Even community organisations, hobby groups, kids sports teams, volunteer groups, churches/synagogues/mosques/etc, open source projects, inevitably end up with politics of this kind. You might call this “private politics”, the internal politics of private organisations, whether for-profit or not-for-profit
But that’s a rather different thing from public politics, electoral politics, political parties and candidates, lobbying for or against legislation, etc. Every workplace has private politics but not every workplace has public politics. If the job itself doesn’t explicitly intersect with the publicly political (e.g. you work for a political party, elected official, political consulting firm, activist group, etc), then how much presence public politics has really comes down to the norms and culture of the workplace, which are largely up to the senior leadership (although the wider background culture also plays some role-certain professions/industries tend to have a built-in political lean, at least in some countries, so if the senior leadership doesn’t push neutrality in publicly politics as a norm, that lean may determine the norm de facto)
In practice, a lot of the time when people say “political”, they mean the “public politics” which only explicitly exists in some spaces, not the “private politics” which is universal. To respond by pointing out that “private politics” is indeed (near-)universal, or that public politics ends up touching implicitly on a lot of things that aren’t explicitly involved in it, is turning the conversation into a pointless game of semantics by ignoring what the person you are responding to is actually using the word “political” to mean
I don't discuss politics either, but i had good interactions on both of these platforms.
I could never get into Twitter because to me the signal to noise is just abysmal, and Bluesky seems to be more of the same.
Over the weekend a lot of journalists in my country (Austria) moved over to Bluesky (Including one with > 600k followers) and with the "starter packs" on Bluesky (Curated list of people you can follow with one click) it was possible to adopt it very quickly and have an active and useful feed without a long onboarding time to make it your own.
Apparently there are shared block lists too, but I haven't tried those yet.
My impression was that blocks on Bluesky seem like a great way to censor dissent and criticism which only seems to fuel echo chambers.
Blocking someone not only stops them from interacting with you in the future but also seems to hide their criticism from public view.
It's literally the same reason behind reading HN. A HN with a higher ground noise but much more real-time, interactive and orders of magnitude higher bandwidth.
You just need to curate things very hard so make sure you keep enough signal above the nose to be worth it.
Signal to noise on Bluesky is about as bad as on Twitter, I think it's just that the type of platform and the format are not conductive to good communication. It's the equivalent of panning for hours and hours to find a tiny bit of gold, it's just not worth the time you waste on it.
Twitter was great for getting intermittent announcements. Not so great at facilitating a respectful dialogue.
Allow me to improve your life by freeing up massive amounts of time.
For any given field, say AI or programming, find the best weekly newsletter. Subscribe to a few of them, read them for a few weeks, and cut them down to the smallest number possible.
Anything of any importance in the field will be in that newsletter. Designate a fixed moment in your weekly schedule to read/skim them and be done with it. You can now delete the social media app.
I used to spent 2 hours per day "following tech news" and such. It's mostly noise and you'll be tempted to hang around and hate-read the social outrage of the day.
Somebody has sifted through all that garbage for you and put the gems in a newsletter, for free. Make use of it.
The data architecture starts eith a personal cryptographic data store. Which can have endless different types of data in it. So for example you can have SmokeSignals Events in your feed or FrontPage reddit like in your feed. https://bsky.app/profile/smokesignal.events
And it's all open data. So we can analyze thr network & try to spot & root out large influence campaigns, find patterns of behavior that bad actors and sometimes state sponsored actors are pushing on the network.
There's so many open possibilities here. I can get how on the surface this looks "the same old with a fresh paint of cost," but the techies are moving here en masse because we believe this is so much more fertile a ground with so much more potential & possibility, we believe it will be a place we can put in energy & ongoingly iterate & improve social networking.
And the team has very explicitly designed the system to assume that someday BlueSky may become the problem. It's not fully tested at scale but we have the technical ability to walk away, & keep the social network going, if the BlueSky corporation ever loses our trust.
It's sad that there's such a fatalistic nihilistic air about, that judgements are so quick to be called. It's still early days for the AtProtocol/BlueSky, but we already see the protocols not platforms decisions here enabling experiences so far beyond what BlueSky corporation alone could ever hope to provide, and that ever-richening interconnection & potentiation is incredibly alluring & a chance unlike any we've seen in a generation.
It's a centralized service run by a company. It's not much different from (early) Twitter. In the end. See this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42178543
Enjoying your link. Pfrazee is such a straight shooter. His post doesn't seem to support the idea that this is centralized. And the whole team keeps saying things like "the network should outlast the company"; everyone has been very vocal about that. https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lau2bgyolc2g
There's absolutely for sure social challenges with clickbait. I'd love to see labelers spring up which users can opt into to give some forewarning, which can label posts as clickbait or misleading or not-supported-bt-their-links, et cetera.
Bluesky already has great defenses against some of the worse forms of inflammatory discourse. If someone reskeets only to dog pile on you, you can remove your inner skeet from theirs. Your blocks can remove previous interactions you've had from your feeds. When people are coming in to flame you, there's a much more mature set of tools on Bluesky to handle it.
Are you aware that Bluesky is censoring posts algorithmically? X is full of people posting videos of themselves starting with a brand new account with zero followers, posting something the left doesn't like (e.g. "there are only two genders") and the account is instantly suspended.
It's unclear how this is compatible with the idea of user-driven decentralized networks or moderation. Maybe they'll implement that one day but by then it'll be too late. Everyone who might benefit from user-driven decentralized labelling will have simply given up and gone back to X years earlier.
People interested primarily in intentionally shitty inflammatoryness had taken over X. We are all so excited not to be surrounded by antagonistic bluecheck trolls being top-ranked & algorithmically boosted.
I have a hard time believing there's a problem here. This seems ideal. You could host your own PDS very easily if you still wanted to be part of this, and I expect it would then be up to moderation lists & labelers to handle this retrograde junk. The protocols exist & are available to all. Thankfully gratis hosting on Bluesky isn't unconditional too.
Also funny that mastodon seems to be losing to a company. IMO amount of users is irrelevant.
There's value in both, I could see Bluesky as a Twitter alternative (jouralists, brand accounts, viral posts etc.) while Mastodon is like the oldschool blogs that you follow for very specific niches.
That's how I currently use it and it works well. There's enough space for multiple platforms, I wouldn't say Mastodon is "losing".
And here, due to the nature of the already corporatized nature of Bluesky, there is one such central funnel where people can converge.
Am I way off thinking that there would be?
https://www.finsmes.com/2024/10/bluesky-raises-15m-in-series...
I am aware of their fundraising so far, but that was prior to what feels like their most important growth rate/wave.
Does the last week change anything with regard to financial pressure, like potential buyout suitors?
I mean Zuck noticed, and is making changes to Threads…
Social networks are about the people and some of Twitters biggest draws for me have left for BlueSky. In the last month the vibrancy and activity in the community feels like it's jumped a to a whole new level. I think the real question is if they can sustain it.
Oh oh, also as mentioned in another thread, API openness sure is fun, as it was in early Twitter.... Already ported some bot type accounts over with ease. But that's about it. Fun hobby type stuff. We've been here before.
The natural cycle of communication apps is that people use them for a while and then the vendor stops maintaining and people keep using them for a while until something new comes along and then it is too late for the old app. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market
If you were born in 2000 you might be excused for realizing that somebody born in the 1970s may have used
Compuserve
The Source
Unafilliated BBSes
Fidonet
Various chat applications for UNIX and VMS
USENET
IRC
CuSeeMe
ICQ
AOL Instant Messenger
MSN Instant Messenger
Facebook Instant Messenger
10+ off-brand MSFT chat applications (When you have so many even Skype and Teams are off brands!)
PalTalk
Tivejo (fork of the above with a user registration system that I wrote)
Go2Meeting
It has nothing to do with proprietary vs open source, as open source products (say GNOME) are frequently run by people who couldn't care what the users think. It's got less to do with the profit motive than it has to do with penny pinching, in fact non-profits burn out before for-profits because at lest the for-profits have a motivation structure for people to improve things and non-profits by definition do not.
It's a fair assumption that Bluesky is going to suck in 10 years just as none of the things above had more than 10 years. Bluesky is going to spend a dollar on me and all the other (roughly) 15 M users they have now and there's no reason you shouldn't enjoy it now any more than you should let awareness of your mortality spoil all the joys you could be having right now.
It's an interesting question to what extent an "open" platform can resist this. I like the system of POTS and text messaging which is highly interoperable between carriers but has proven to be co-optable by the likes of Facetime.
In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. Email is a nominally open protocol but Gmail's dominance makes it not so if you care about getting your mail delivered.
This is an often-repeated myth.
I have a lot of experience with XMPP, and I can tell you that many of today's clients are unrecognisable compared to equivalents 20 years ago.
Then IRCv3 is a thing in multiple IRC clients and networks.
RSS, well, I'm not sure how much evolution is needed there anyhow.
By longevity, the most successful networks have all been open ones. The proprietary ones come and go.
RSS is a great protocol to talk about, it's not such a great protocol to use.
Right now my RSS reader subscribes to about 110 feeds for 10 cents a month per feed through Feedburner which does all the crawling for me and just hits a websocket when a new article comes in which posts it to SQS. When I want to add new articles to my database I just suck 'em out.
It's a bargain for feeds like MDPI and arXiv and the Guardian that have many articles per day but I could not afford to subscribe to the 2000+ indie blogs that I'd like to subscribe to and that YOShInOn could easily find articles I find interesting in.
I could write my own RSS crawler and probably will at some point but it is a hassle. I can crawl frequently and make my home internet unusable or I can crawl infrequently and have stale results. Worse yet if a feed changes rapidly I might even miss updates completely.
I can define some loss function that lets me find an optional combination of "doesn't poll too fast" and "isn't too stale" for each feed individually but I expect to experience both the consequences of underpolling and overpolling unless I make a definite decision that I am going to underpoll or overpoll by a few order of magnitude.
There was so much fighting between RSS and ATOM in terms of the exact syntax of the records but none about the problem of polling and polling and polling and polling. Confront Dave Winer with ActivityPub or AT protocol and it is like you are showing somebody a car and they don't want to hear about the engine and the brakes and all that they just want to know where to hitch the horse.
Sure you can set up your own email server but if you are on a cable or DSL network just try connecting to port 25 somewhere. Even if you find a place that doesn't have port 25 blocked you will find deliverability is a problem. You might send an email to one normie and have it get through but try sending mail to 100 normies and you might back 28% or something.
Email clients have a lot of pathology too which I think has to do with the influence of Outlook on the industry.
The left thing seems incredibly incidental. This feels like the first time the social networks are offering any serious tools for protection & shielding ourselves from wild content & algorithms, giving us the power to define our social network experience. The right could benefit just as much, build their own good experience. It would need to be built around something other than in your face razzing on people on the left though!