Twitter's heir apparent isn't X or Threads – it's Bluesky | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's heir apparent isn't X or Threads – it's Bluesky

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31 pointsmiles33 comments

I'm genuinely enjoying Bluesky, even more now than I was a year ago when it was a comparative ghost town, but in the back of my head I'm worried about the long-term financials of it. They're operating 100% off VC money right now, yeah? When that runs out, how much will it cost to keep the site afloat, and how far will they have to go to get it?

I know that the AT protocol at least offers a lifeboat against the "uh oh they overmonetized everything" problem, so that's nice, but I'm curious what their plans are, if anything.

Hopefully Twitter doesn’t get a heir and the whole concept dies.

There’s a weird distinction in Twitter, or something, between the tweets (which are, like, a single post in a discussion, but oddly emphasized) and the comments below them, which are, like, just as much part of the discussion but smaller for some reason.

A site that is: what people thought Reddit was supposed to be before it sold out (communities, mostly self-moderated), would be much better.

So i agree with you partly, but Reddit suffers too imo. Notably it feels like the arbitrary walls of Subreddits impose friction that is painful.

I feel like what i personally want is a Twitter-like UX but with content organized automatically like Reddit.

Ie i want to follow topics, like Reddit, but without the walls - like Twitter. Twitter has tags, sure, but that assumes people use them well.

Bluesky might have this a big with moderated feeds? Just not sure how well a feed can start opting into topics.

I’m curious to see how the moderated feeds work out.

Twitter, because it doesn’t host conversations but salvos of rhetoric, can get away with just having user-to-user blocking.

The walls on Reddit are artificial, but they do solve the problem of having a “community” in the sense that most people can see most comments, and it can still be moderated, but the moderation can be tailored to the community.

Are there any social aggregator networks? TBH I don't care about politics or anything - I just need latest updates on topics i like summarised.

RSS still works.

Agree. Feedly is my first open tab every morning.

Is there a reason Mastodon isn't listed here as an open alternative? Not a single word of it in this article.

Surely it should have significantly benefited from the X exodus?

What can Mastodon do other than be user friendly like BlueSky to be on the radar as a true alternative to these corporate or VC backed social networks?

I've seen reports of the fediverse getting a bump in users. End of the day you will almost never see news about it because it has no marketing budget, and offers no investment opportunity. Money talks.

It remains imo the best social platform because of those reasons.

Just as Android is a popular Linux kernel-based OS because it discarded the desktop Linux userland, Bluesky is, successfully it turns out, a case of being open, federated, and popular because they focused on product, not on existing standards that hadn't quite hit critical mass.

When Twitter was sold there were many articles about Mastodon, but it seems that BlueSky got critical mass now.

By one count, Mastodon has been stable at about a million users for the last year; this hasn’t increased significantly with the rise of Bluesky, and may have dipped a bit. I would suspect that a more viable Bluesky is cannibalising some users from Mastodon; anecdotally I use Mastodon less since Bluesky has become more viable over the last month or so.

> What can Mastodon do...?

Be centrally managed and accessible from a single point... But then it wouldn't be Mastodon.

So how is Bluesky going to pay for the costs involved?

Personally, i hope once the Ads start appearing on Bluesky, everyone will move to the open-source Mastodon... - which relies on community support and contributions for development and sustainability.

I had expected better arguments. Not convincing. Current rise in Blue sky users is due to election results. People will go back to Twitter.

It all boils down to the one and only techbro that you should like. All other techbros are false-prophets, and by proxy their short-text based social network is also bad.

Anyone who left Twitter for political reasons is unlikely to return. The climate there has long since passed the tipping point.

> People will go back to Twitter

What's Twitter?

Xitter now, the X is pronounced "sh".

No it's over, critical mass has been reached. Bluesky won.

Comments like this are why I have zero interest in Twitter or Bluesky or any of them.

Which is why you don't already know this to be true. I'm just reporting this based on knowing which communities made Twitter work and have migrated at enough scale to make Bluesky stick. Bluesky won't have more subs than Threads, but it will be what the old twitter was in scale and be the more culturally significant platform.

The X crowd just swept the entire US federal government in the elections. I think it's going to stay pretty culturally significant.

Also this smugness is why I dislike most discourse on X/Twitter and Bluesky. They're variations of the same thing and I dislike them both b/c of it.

It's spilling over into HN unfortunately.

Trumpism has no culture. That's not shade. It just doesn't have any culture, any more than the Goldwater right or Nixon's "silent majority" were ever a cultural force. That Bluesky will be the center of cultural gravity online and be where people on the left migrate toward is just observationally true. Smarter people can speculate why that is.

> the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group

Trumpism has a very clear culture, using that definition.

But it seems like you're not using that definition. Perhaps you're using the second one in Merriam-Webster?

> enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training

People self-identifying as this type of "cultured" is just another example of the smugness I'm complaining about. There's also not much to argue about here, there's no way to falsify such a claim, it's just self-annointed "enlightenment and excellence". Some folks on Bluesky define "enlightenment and excellence" in ways that align with their attributes, some folks on X/Twitter define it differently to align with theirs. And they're all smug about it.

You are being weirdly abstract and defining yourself as the victim of smugness, while not bringing any counter-examples, or even a theory of an alternate culture.

The only weird thing here is your “my enemies have no culture” theory, which could not be a more transparent case of bubble blindness.

Counterexamples? Or, what am I blind to? You are trying to pick a fight about "bubble blindness" or something without any example of what I supposedly do not see. Yes, that is strangely abstract.

I don't see why people would go back to Twitter if they find the experience on Bluesky better, regardless of why they moved.

Agree the article could have been better written but I don't think the fundamentals behind why people are leaving the corporate internet behind are going to change soon. Nobody that left because of trolling and abuse is going back for instance.

As really active ex-user of Twitter I suddenly had no reason to open it anymore as my feed in there is now less active than on Bluesky - most of the people I liked to follow either made the move or are double posting. There's just no reason to open Twitter anymore and I'm not really sure how it would change.

It's not just election results. A lot of scientists have moved over because Bluesky is a lot like "old Twitter".

Here is an article from Science about it [1]. Nature also covered this [2].

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/old-twitter-scientif...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03784-6

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