Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them).
That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.
Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.
There has been such a consistent attempt at ramming square pegs into round holes online in trying to “both sides” a bunch of these issues.
One trait is immutable and the other is not.
One trait is entirely internally focused and is not defined by a rejection of anyone external to the subject, the other's trait is entirely defined by such an external focus on the rejection of another person's immutable identity.
That was just a single incident, being noticed by far-right weirdos thankfully not being a regular thing for me. But I can imagine it would get old quickly if you were the sort of person who was. Bluesky’s far superior self-moderation is absolutely very useful here.
The fact that you don’t know and people offer dozens of credible guesses should probably tell you the problem is widespread.
Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.
'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.
Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.
But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.
I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.
Why do the remaining posters keep self-censoring "Blues*y"?
I tried checking out Bluesky the other day. The feed was mainly unhinged political rants of a very particular flavor.
You can have a fruitful exchanges of ideas and information and debates on a foundation of similar values in a way that amounts to more than just repeating ideas back and forth. Using the term as a catch-all for a shared desire for conversations to have certain ground rules or certain community values, or subjects that spark your intellectual curiosity, calling those echo chambers is shallow and is not going to inform you about the real cultural dynamics that drive those kinds of communities.
It's just a lazy way to try absence of critical thought by looking for the wrong thing. If people labeling things as echo chambers cared about the things they said they cared about, they would look at entirely different criteria, such as epistemic closure, the quality of relationships, propensity for trolling, and so on.
Yes, people on X seem very upset that they can be blocked on bluesky. But if I've heard what you have to say and don't want to hear the same thing 1000x, that's not an echo chamber. That's me hearing you, disagreeing, and you having nothing more of value to add.
Discussion requires communication, not simply repeating propaganda over and over and over, which is 99% of the time all that anyone crying "echo chamber" tends to do.
You can’t possibly believe that, can you? Have you not noticed the vast gulf between what Musk says and what Musk does?
And it continues to run, but not well. The nice thing about the kind of site it is, is that if you don’t see a particular message, you can’t tell it’s missing.
lol, you seriously believe that a network fully controlled by the world's richest man, accountable to no one, is a bastion of free speech? I presume you have a bridge to sell me as well?
That's far from the worst I've seen on there either, evidently you can just post about how Hitler was right and it won't affect your visibility at all now, nevermind get you banned.
But this is not true. I always use my "following" feed and not my "for you" feed. Other than sponsored ads the only thing I see are posts from people I follow. I don't understand why people persist with the narrative that Twitter forces people into "the algorithm".
I've been splitting time between Twitter & Bluesky for the last year or so. The only real difference i notice is the set of people I follow as until recently most of my Twitter follows weren't on Bluesky
I disagree. Bluesky will grow further and then be like a "Coke or Pepsi" to Twitter. (Albeit, it will stay smaller than Twitter.)
I have 2 threads accounts and never created a single one. That's because I had 2 Instagram accounts.
The difference is people chose to go to Bluesky, Threads accounts were just added on to your Insta account by Meta.
Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads.
I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.
Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there!
It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in.
There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss.
The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to.
There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on.
Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping.
The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049
Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.
Another social media site asking for my phone number, no thank you.
I read the occasional Twitter/X and probably now Bluesky post, but this offers nothing that would attract me. Twitter/X/Bluesky/Insta/Threads is for people that like celebrities with some interesting stuff in between. But overall that isn't worth it.
I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't.
Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us.
X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two.
Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.
If you want to find your colleauges' posts, if you want to find high quality information, if you want good links to long articles, X is no longer the place to be.
If you want to have click-bait and rage-bait or lots of right-wing politics, X will cater to your needs. But it won't cater to somebody that's trying to get to highly-curated high-signal information networks that Twitter allowed in the past. That's all been actively destroyed, with great intention.