The Rise of Bluesky
cacm.acm.org
cacm.acm.org
After the demise of Twitter, I first tried Post.news — which had great branding but failed to get the everything-is-a-tweet model right (comments were 2nd class citizens to posts).
Then I moved to Mastodon, which I enjoy. Mastodon’s biggest issue is the enormous UX hurdle to pick an instance before even signing up, though. That and the lack of a unified view (mentioned in the article) will probably keep it niche. Also lack of quote-tweeting, a deliberate choice.
BlueSky is the first truly worthy successor. It’s better than Twitter in its prime, before it went algorithmic. It allows quote-tweeting but gives the quoted party control over the scenarios that Mastodon was trying to prevent by avoiding the feature entirely.
That said, my biggest concern is how they plan to make money. With BlueSky being completely open at the moment, there is effectively no possible monetization strategy for them without making major breaking changes to the protocol.
For example, if they added ads to the app, someone could just write a client that didn’t have ads. Donations are another possibility, but probably wouldn’t be enough to pay for the servers.
Though, wasn’t Twitter’s financial situation starting to become somewhat dire toward the end of its pre-Musk life?
Bluesky, at least for now, has the advantage that they essentially control the protocol, and are the only significant user; they can move a lot quicker. It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves.
Twitter/X is actually a balanced discourse site now. CNN even admitted that the party affiliation of its users went from majority-left (65/31) to split down the middle, 48/47. https://x.com/ScottJenningsKY/status/1861445812175147353
Ergo if everyone who hates mars man proclaims that the alternative to mars man website is “the next big thing” and “exploding in popularity” loudly and often enough, then maybe it will actually become popular outside the mars man bad crowd.
You know it’s manufactured when news outlets are comparing App Store download rankings of X and BlueSky. The new app versus the one that’s been around for nearly 20 years and already present on most devices it ever will be.
Meanwhile in the real world nobody has heard of BlueSky or really cares that people they’ll never interact with no longer get banned for being bigots on X.
Twitter fundamentally offers no killer feature. Being "around for nearly 20 years" means nothing.
Less censorship is a pretty important feature
Bluesky also has the "less censorship" feature :D
Twitter is a cesspool.
Which I was.
News outlets giddily claiming some newly launched FPS game is going to replace Counter-Strike because it had more downloads in a given week in 2024 would be a far more apt analogy and equally as absurd.
Besides, 25 million users is plenty already.
That might have a chance at being true if the owner didn't flood the network with deliberate misinformation and block dissenting opinions.
Personally I prefer the freedom from regime but the nice part of the divide is everyone gets to choose for themselves. I’ve seen more of the people whose create content Im interested in (scientists, artists, authors etc) migrating to Bluesky but it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years.
I'm not sure what you mean about the rape threats. Is there a documented increase in such things on Xitter?
No, it really wasn't. Don't even try and pretend please. Musk was spreading deepfakes about Kamala for example without labeling them as such. Jack and Musk are not comparable.
And yet, the response to this from liberals wasn't to chide him on that alone, which would have been plenty enough. It was to pretend that this wasn't obvious satire, that it was an attempt at spreading misinformation. The reaction was far more disingenuous than the bad joke.
I don’t care about looking fair. I care about being honest. I’m sorry if you think I’m not doing enough to support your team.
See, when you're apologizing and defending this behavior, you're already in the wrong.
He violated his own platforms policies requiring such videos to be labeled. If you don't think that was deliberate to mislead people, you're incredibly naive. It's hardly the first time he's done that sort of thing.
> I care about being honest. I’m sorry if you think I’m not doing enough to support your team.
I care about being honest, you clearly don't since you champion liars. god this country is so screwed lol.
To repeat a quote I have seen repeated in dozens of email signatures (below the pronouns, of course!)
"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
Here's my true first-time user experience: The first 10 posts recommended to me were 1 comedian making a joke, 2 pictures of space, and 7 hate-based partisan political posts. All from one extreme end of the political spectrum. You can guess which. I instantly left and will never go back.
For what it's worth, I also do not use X.
Or at least I suspect so. I often end up being interested in politics and thus get more of it, but I'm not complaining. I get a good mix of my specific interests, art, humor, cute animals, and politics.
Their smart use of domains makes it so that their equivalent of "channel" can be an actual website, that will offer you recommendations when you watch videos on it exactly like YT, except you control the algorithm.
Users will get much better choice and experience over the already excellent YouTube, but most importantly the creators will be able to express themselves however they wish. They will rent hosting from a provider, shows ads from an Adsense-like service, and actually own both their content _and_ their subscriber list.
I've been wanting to build it, but I'm always deterred by how ATProto is still tightly linked to Bluesky itself.
yeah, there are 1-2 posts on the frontpage every day now. totally organic
1. Make Twitter/X Clone
2. ???
3. Profit!
It's basically become yelling into the void. Started out in 2007 and it was great for finding people and getting interest in your projects, but now, I just get a bunch of spam bot follows and on an account with 3,600+ followers, only 30-40 views at most per post (w/ no engagement).
Odd. My homepage looks nothing like that. I wonder what I'm doing wrong?
Right now I opened the home page, paged down through the top 20 or so bloots or whatever they're called, and got:
- An MSNBC video about fighting back against conservatives
- A post celebrating that a "right-wing lawsuit" to review voter rolls failed
- That BrooklynDad dude complaining about Trump supporters
- A post comparing conservatives to the Empire from Star Wars
- A post chastising White people for having opinions on some controversy involving Black celebrities
A lot of whiny us-against-them rhetoric, but it's not toxic because they are conservatives. In between those, there are cat pictures, some shower thoughts type posts, landscape photos, and comics. This was a marked improvement over the page when I opened it yesterday.
The major accounts from twitter are not on bluesky, but I don't care for vitriol or meme replies (all of which are much higher on twitter). That being said, twitter still has a lot of interesting people, who are the main reason to continue using the site.
I did make an account to test the waters with such statements, and wasn’t immediately banned, so maybe it’s not true.
Yes, but not particularly.
> Political lines are now about acknowledging facts or not
Political lines are about which facts you accept. On many of the social issues of today, which are far more contentious than economic ones, liberal "facts" are often two lies and a half-truth wearing a trench coat. What liberals[1] want is a monopoly over which facts are on the table, and for all discussion to take place within that framing. And accusations of toxicity, harm, disinformation, and bigotry, are employed as rhetorical tools to preserve that monopoly.
[1]: By "liberals" here I don't mean average liberal voters, but politicians, pundits, influencers, and the class of affluent, politically-engaged people who tend to set the tone generally.
Not particularly what?
> Political lines are about which facts you accept.
Right, one side outright makes up lies and denies things.
> liberal "facts" are often two lies and a half-truth wearing a trench coat.
I see your footnote, it's still nonsense. Conservatives outright lie, Trump an JD outright admitted to making up the story about Haitians eating pets which did incredible harm to a community, and conservatives lapped it up and asked for seconds instead of, you know, holding them accountable.
I don't care either way i just think the collective effort to push it wont pan out but please hype away.
1. It is built on an open protocol
2. User controls and choice, they decoupled {algo, app, data, moderation} and users decide which ones they use. Anyone can build any of these and offer them up without having to change social network. In short, they created a social media fabric with built in competition on the supplier side while removing the switching cost for users