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Comment by pohl | Hacker News Reader

This was a great little article. Very fair summary of the situation.

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.

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Agreed about that they nailed the UX for BlueSky in terms of “best possible Twitterlike”.

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.

Twitter had third party apps with no ads for over a decade without the sky falling. Few people use anything other than the default.

Fair point! Ditto for Reddit, I suppose.

Though, wasn’t Twitter’s financial situation starting to become somewhat dire toward the end of its pre-Musk life?

I mean, define dire. It was not what you’d call the world’s most profitable company, and had negative income for two years, but it had been cash flow positive every year for years. Its valuation was… optimistic, but it’s not like it was going to collapse or anything.

In fairness, Mastodon apparently is working on quote-tweeting. AIUI to do it properly (ie, like Bluesky, with the ability to remove quote-tweets etc) requires changes to ActivityPub.

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.

I vastly prefer comments as second class citizens anyway. Twitter felt like such a rat's nest sometimes.

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