Show HN: I organized Bluesky feeds by categories and growth rankings
bskyinfo.com
I’ve curated and organized Bluesky feeds into 50+ categories, now with growth rankings for the past day and week! Check it out and share your thoughts!
bskyinfo.com
I wanted to see if there were any infosec feeds (none appeared on the top 30 trending feeds list) so I clicked the hamburger menu at the top left, went to categories and went to security and privacy.
It was all random tools and plugins, so I went back to "Feed Directory" which appears to only be a top 30 trending list. So it's seemingly misleadingly named.
Edit: there's another hamburger menu, about 75% down the viewport that has some other stuff in it, idk.
Pretty confusing UX
If you're browsing on a mobile device, please use the menu button at the bottom left to expand the category navigation.
The category option at the top left currently serves as a navigation tool for Bluesky.
We’re actively working to improve this experience.
The NFL has lots of weird rules, apparently one of them is teams can only create accounts at "approved" social media sites. Probably only a matter of time before it's "approved".
We’re working on improving the category system and appreciate your input.
Reddit communities are (all of a sudden and by odd coincidence) trying to will that into happening by delisting anything from X.
I will update the category system
and Search function asap
It's a slightly broader Mastodon crowd. They tend to be liberal, quite often techies, some celebrity obsessed people (swifties, etc) and some hustlers who thought it's their big opportunity to establish themselves on a new and growing platform. I assume this crowd likes real sports less (or at the very least, watching and reading about professional sports), yet they are still okay watching eSports. Some sports are also more popular outside of US/EU, and they care less about the whole resistance and culture war, therefore less likely to end up on Bsky.
But I'm just speculating and building imaginary stereotypes based on the people I saw going there, being there.
And with all that said, I see plenty of sports accounts there, even in the feed linked here, NBA, NFL, so I may be full of sh it.
I tried to search for MMA on bsky, but the search is cooked, and I don't see a single result.
How was this "curated"?
Great to see so many good analytics tools pop up for bsky, I'm also working on one that primarily focuses on the fastest growing user accounts if you're interested: https://blue.facts.dev/trending
I'm currently on bluesky, but that also has the "no sustainable funding" serious bug. Also it's a frankly miserable place until US election misery dies down, which may take a while.
(Looking for ArtNoAnime but having no luck, ha ha.)
We’re working on improving the category system
I am trying to curate my feeds with mutes, blocks and "I want to see less of this" to cultivate an art/science/nature/programming feed, and the app keeps shoving politics and rage bait down my throat. Custom and Following feeds help, but I want to... "Discover" new people, not lock myself into a pre-prunned garden.
In particular, the above list is ok for avoiding the awful slop, but the devs need to be much more aggressive (if they have the will, of course) about understanding and respecting user choices.
I might reinstall and try again when the Rust lobby chills out.
If you don't follow enough people, your feed is filled with whatever's trending at that moment. Blocking when you don't follow anyone will not train an algorithm, it will just replace that person's content with something else.
Even engagement with this post is suspicious tbh, and there are many accounts at the ready to counter any naysayers. It seems like an attempt to win favour with those in the tech community.
So no, I don’t need filtered lists of already-generated AI slop.
We’ve listened to your suggestions and, after one day of launch, we’ve improved the category system.
There are now 28 main categories with around 160 subcategories, and we’ve also added a search function, so you can now search by keywords.
- BlueSky is mostly centralized and easier to understand. No server choice stuff
- BlueSky has the better name
- BlueSky has the cleaner UI
> BlueSky is mostly centralized and easier to understand. No server choice stuff
It's not supposed to be this way even though it is right now. They're intending for it to be actually fully federated.
But the "server choice" stuff is a bug in the existing design of Mastodon anyway. It shouldn't matter which server you pick because you should be able to change it at any time seamlessly, e.g. by uploading a copy of your posts to any other server, where your posts are backed up to your local device by default.
So then the question is, does Bluesky repeat the error when they get around to it, or does Mastodon fix it with an update, or both or neither? But it's not inherently an advantage for Bluesky, unless they get it right and Mastodon doesn't fix it.
> BlueSky has the better name
The old thing was called Twitter, which is the same kind of parody of itself as Mastodon. Now it's called X, which is somehow even more of a parody of itself.
It turns out having a silly name doesn't stop people from using it.
I'm on mastadon, but its clearly harder to use, and theres way lower engagement.
It does mean search (and as importantly, likes and comments) are globally consistent so there's def a trade off.
These are all propaganda sites. The value is the influence.
I didn’t say that. What I said is the word “non profit” has no bearing on it. And it may even be a negative signal, as the organization wants to appear neutral or moral.
A walled garden implies captured user data and social graph, which is the decentralized part of Bluesky (ATProto to be precise). The difference to Mastodon (ActivityPub to be annoyingly precise again) is in funding needed to host the entire thing.
With ActivityPub, you have to find recluse with a war-lord who will now own your data and handle, and spend a not-too-insignificant amount to keep up the infra (enough that instances have folded due to finances). With ATProto, one has to find a seemingly sympathetic oligarch who does NOT own your handle or your data, and has to spend an average european income on keeping up the infra.
Different threat models, different game theoretical plays really
Bsky has a better UX so it attracts a wider diversity of users, which can make it seems more prominent than masto, but the value of federation is interoperability. Mastodon can keep all of its users and still share its content on bsky and vice versa. It's not a zero sum for one of them to win or lose.
Also, I second the other commenter's mention of the lack of sports on BlueSky. That's a pretty large category not to have...
I decided to visit twitter homepage but it asked me to signin.
I went to the homepage for Mastodon. It had comments about new science discoveries, tech, some politics but more thoughtful if not humor full.
I went to threads and they had a variety of posts in different languages. Top link: Tiktok style guy from Japan who does wall pushups. A newspaper cartoon and netflicks infograph follow.
I'm not sure why we are not all on Mastodon it's similiar content to this site.
Bluesky is getting so much hype but the frontpage content is a tarpool of vile content like someone trained an ai on salon.com and decided to spit out the worst nonsense.
I also assume that Bluesky as the political refugee camp from Twitter means it has a lot of participation from the liberally politically active at this moment.
(Patton Oswald's post was not vile, just to be clear).
Honestly I thought Mastodon and Bluesky were part of the same fediverse, I guess I need to do some learning.
How truly awful to break out of fake identities and connect to a real person on a human level. On the one hand you have Martin Luther King Jr sacrificing his life just so others can do that and on the other side you have some drunk, almost famous pile of garbage who wants to separate anyone different so he can live in some bubble in some world where the biggest bubble gets to crush everyone elses. He needs to crawl back into the segregated hole he came from.
I didn't expect it from someone so privileged. It's just the worst of humanity.
Parts of bluesky are parts of the fediverse. So are parts of threads and wordpress now.
Misses his original point. Exclude those different from you and segrate. That's the one lesson he always remembers. Truly sad individual.
No, it was about Nazis.
You’ve chosen one of the infinitely many different arguments that would imply the conclusion argued for but are not implied by it, and chosen to claim that is what is being argued for.
If done in good faith, this is just embarrassingly sloppy reasoning. If not...
He has never met or even seen a Nazi. He wants you to exclude those different from you. We need to include.
Which is kind of sad because from a technical perspective Bluesky seems to have some advantages (provided they fully extricate any dependencies on the corporate entity soon, which is supposedly the plan, but we've seen this play before and know one of the ways it can end).
Whereas Mastodon/ActivityPub has some flaws that are going to cause real long-term problems if they're not addressed, e.g. tying accounts to a specific instance combined with the propensity for instances to ban other entire instances or ban small/new instances by default, which will have the unfortunate propensity for market concentration. Which is almost like the opposite problem: Instead of being centralized right now but they might fix it later, it's federated right now but they might break it later.
This, among other issues with Mastodon, is what made me try Bluesky. Unfortunately, like I said in another comment, the feed crap is breaking me. Even my facebook feed is better than this, and I spent more time pruning Bluesky's.
I don't think these are problems. Compare it to how email works nowadays, and it's very similar. At least you can easily move your Mastodon account to a new instance and there are built in mechanisms so that you're followers dont even notice your instance has changed, they still keep following you. And good luck running your own email server, you'll also get marked as spam by most. But still, email works and works well. So, no reason for Mastodon not to work.
> And good luck running your own email server, you'll also get marked as spam by most.
That's exactly the problem. You don't want that to happen.
It's politically intolerant in the sense that the vibe is left to hard-left, and even within that sphere there's lot of infighting. Sure, you can use Mastodon as a normie centrist, but the culture is unappealing to many.
Any attempt to plug Mastodon into other decentralized media (Threads, Bluesky) is met with extreme hostility.
Any attempt to make Mastodon more discoverable and searchable is met with hostility. A vocal part of the community is obsessed with safety culture and consent.
Institutes, celebrities, influencers can't use Mastodon because there's no reach and users act like stung by a wasp when anything remotely commercial happens.
Anybody within Mastodon that tries to improve or grow things is shot down and crushed.
The guy that created Mastodon has sacrificed a decade of his life into this thing, for a compensation bordering poverty. He's under constant attack and framed as evil just because he didn't implement some random feature.
There's now a guy creating an Instagram clone called Pixelfed. He's white and talks hip hop slang. Which is close to inevitable for young men as it's deeply integrated into music, gaming, etc. He now stands accused of "cultural appropriation". As he did not immediately fall down to his knees to apologize, he's now framed as a racist.
There was a gay man running a large LGBT instance. Activists were flooding it with spoilers of that Harry Potter game. He tried to stop it and got angry at this behavior, after which he was bullied into a total breakdown, and shut down the instance.
There was a man running a large instance with supreme infra skills. The instance was ballooning. The instance was instant-fast and scaled beautifully. It was popular for being very middle of the road, a generic instance with decent moderation. It was the only instance at the time having a proper search experience. The activist community kept hammering on him for even enabling search and for his moderation not being strict enough, until he ultimately just gave up.
Mastodon doesn't grow because the vocal minority that runs it are chronically online purists that take sadistic joy in destroying anything that would grow it.
I mean, even Mozilla quit their experiment after 3 months. It's shockingly bad.
So I've tried Mastodon because I'm also interested in a service operated by a more neutral org but I found it too random. Bluesky seemed quite nice, kind of like a UX friendly Mastodon.
Most people I follow seem interested in talking about tech and not so much politics which I find quite refreshing. Also it's quite easy to onboard and enjoy the platform without having to make it a huge effort.
I was interested in it back when it was called Whoaverse because reddit sucks (obviously) but it devolved fast and hard.
Mastodon is a nonprofit and a federated network with no single powerful entity marketing and managing it. It does not have enough pull.
Imagine if every city would run activitypub type servers and offer them to their own residents as local tax funded service. Its an entirely plausible scenario, cities are managing far more complex infrastructure.
Suddenly you have the pull of the entire planet and resources to keep evolving and innovating the software stack.
We have the cesspool social media that we have because society is forgeting what democracy and sovereignty even mean.
One just hopes that the in-your-face possibility of better alternatives will tip the balance somewhere in the world and start the revolution that will help us out of this sorry period.
People abandoning their civic responsibilities is what delivered "government" (and practically everything else) to the oligarchs.
It sadly isn't, if by this you mean that residents can create their profiles there and use it to post stuff. Because now every city is a social network operator that has to police the server.
But even if the city only had a server with accounts for the city admin and only posting city stuff, that by itself would be great.
> We have the cesspool social media that we have because society is forgeting what democracy and sovereignty even mean.
Maybe, but more specifically it's because social network operators refuse to police them properly. I have seen that scenario play out on a small non-commercial social network in the 00's and then countless times again: well-meaning people are too pacifist (at least online) and the rest is hands-off. Not very good people are always going to exploit weaknesses like that. And then it's too late, you can't put the cat back into the bag, the whole network is gone. And if the society as a whole doesn't act, well we are seeing what happens.
> One just hopes that the in-your-face possibility of better alternatives will tip the balance somewhere in the world and start the revolution that will help us out of this sorry period.
I don't think there will be a revolution. What I hope for is there will at least be a slow trickle of people into stuff like Mastodon, so that we leave behind the era where 99% of value was captured by facebook/instagram/tiktok/twitter.
the "policing" problem (I think moderation is a better word) needs to be solved one way or another, there is no doubt about that. The question is what is the most democratic and economically viable way to do that. You need to find an organizational unit that embodies decentralization, has a stake in the matter and could realistically execute. Can't think of anything better that the city.
Plus, we don't really need a utopic perfect solution that works for everybody all the time. What the open source fediverse really needs at this point is a sustainable source of funding to reach more mass-market usability. People would always be free to fork and build their own quirky communities.
I don't, because this also involves deciding who can have an account on your server, once you are federating then you also have to decide who you federate with and any possible defederations, what data to store etc.
> The question is what is the most democratic and economically viable way to do that.
It doesn't even have to be democratic; once it's federated with enough nodes in the network, freedom of movement of accounts between servers and a possibility of defederation between nodes, the democracy is somehow implicitly there. I'd say economical (or resource including admin and moderator) viability is the only important thing. People have to stay motivated; individuals will always come and go, it's just important there are enough people willing to work on infrastructure, motivated by money or otherwise.
> What the open source fediverse really needs at this point is a sustainable source of funding to reach more mass-market usability.
One think to consider is that it also needs sustained funding of operations, not only of development, as opposed to capital- and ad-funded commercial social networks. I'm doing my bit by sending a small amount of money to a mastodon server each month.
There will be some happy surprises required to overcome the inertia of network effects but enshittification is now terminal, so it actually looks promising :-)
That said, a social network's home page is rarely representative of the value most people get out of it, that's down to the networks and curation you set up yourself. I mean open up Youtube in an anonymous profile. It's all caps football reporting, all caps "challenges" from influencers, Russian, shorts of double-cropped old videos with 50m views, music videos of people unknown to me, etc. Nothing I'm interested in, and yet I frequent youtube when I'm signed in.
Bsky, on the other hand, does not have such hard splitting between servers (comments belong to the post on ATProto network, not to the instance) and allows you to run your own personal instances (PDS) natively. You can even transfer your profile and data (including followers) to other instances. IMO, it's a better tackle on building a federated social network.
But yeah, the native recommendation algorithm is lackluster.
This breaks conversations. An OP hosting a popular thread will see the same/similar reply many times because people can't even see each other's replies.
Federation makes discovery and search impossible or at the very least extremely hard to implement, whilst this is such a core feature of social networks.
Federation is extremely wasteful. People hosting instances with just a few thousands of users are reporting gigantic bandwidth consumption and hefty bills. Not to mention storage bills for all that media.
Federation does not allow for the independence it suggests. A bitter activist can advocate for other admins to defederate you and then your instance is cut off. You're not independent, you answer to the rule of the purists and the Mastodon way.