Revival: There appears to be media consensus: "Bluesky is dead." | Hacker News Reader

Revival: There appears to be media consensus: "Bluesky is dead."

netwars.pelicancrossing.net

33 pointsColinWright47 comments

It's always funny (and a bit sad) how media people don't grasp that people don't use social media the same way they do, and there is value outside their expectations. I'm not on social media to provide "engagement" to media companies or journalists, nor am I for general politics.

While there is some utility to platforms where "everyone" is, that a) never was actually true of any of them, as much as journalists loved to pretend Twitter reflected "everyone" and b) just not what most people need.

It seems like if the masses aren’t swarming to it, it’s dead. I don’t think a massive audience ever equated to better conversations and content. Especially in our engagement economy. It seems to just dumb everything down and restarts Eternal September. I think Mastodon is on the right track. It feels closer to the early web to me and I think part of that is the fact out isn’t an everyday term like Twitter but it’s also how it’s architected. Albeit it is still short form content so had all of the problems that come with it.

I've seen it described as: Marketing has no middle gear. Everything is either the best thing ever or dead. Trucking along nicely does not exist in that world.

It's more that media searches for an ending, endlessly.

But cannot accept it's own.

Bluesky and Mastadon supply a place, separate from the toxicity of "attempted narrative control"

Labeling Bluesky as toxic, is an irony beyond the pale, but... it'll float with that ecosystem, where everything is transactional and a "better crafted lie" is the endless goal.

Bluesky / ATProto is very open, this makes it possible to track the exact statistics how the platform is growing (or shrinking currently):

https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth

Ironically these articles probably do quite well traffic-wise because Bluesky doesn’t downrank posts with external links, and the articles get a lot of (negative) responses on the platform.

I'm kind of forced to use X because to help my sick wife I follow on Long Covid research, people self-reporting improvement and so on.

Is there a way to get what I want without using X directly unless I interact? Notice that I need to be able to easily "follow" new people if someone I already follow retweets/likes someone new and interesting to me. Or also navigate through chain of retweets and references

Uh, news to me. My feed is about as active as my Twitter feed ever was.

> hypersensitivity to ideas leftists find offensive”

Nobody was fleeing Twitter because people were calling for lower taxes. It was for the rise in unrestrained hate speech culminating in the unleashing of MechaHitler by the guy who cancelled the world's biggest AIDS prevention program after buying an election. That should be an intolerable state for any rational person.

My sister-in-law was working for USAID in Mozambique on exactly that. People down there are going to die exactly because of that. She is back in America wondering what she'll do next, as she trained for public health her entire life.

The smart thing would to be reconstitute something like it with prior staff and new philanthropic investments as a nonprofit unconstrained by government whims.

The private sector alone can't fix inequalities. We need government intervention to redistribute wealth, or else the rich will use their vast resources to tilt the system to make themselves even richer at the expense of everyone else.

Bill Gates is the largest private funder of AIDS causes in Africa and he is adamant that philanthropy can never match the impact of government.

They at least mentioned Mastodon (once). I have a BlooSky account, mostly to claim my usual username, but I don't feel much of a pull. The Mastodon instance I'm on tends to pull a lot of alt people, people who wrestle interesting tech, and a lot of catpictures. I have yet to find the same niche on BS. I still have my account on birdsite, where I post maybe once every six months, "y'know, there are other, better places..."

I'm still on Twitter to follow a few Japanese art and author accounts (and because I had the account since 2009 and just don't want the bots to take it,) and on Bluesky to follow some bigger accounts who jumped ship but not to Mastodon.

The majority of my actual activity is on Mastodon, though. I just wish it was possible to share identity between other fediverse platforms like Pixelfed. Although that isn't something you can do on the mainstream web either, it feels like it should be a thing between platforms sharing a common standard.

On Bluesky, I don't need to be ashamed that I'm helping a Neo-Nazi.

Bluesky prioritized safe-space culture over free speech and decentralization. Interesting experiment but that's not what a Twitter replacement needs to be.

Anyone looking for "free speech" can already find it on Twitter in abundance, they don't need a replacement.

The only draw to being a Twitter replacement is not being like Twitter, which means not being a safe space for Nazi and Nazi-adjacent content.

Unless you're an anti-fascist ... Musk made sure to personally ban the large anti-fascist accounts immediately upon taking over twitter

Also the word "cisgender" is banned

Yes, I'm intentionally being facetious using "free speech" with the same implication that most people complaining about the lack of "free speech" on Bluesky or Mastodon do, which is to say the freedom to post racist right-wing propaganda and hate speech without consequence.

No, I want actual free speech, where Nazis are allowed to freely post their nonsense and I’m allowed to freely laugh at them. And Twitter is not that.

> If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. —Noam Chomsky

Yes, Nazis exist there.

Nazis are also finding safe spaces on Reddit, Wikipedia, Telegram, Tinder and virtually all other large social sites if you care to look. Nazi safe space isn't exclusive to X.

On Reddit? If anything its moderation can be heavy handed.

Elon Musk sympathizes with Nazis and shares their views and his platform has been explicitly designed to cater to the extreme right and amplify that speech while purging the "woke mind virus."

When the Nazis show up to your bar and you don't kick them out, you have a Nazi bar. Elon didn't just not kick them out, he put up a big sign that said "Nazis drink free." Let's not pretend the site formerly known as Twitter is a politically or culturally neutral space in this regard.

You mention Nazis a lot

do you know even Nazi is, how can people be "Nazi" according to you??

Ask grok, buddy. It loves that topic.

> people tell the AI to call itself mecha hitler

> Grok doing the user request

> people call Grok nazi/racist etc

It literally debunked

I'm sorry, what was debunked?

Only a fully decentralized system can guarantee free speech. And yes, that even includes letting the Israelis have their say too.

Freedom of speech must include freedom from speech or it isn't free.

Israelis can say whatever they like, I'm not obligated to listen to them.

Agreed. That's what the mute button is for. There is no conflict with free speech and a mute button.

> Anyone looking for "free speech" can already find it on Twitter in abundance, they don't need a replacement.

From what I’ve heard, Elon deletes a lot of stuff he disagrees with.

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