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Comment by jghn | Hacker News Reader

What I've found is that most of the people I really want to follow are exclusively on bsky. BUT most of the people I'd prefer to casually follow either exclusively or mostly only posts on Twitter. And the 2nd group is a much larger pool than the first group.

I really dislike Mastodon so gave that up a while back. I know there are a few people I'd like to follow who only post there, but such is life.

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I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup. Heaps and heaps of political rage bait on the main discover feed? Yup.

I wanted to like BlueSky, but it's such a bizarre echo chamber of people who left Twitter for ideological reasons that it basically filters for people that I actively don't want to engage with.

Those types of people are still there on Twitter (mostly on the other side these days), but I don't see them because the algorithm filters them out.

You've got three tools, mutes, blocks, and lists. Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you, it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look. Which is pretty much like how it was to use Twitter a few years ago before everything got algorithmed.

> Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you,

Bluesky doesn't really present it that way. The default "Discover" feed at least pretends to be exactly that.

> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look

I think this has changed recently. Months ago I tried to actually use Bluesky, and my Discover feed was awful. 90% of my time on the site was muting/blocking or thinking "show more/less like this" did something and it was an miserable experience which nothing seemed to improve except quitting it.

Checking it now, it's dramatically better. Still includes a lot of content I don't want, but less aggressively so, although that seems to largely be that I was gone so far it could be mostly content from accounts I follow.

A Bluesky dev has admitted that the "show less/more" items did nothing. It was in the context of supposedly hooking them up to real code at long last, though I've yet to see any practical difference. Anyone who claims they worked all along is not arguing in good faith.

That's hilarious. No wonder they didn't seem very effective.

Bluesky is centralized, despite the constant protests that it isn't. https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy

If it takes a couple of days of actual effort, then it’s not extremely easy, especially for the average user who can just go to Threads with their existing Instagram account and not be bombarded with furry and diaper porn.

It actually takes effort to see furry and diaper porn. I'm pretty sure Adult Content is disabled by default and needs to be enabled.

The reason why I chose those examples is because they were already brought up in the thread here:

> I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45397250

> i kept getting weird sexual posts of dudes in diapers, no matter how much i blocked or asked not to see that.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45397733

By default bluesky blocks adult content, once you enable it you can dial in what kind of adult content you wish to see. I know this is all anecdotal, like the links you posted... But I started a new account to see what it's like. I can scroll the default algorithm for 5 minutes and not see anything questionable, and my actual account exists with adult content turned on and I never see it. After signing up the new account, I can search for furry or diaper content, but it appears that none of it is like "nsfw" (mostly just people in furry costumes or diapers but no sexual content or nudity).

For what it's worth, I've never seen anything like this either.

Just to solidify, I just went and created a new account to ensure I was right, and I was. You need to go to your settings, go to moderation, and enable adult content. I scrolled continuously for 5 minutes straight and saw no adult content on a default account. And on top of this, as far as I can google, Bluesky has never had adult content enabled by default, so if you are seeing it, you enabled it.

I never see that but on both sites I only ever look at the feed that only includes people I follow. I don’t understand why anyone would use a feed that includes other co the t

New users follow zero people on Bluesky.

Yes. And I seeded my feed with people I already knew. Just like I did with Twitter back in 2008. And just like Twitter all those years ago, from seeing what they repost, I expanded my network.

People who are incapable of finding content without a "discovery" or "for you" feed get what they deserve.

> People who are incapable of finding content without a "discovery" or "for you" feed get what they deserve.

If this is a typical attitude to the new user experience, no wonder Bluesky isn’t succeeding.

Why would anyone want a "discovery" type of feed on any site? On sites that insist on showing me content from things I don't follow I just block it.

> I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup. Heaps and heaps of political rage bait on the main discover feed? Yup.

Unlike X, blue sky defaults to simply showing you a feed of the people you follow, in chronological order.

This is the best way to use the app

They do really need to do something about this, I am not on regularly anymore but there was a period where i kept getting weird sexual posts of dudes in diapers, no matter how much i blocked or asked not to see that.

> or asked not to see that

That's part of the problem, I'm not sure that actually does anything.

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