I have a look at Bluesky from time to time and there is (for me ofc) as much info/interesting stuff as I was getting from the other one before the acquisition.
it’s just people raging about trump and whatever brand they’re looking to try and cancel next.
it’s so far from the greatness of the original twitter. no tech community or content.
I dunno. It probably depends on what you’re looking for.
Although I still have a web/programming which I follow and have found some people interesting from Hackernews and others too in bluesky (emsh,simonw)
What is the HN consensus around lemmy? I really like lemmy and think that it might be better for tech stuff (almost similar to HN/reddit you can say and federated)
I used to follow lemmy c/technology but I do feel like HN is pretty unique in its own manner.
Regarding twitter alternative itself. Maybe mastodon too can be an alternative.
Another minor nitpick about bluesky is that its 200 characters limits actually really removes the tech community from too deep discussions imo. Although I guess twitter had that limit for long time too until it got removed but now I do see sometimes some tweets which are really long (sometimes even complete blog?)
It actually really (pissed?) me off so much that I ended up making a tampermonkey script which can actually write a long message automatically and split a message into 200 messages chunk and post them in a thread of sorts you can say although its very hacky and messy and it starts to glitch around 10 threads from what I remember.
I think there's a few tweetlonger-type services that people have tried to make, but with atproto they can at least embed that extra text into the post (100kb limit), so the site only needs to stick around to view it.
Woah I didn't know this was possible, definitely gonna try out leaflet.pub, I did know about it, let's see.
Thank you for telling me about this!
Edit: Now tried leaflet.pub, looks really cool. I am gonna use it from here on out because I used to use mataroa.blog or bearblog but they didn't have comments and comments were something I always wondered.
Its comments actually hook up to bluesky itself. this does feel interesting.
I might use it from here on out or maybe the fediverse alternative to something like this (i think its name was writty or something like this) but I am pretty sure that I am gonna nowadays write on leaflet too a litte haha!
Thanks for sharing me this. I knew about leaflet.pub but didn't know that it hooked with bsky so well. Is it a recent feature or is it the case where I maybe misremembering somethings?
It doesn't seem to be as bad anymore, a quick glance at the public feed suggests that the percentage of political posts has gone down, but considering how many times the word "toxic" appears in this linked blogpost, I'm guessing they're still banning anyone who expresses the "wrong" opinions, so the userbase is unlikely to grow much further in the future. It seems to have plateaued at around 1.2M daily likers.
Source for the stats: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
The US does not have a "far left" in any significant numbers, and never has. At least not in a self-aware sense.
Maybe you meant to say liberal, to which I'd agree.
That's not to say there isn't a "left" or "far left" on Bluesky, but there's no way it's a majority.
I agree echo chambers are a problem there, which is why I only posted there briefly before leaving. One feature that seemed to exacerbate the formation of echo chambers was users sharing and blindly trusting mass block lists to silence things they didn't want to hear (leftists and liberals alike).
There's really a problem that needs to be solved here. I really think anonymous or phony posting needs to stop. It's not helpful here. All it does is amplify false talking points with a "Fake it til you make it", "the loudest voice wins" methodology.
But unfortunately, engagement is financially incentivized now. So the big corps reap $$$$$ while the public burns itself down.
There is hope, but it requires enough people to care and act accordingly:
Can you explain what exactly you mean by "local nazis"? Are you getting ads for Nazi barber shops? Sieg Heil Heating & Cooling? Hitler Juice Bar and Bubble Tea?
If this was such a huge problem I'm sure we would have heard of it before.
Bluesky does, however. Clearly they've made that their target market, but that's also why growing beyond that base seems to be difficult for them,
Again, that's not to say lefists don't exist, but they are a tiny fraction, and always were a tiny fraction no matter what platform.
Don't rule out bots that exist in numbers to make the actual left appear like a deranged spectacle as a form of controlled opposition. Both parties of capital interests have a role in and benefit from these.
As for bots or “controlled opposition”: you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain why a heavily moderated platform with explicit cultural norms converges on a particular worldview. I’m disinclined to apply anything beyond Occam’s razor when accounting for “deranged spectacle” behavior; ordinary selection effects are sufficient.
This isn't in conflict with my original comment.
> As for bots or “controlled opposition”: you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain why a heavily moderated platform with explicit cultural norms converges on a particular worldview. I’m disinclined to apply anything beyond Occam’s razor when accounting for “deranged spectacle” behavior; ordinary selection effects are sufficient.
These aren't conspiracy theories, and they pre-date and extend beyond Bluesky. They are easily observable patterns in most modern news media and social media. For one, silos are much easier to advertise to. Follow the money, like everything else.
If anything, the mistake is treating the "reasonable", aspirational version as more real than the people who consistently show up, organize, and speak — and then assuming the most visible expressions must be "controlled opposition."
Once again, we seem to be in agreement on this.
> The underlying attitudes -- maximalism, moral absolutism, tolerance for disruption, and readiness to analogize opponents to historical evil -- are not artifacts of bots or manipulation. They’re characteristic features of a political subculture.
These things are not mutually exclusive. It's both, and people (and their bots) across the entire political spectrum are guilty of involvement.
Are they just disproportionately powerful then? Because the US does definitely have consistent far left trends and movements that overtake the mainstream. The OK hand gesture hysteria is maybe an evident example, but land acknowledgments? DEI statements? Fatphobia? Defund the police? All of these originate from far left positions.
You might be confused because several forces want you to be exactly that:
1) The right lumps/conflates everything from centrist liberal to far left as "the far radical left" with no in-between, which blurs many lines.
2) Center liberals who want a social media veneer they can feel good about will literally pose as leftists/marxists, but if you look at their other beliefs and behaviors (were they trying to sink Bernie, or not?) then it becomes immediately obvious they're ultimately loyal to the Dem party, and that means center liberals serving capital interests.
But I can't blame you or anyone else for falling for the above unless you've seen enough to know, like following both of Bernie's presidential runs and how he was systematically smeared by both liberals and their corporate media.
Identity politics / DEI / etc are a liberal obsession. Class politics is the focus of the actual far left.
...No? Bernie was super popular specifically with this audience. The more liberal people described themselves as, the more they supported Bernie: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-defines-the-sander...
You can take the stance that nobody knows what any of these terms mean I guess, but then the picture gets kind of absurd, left-wing materialism loses all meaning, the church loses all relationship with the right, hell, from that standpoint Donald Trump campaigned as a leftist I guess? He did have a recurrent discourse around jobs and the working class.
It's not that they don't know. It's that they bend definitions to their advantage depending on what the context dictates. 538 is exactly the kind of outlet one would expect to do such a thing.
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/liberals-bernie-working-class-tr...
It seems the left-right spectrum serves better to confuse than to differentiate, and that the most productive discussions unfold when we talk issues instead.
I can moderate my own feed -- the majority of people don't need, want, or enjoy an overtly paternalistic hugbox, and especially if moderation tends to be unidirectionally skewed in one political direction. It's not surprising that growth is slow.
Lumping sophomoric image edits into that category is exactly the kind of moral and definitional inflation being actively used to manufacture pretext for suppressing speech under the guise of "moderation."
Harm has not been demonstrated. Annoyance or offense is not injury, and discomfort is not exploitation. Without evidence of systematic, material harm -- and without showing that enforcement would not introduce greater error and speech suppression -- the justification for moderation fails. Vague claims of illegality are irrelevant. A non-explicit image edit is not criminal in any US jurisdiction absent additional elements such as explicit sexual content, fraud, extortion, or targeted harassment; invoking “illegal in some states” -- without naming conduct and statute -- is just noise.
"Put them in a bikini" is closer to low-effort mockery than to any recognized category of sexual harm. The level of alarm being applied here is grossly disproportionate to the act itself and is merely being used as a pretext for broader intervention.
Ok, sure[1]. I don't know why I am, but I'm surprised people are going to bat for this. Where is your line, exactly? Is it legality? Is it further along?
[1] https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2026/01/california...
>> The level of alarm being applied here is grossly disproportionate to the act itself and is merely being used as a pretext for broader intervention.
> I don't know why I am, but I'm surprised people are going to bat for this. Where is your line, exactly? Is it legality? Is it further along?
If something is illegal, that’s a clear boundary and the appropriate place for enforcement. If it’s legal, the burden is on anyone arguing for restriction to explain why speech controls are justified despite that -- what concrete harm exists, why existing law is insufficient, and why the remedy won’t create more error or suppression than it prevents.
Absent that showing, "this feels bad" or "this is alarming" isn’t a standard.
I'm not sure about that. I'd rather decide for myself what I want to read and what I do not. I'd love to not delegate this important decision to corporate overlords.