Just to say the obvious: the new CEO is a VC partner and former CEO of Automattic. That seems very bad, no matter how "committed" they are to the vision of Bluesky.
From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine, but there's no investor who would take a look at the site's user statistics[0] and say "oh yeah things are going great." There needs to be drastic changes if investors hope to have any return on investment.
Speaking personally, supposedly Twitter now (X) still has a bunch of censorship and I don't especially like Musk (but what he did was valuable, showing Jay Bhattacharya he'd be put on a trending blacklist) and the site is... well, I should be able to follow threads without having an account but they crippled it so much. It reminds me of Instagram, "log in to see any PUBLIC page"
Don't be fooled into thinking you're getting a dose of unfiltered reality on X.
It feeds you what you engage with, and it changes surprisingly quickly. It caught onto my ARC raiders interest almost instantly. I engaged with a Portuguese post once, and now I get wonderful translated posts in Spanish, French, and Arabic too.
>Don't be fooled into thinking you're getting a dose of unfiltered reality on X.
What evidence could you possibly have that I'm not? There's lots of "politically incorrect" things which is a symptom of low filtration. Besides, you can't have seen my feed. Completely baseless allegation. So what's the real reason for taking the anti-X stance?
Politically incorrect things might be a symptom of low filtration on almost any other site, but not one run by Elon Musk. He has a clear agenda and is not shy about putting his finger on the scale at X. It's so blatant and well documented that it's almost hard to imagine you could be commenting in good faith.
Why would that change anything? I've always found political incorrectness to be a symptom of free speech.
>but not one run by Elon Musk.
Why would that be any different? Same symptom. Same free speech as far as I can tell.
>He has a clear agenda
What's the agenda?
>is not shy about putting his finger on the scale at X.
What instances of him putting his finger on the scale do you have? He gets community noted hilariously often.
>It's so blatant
What makes it blatant?
>well documented
By people who clearly hate the man and have lost their ability to reason over it. Like the ones who lost the narrative control of twitter.
>it's almost hard to imagine you could be commenting in good faith.
Having different opinions than you isn't bad faith. I brought up that the censorship is better than before (but still not great), and mentioned some cool new developments I've seen. You've attempted to steer the conversation to be about Elon Musk or myself. These are both ad hominem attacks, which is textbook bad faith.
I think the lady doth protest too much.
That's all been gone. The algorithm fav'ing paid blue check users massively made things worse from there.
Bluesky attempts to be better on all fronts here. Interesting apps/services are welcome, permissionless. There is no top down pro-facsism pro-racism pro-MAGA finger-on-the-dial algo-shaping.
Sure there's some who will just be burned out & not interested. But there's so many interesting structural safeguards & such a openness to play & creativity & tuning... I really encourage folks to give it a time. I would definitely hope that "bound to fail" is perhaps not a cast die, that, we tried something great once, it's gone, never again, is not how this works.
I was a customer of a bank that treated me with nothing but contempt. Whenever I called the bank because of a problem, I would stay on the line forever to eventually talk to an unbothered representative. One day, instead of calling, I complained on twitter and tagged the bank. Half an hour later the bank apologised and fixed my problem.
I just checked https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/6009 and X (formerly twitter) is the #1 news app followed by substack, CrimeRadar Dispatch Audio, and coming in at 4th place is reddit.
So if twitter's dead, what does that make reddit, 3 spots behind it? Well, not dead, obviously. Pretending that twitter is gone or dead is just not rational behavior.
I'm not saying it's "fully dead", but it clearly lost the cultural relevance and impact it once had.
BTW, on US iOS App Store, Claude today is way ahead of Chrome, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Surely you don't think it means it's used by more people.
>Also, why would it be "wishful thinking"?
Because you've Motte & Balley'd twice now, each time in the direction of downplaying X's success. Because X is objectively doing great. #1st place is objectively great.
>BTW, on US iOS App Store, Claude today is way ahead of Chrome, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Surely you don't think it means it's used by more people.
Are any of those news apps? This is the third Mott & Bailey. Again in the direction of denigrating X with bad data. So first principles and neutral data sourcing cannot be the reason for the inaccuracies - I dare say lies. It's flailing at this point.
This also does not account for (1) people with multiple accounts (labellers, feeds, bots, intent) or actual activity (significant % are likely churned, didn't delete)
Again, this is not a reflection of anything bad about Bluesky as a user. IMO a smaller and more focused is a good thing for the actual community, hence why I read/post on HN and not Reddit or Twitter. However as an investor there's basically no way to interpret those statistics as anything but bad.
From a content perspective nothing important is permitted to be discussed there. It's just another hivemind with the exact same opinions as reddit and HN. Completely pointless and nothing more than the output of a temper tantrum over not getting to be the censors in charge and the whole world knows it.
Today, Bluesky remains largely undermoderated and they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan. Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter.
The only technical saving grace is the broad control you can take over the algorithm to avoid the content you don't want to see, but Bluesky is generally covered with more calls for violence than their nascent content team could ever actually deal with.
And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub.
But I digress, the new CEO pretty much hammers that final nail in the coffin for me. I have zero belief in Bluesky to be anything but another awful corporate corner of the web that I should avoid.
These things are very valuable, and if Bluesky can't succeed doing them, I hope someone else can.
Not arguing, just curious - what toxic features are you talking about?
Auto-tagging, which allows you to tag users based on who they follow. (shame feature)
ActivityPub doesn’t remotely even try to solve problems solved by atproto. What are you talking about?
In short, atproto makes apps interoperable by default by decoupling data hosting from applications. This means that apps become projections of everyone’s data, and can embed and interpret typed data from each other. ActivityPub doesn’t offer anything close, which is why you don’t have projects like http://leaflet.pub, https://standard.site, https://tangled.org, https://semble.so in the AP ecosystem.
If you genuinely want to learn about atproto, I have two longreads for you:
Also the whole point of Bluesky is that they aren't supposed to be a big evil silicon valley tech company. But now you have a silicon-valley VC running the thing.
Automattic's Matt Mullenweg is downright insane. Just google their war with WP Engine and by extension the entire WordPress community.
> As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution
Translation: enshittification
That’s the other shoe where they will iterate on ways to monetise the party. Ads, paid “verification”, making users pay to use atproto apps (or making developers pay to use the managed storage)… the sky is the limit.
In a way I’m happy Bluesky never took root and outside a few enthusiasts in my bubble it’s practically unknown.