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Comment by lich_king | Hacker News Reader

It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are.

Mastodon ended up losing its user base to Bluesky during the early Twitter exodus because many influencers and journalists wanted to have an "elite" status and a special relationship with the platform, so they preferred a platform owned by Dorsey to some hippie open-source thing. Bluesky, in turn, ended up losing back to Twitter/X when it turned out to be a place where you mostly talk about how awful Twitter/X is.

I want to say that we don't need social networks where we constantly interact with hundreds of thousands of strangers, but I'm writing this on HN, so...

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Just an anecdote - I never used Twitter/X, and never used BlueSky. Recently (about a year ago), joined Mastodon. I enjoy it, find a lot of value there, and have interesting conversations (recently about Mint Debian Linux & sound-systems, and also maker-space CNC design tools). There seems to be active investment in good features & quality on the platform, including making it easier to host your own organization server.

I believe, due to the format of engagement, its easy to spend a lot of time there scrolling - so consider

(1) only using the platform on your desktop computer, instead of phone,

(2) limiting time - 25 minutes a day is enough!

(3) Mute spammers, complainers, people with negative attiudes - you can't catch them all, but you can intentionally shape your experience over time.

(4) Subscribe to tags of your passions (example: #piano, #makerspace, #drawing, #cats, #jujitsu, #cncrouter, #3dprinting), and try to lean into that instead of getting caught up in endless political reactions - which never ends. You can be intentional, and subscribe to people who have a positive vision for the version of the future you prefer.

> Just an anecdote - I never used Twitter/X, and never used BlueSky. Recently (about a year ago), joined Mastodon. I enjoy it, find a lot of value there, and have interesting conversations

Same, more or less. Twitter started as a place to be interrupted by attention-seekers, and Bluesky was just "that but with less Elon Musk and more implementation throat-clearing." I never saw the point. Mastodon feels more like old-school Usenet, where you could find communities with shared interests, block the attention-seekers, and shrug at the usual human drama.

Curious, how many people do you need on a social network before you can find someone to talk to or before it is engaging enough for you?

I certainly don't need a billion users. I think I'd be happy with 100,000 users -- what is your number?

I think this is related to the question of how big of a city do you need to live in before you can find something to do and are not bored living there. I'm fine with a city of, say, 50,000-100,000. That is more than sufficient for me to find an appropriate number of likeminded friends and neighbors as well as interesting pursuits.

> Curious, how many people do you need on a social network before you can find someone to talk to or before it is engaging enough for you?

I don't think that's a meaningful parameter to think about? I'd say that on any social network, I have meaningful, ongoing relationship with maybe 20 people. I suspect that's the norm. But that doesn't mean you can join a social network with 20 users and get that. I mean, if it's a mailing list for friends and family, sure. But not if it's 20 randomly-selected strangers from around the world.

So the critical mass to make the "random stranger" type of a social network work is much, much higher than the number of daily interactions you need to keep coming back.

Yes, all you use is 20, but as the number increases the odds of you finding your 20 goes up. I'm saying in 100,000 roughly randomly selected people, I have basically a 100% chance of finding my 20. 50,000 is probably enough.

By the way, if your number is not the same as mine, I am not intimating that this makes you deficient in some way. Everyone has their own number.

Yeah and for me it should be mainly people like me. That's really what we do, we now live in a world that's too big for our minds to encompass, so we build little villages with like-minded people.

Some people call that bubbles, I call it sanity. I try not to spend my time giving out about the other side though. It just gives me negative energy.

As solid as the goals of Bluesky were from a technology perspective, the political driver of the user acquisition has the platform in the same category as Truth Social: political echo chambers. Two sides of the same coin. It's unfortunate because I don't think the branding is going away.

Mastodon has been great for tech communities in my experience though.

> It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are.

Bluesky and Mastodon users can interact with each other (provided both parties opt in). I'm on Mastodon, but I see my friend's messages (he's on BlueSky) and vice versa. My replies show on up on BlueSky and vice versa.

I would love to see that work, but every time I've tried to set that up, it seems to fail. The bridges seem unreliable and non-responsive when trying to set them up or diagnose issues with them.

I use https://fed.brid.gy/

It works. It has poor documentation, though so it took a few attempts to figure it out.

For example if you don't have a profile image it won't work.

That's exactly what I've tried to get working, several times. I show up on bsky with zero posts, and I can't follow folks from bsky.

IIRC when you make a mistake and it doesn't work you have to go through a procedure to unlink your account and then relink.

It's been a year so my memory is fuzzy.

You can only follow folks who have also set up the bridge on the other side.

Sometimes I think more the toxic people who wrote about politics and identity on Mastodon moved on to Bluesky when Trump got elected.

I don’t see why it is “zero” sum, nothing stops you from posting to more than one social. I mean, I have relatives on Facebook and no prospect for getting them to change so I cut-n-paste what I posted on Mastodon to Facebook, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and all sorts of places.

Bluesky won over Mastodon because the fedi model is fundamentally flawed in its UX. For a flood of people wamting "Twitter without Nazis", Bluesky was a good match. I don't think Dorsey had anything to do with it, because the influx happened after he'd already severed all ties.

Some people are getting introduced to similar and in some ways worse UX on Bluesky now that there are some actual efforts to make it slightly less centralized.

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