This doesn't really matter. The Bluesky app has very few features, it's still invite only which limits the number of users, and engagement and active users are low. It's on a trajectory to death right now. The core of Bluesky, relay/BGS, still isn't proven. Over a year after launch there hasn't been significant progress in these areas.
I finally tried it and as a new member literally every recommended post was US culture wars stuff. Is that the normal experience, or am I getting some kind of bias based on who I received an invite from?
And unfortunately I see the same shit on Mastodon as well 24/7…
I don't think there is any algorithm magic in mastodon. your feed is who you follow and who they boost. maybe its time for you to have a clean up.
Just like OP I also mean the recommended stuff https://mastodon.social/explore
Same shit as on Twitter and Bluesky
Oh, huh, I didn't know anyone used that.
This is the recommended stuff as seen from on one single server. It doesn't represent one's experience.
The whole point of Mastodon is to only get what you want, not the rest. It's easy to build your own network of sources. The explore feed is useless :)
Yeah I have an account on that Mastodon server and even logged-in, that page shows popular (rage-bait) content regardless of my personal preferences. It filtered by language but not region (so it was mostly content from another continent).
However, my actual Mastodon feed only has content from people I follow, without any recommendations, and that works great.
Twitter-style social media has become its own subculture, made of:
- people who like to argue online
- people who can easily turn any complex topic into a 100-odd character slogans
- people who like to put the world into hashtag-sized boxes
- masochists who enjoy getting into the ragebait du jour
- a vanishing minority who didn't get the memo and somehow the Algorithm has kept them in a bubble of sanity
- bots
Coincidentally most of these groups, including bots, really love the entire US culture war bullshit. They're the one that are keeping it alive, with the help of journalists, the last category of people that live on that type of social media and then report on some newspaper @oneidiotontwitter's troll post as if it were public opinion, in a perpetual cycle of mental and cultural noise.
---
Look outside. People are going about their lives. The sun is somewhere in the sky. Probably not much is going on around you. That's the real world.
Yes, kind of.
But each platform's mechanics encourage certain behaviours over others. The Twitter website (not the culture of it's users), as an advertising-funded platform, is highly geared to optimise for 'engagement', which encourages all of these behaviours.
I would have agreed until the explosion of Mastodon, where it's become apparent that even without engagement algorithms, the culture wars and other nonsense are thriving on that platform as well.
We blamed the Algorithm, but perhaps the issue was the users all along.
Here's how I see it. Maybe "the algorithm" was the problem initially, but the problem has since metastasised into every aspect of American culture, and so removing the original tumour is no longer as helpful.
We blamed the Algorithm, but perhaps the issue was the users all along.
always-has-been.jpg
It's one of the strangest things about the meta-conversation regarding social media. The "left" (I'll use quotes because these things aren't strictly defined) thinks that, for example, anti-immigration sentiment or support for Trump comes from "Russian bot farms" fooling the public. It's unfathomable to some people that smart, good, hard-working people could hold those views.
What kind of stuff are you into? I follow EU gov stuff, a bunch of scientists, Neil Gaiman, Molly White, bunch of journalists.
Also, did you scroll all the way through https://bsky.app/feeds for various interests?
Oh, and one really useful thing that I found for discovery is the little + icon to the left of the Follow button on people's profile pages. It shows suggestions of who they are following, so I built up a bunch of good follows that way.
I'm not accusing you of this, but I do find it sort of odd how the victim blaming in social media goes.
"My default experience is openly hostile and promotes division"
"My experience is that if you tailor it then it's very valuable".
"OK, but the default experience was hostile and I don't have the means to coerce the good vibes experience"
"Skill issue".
It happens on every conversation about Twitter, less so regarding TikTok and co. But it's an interesting pattern I see all too often.
Yeah, I am just a user trying to help someone navigate a new platform, which is still being developed and is probably not ideal.
Troubleshooting does fit common patterns maybe?
As mentioned, I'm not accusing you of doing it.
I think it's right to try to help people, I often mark things as "Not Interested" if it's divisive, but since we tend to have less control about emotional responses, we all have a sense that we have a duty to fairness and with the understanding that humans tend to want to correct bad information rather than letting it go uncorrected (that's why the best way to get an answer to your question is to post an incorrect answer rather than ask). -- combined, these issues mean you will likely interact in some way with the divisive content if it's delivered to you.
Seeking to actively diminish it is difficult, it requires thought and intentional moves to ignore and flag content as uninteresting or to heavily curate your feeds.
This, I feel, is why it's victim blaming; because the intent of the media platform by default is to engage and they do so by baiting emotional or corrective responses in the interest of fairness.
It amazes me the extent to which the existence of BlueSky has improved my Twitter experience. It went from unusable to all the nonsense moving somewhere else and safely avoidable.
Let people argue in their own bubbles and leave the rest of us in peace.
It went from unusable to all the nonsense moving somewhere else and safely avoidable.
You mean you moved from a place that showed content you disagree with, to your own bubble. You can admit that without claiming everything outside your point of view is silly.
No, all sides of the US culture wars disappeared.
It used to be that regardless of your position, even active disinterest, this stuff was forced on you, and now that is not the case.
If you mean "culture wars" as in the right leaning people who are obsessed with attacking minority groups, that is fine.
If you mean said minority groups just trying to exist in a space without harrasment then that is not fine at all.
I wasn’t referring to minorities existing without harassment. Not even sure where that came from, but jumping to that sort of conclusion is exactly what I’m talking about.
both can be fine and part of culture wars.
Is that the normal experience
Yes, this is the tricky thing about internet communities. Bluesky is mostly made up of older school Twitter addicts angry at Twitter's takeover and yeah all they tend to talk about is that and culture war adjacent stuff.
Shows a bit of the naivety of the Bluesky devs they didn't clock this as a problem and try and help people who don't want to talk about that find their community on there.
Bluesky is mostly made up of older school Twitter addicts angry at Twitter's takeover
Exactly. Bluesky was born in the shadow of Elon taking over Twitter. But Twitter still exists, so who went to Bluesky? A lot of people who disagree with Elon's (recent) politics. The politics of Bluesky will reflect that.
I am so tired of it. I wish there was an AI filter for social media that let me block out this stuff.
When USA reelect Trump my willingness to pay for such a service is infinite
I think it is normal. I have tried to find other creators or content source, but the topics I care about (mostly engineering and education) are under-represented on Bluesky.
It is probably due to how Bluesky was populated - a specific demographic of twitter were the first movers to bluesky, and it has attracted more of the same. I guess there is a market for this.
As a side note on Thread and Mastodon: the experience there was different. Thread has a larger tech community so there is actually interesting content (for me at least) and Mastodon, it really depends on the instance, but even on the first instance (mastodon.social) you can find good content if you search by hashtag, and you can find some real nice people to follow (and since it's the multiverse, you can follow from any instance anyway) so it's all about building the social graph you want)
One of the reasons I entered an apparently very focused Mastodon instance and left after two months. I was absolutely not interested in discussing politics, let alone culture wars that are absolutely incomprehensible to me.
It doesn't surprise me that BlueSky goes in the same direction, to be honest.
It had nothing of the sort when the network was younger but it seems like everything steers towards that sort of political profile eventually, regardless of name.
And 2024 is probably going to be particularly nasty for obvious reasons.
It was billed as a twitter alternative
Thanks for the warning
Finally a real Twitter competitor.
After being addicted to Twitter to a point where I could not focus on anything (as someone who was born in Ukraine, all I did was doom scrolling), I've decided that the only winning move is not to play. No Threads or BlueSky for me. I am OUT.
i have been addicted too, trying to quit several times, and went cold turkey when musk took over
I suggest a strategy to reduce Twitter addiction: limit yourself to following no more than 100 accounts and avoid using the "For You" tab.
A better strategy: just delete your account. I promise you won't miss it after a week.
Delete your account, remove the apps. Block it on the network level if you need to. Just add any friction you can to using it.
If even 1 of those 100 frequently retweets stuff from another 10 accounts, this system stops working.
If you are ruthless at blocking and curating who you follow, Twitter can be a very good experience.
My Twitter feed is nothing but posts about what is going on in AI.
While I do follow Elon Musks account, because it may contain something important to know at some point (which rarely happens), I block everyone he retweets in regards to political views so that I'm not affected by it.
I use an ad blocker to remove the Trending panel, because at least here in Germany it is an entry point to the gates of hell, where you are guaranteed to be confronted with the most extremist, anti-government people this country has to offer. Politics are the worst on Twitter, and Twitter feeds that rage in order to have more engagement.
I also have always had a curated list of "following" but certainly my experience has been degrading in the last months, for various reasons.
It should be said that for specific contexts, Twitter is the right place to follow, and AI is one of these.
My Twitter feed is nothing but posts about what is going on in AI.
Sounds awful! :-)
The issue with creation is that you have to devote mental energy to removing the crazies. I felt much better simply cutting it all out of my life. I only read individual blogs now and its way better. If only we could convince the people worth following to start WordPress blogs or something.
For me, the perfect thing would be something that aggregates links from all these sources, because there is useful stuff there sometimes.
The discussion tends to be worse than useless.
I'll implement this "some day"
I made fossil for this purpose. Sometimes the good stuff is regular social posts, sometimes it’s links. The only way to separate the wheat from the chaff is AI (imo)
For social media that offers RSS (YouTube, Mastodon, and now BlueSky), I use an RSS reader.
If something important happens on Xitter/Facebook, it’ll get repeated elsewhere.
No Threads or BlueSky for me. I am OUT.
I still use Twitter some, but I had a similar experience with Facebook. One day I found myself lurking on acquaintance's profiles and thought: "what am I even doing?". I quit and never looked back.
Problem is, I find Twitter really useful. But you have to keep your stream focused (in my case tech and data). It's really easy to doom scroll. In fact that's kind of the design intention.
Whatever Twitter had in usefulness has been gamed and reverse-engineered by the big accounts and the paid blue ticks to the point where the signal to noise ratio is no longer good enough.
Never used twitter, but I was a reddit addict. My life is much better now that I've stopped. It really is the only winning move.
Same here. Reddit and Youtube for a shocking amount of time per day. I had to quit Reddit like I quit nicotine, it was genuinely difficult.
The good news is that it reduced my Youtube time as well because I didn't have anything to pair it with. I realized I would watch Youtube and if I was bored or uninterested I may pull out my phone and hop on Reddit. Get bored of Reddit? Find a video to throw on. It was good to put a wrench in this self-reinforcing feedback loop.
There was a happy time around 2018 or so, where I followed a limited group of about 50 Twitter accounts. Using Tweetbot, I could keep up with the timeline in about ~20 minutes per day. I would see interesting conversations and links, some humor and almost no anger.
It all went downhill since then.
I had the same experience here in the Twin Cities during the fallout after George Floyd's murder. It was awful, possibly the worst experience in my life, all driven by Twitter. I finally deleted my Twitter account when Musk took it over, and my life has improved massively. I did register a Bsky account, but it immediately triggered the same awful feelings that having a Twitter account did, so I haven't looked back.
These things are absolute brain poison and I don't miss them at all.
I have come to the same conclusion. I still feel a bit out of place every now and then without any social media, but if I need to chat - I just open up whatsapp and talk to my actual friends instead.
What's Bluesky's revenue stream? Ads?
Bluesky’s business model must be fundamentally different — we are a public social network and our code is all open source, so we have no “moat” when it comes to data.
That's such a bullshit claim. The entity that runs the servers where the data is stored always has a moat. They can aggressively rate limit scraping and simply refuse to provide dumps, and suddenly, they are the gatekeepers to everything that actually matters. Open source has nothing to do with this.
A few things:
1. while they're still not quite there, the protocol is federated, so they aren't the only servers storing your data once that happens.
2. because stuff is signed to your account, and other PDSes replicate posts, even if your host got weird, you could recover a lot of it. if you want to be extra sure, you can run your own PDS as well. I am not super up to date with how much replication various "reach" services store the firehose permanently, but should be possible to get content from them, for example.
3. I agree that open source doesn't prevent this.
so they aren't the only servers storing your data
That's only true if other large servers eventually emerge. "Federated" systems have a tendency to coalesce into a network wherein a few big players – often just a single one – dominate the ecosystem. Gmail, Matrix.org, the few Mastodon and Lemmy servers that actually matter, etc. are examples of this.
Usually, this leads to the dominant servers dictating rules for everyone else under threat of defederation (already the status quo with Mastodon today). And at the end, you have a hyper-complicated federated system that operates the same way as the centralized systems it originally aimed to replace.
So, I absolutely agree with regards to normal federated systems. Your examples are examples for a good reason.
But Bluesky works a bit differently. Users don't work as like, "user@domain", you have the moral equivalent of a UUID. If the host of your PDS decides to defederate with someone else's host, that doesn't mean you're prevented from getting their posts, it just means that like, it's a bit harder to. And if you don't like what your PDS's host chooses with regards to defederation, you move to a different one, and when you do, you retain your entire following/follower graph, and people who follow you don't necessarily even notice..
The closest way to think about it is git, IMHO. GitHub hosts a copy of your project (a PDS of your posts), and you can have one locally too. You can also put up copies elsewhere, and people can grab copies of your project elsewhere. If GitHub decides to stop hosting your project, you can put it up on another host, no problem. If GitHub decides to stop hosting a project you want to follow, you can follow where they move.
This is in sharp contrast to email or Mastodon, though in my understanding, Mastodon has made it a bit easier to move servers lately.
Most criticism of BlueSky/AT tends to be that it's too hard to do things like private accounts, keeping your block/mutelist private, or even deleting posts. (Though the latter is better now thanks to the addition of the moral equivalent of git rebase.)
I can't respond right this moment, but I suspect you may not understand the technical underpinnings of the protocol. It works very differently than Mastodon. I will elaborate later, unless anyone else chimes in :)
That hasn't been my experience with Mastodon. The servers most of the big servers block are overwhelmingly sources of harassment, extreme hate content, and media that might be legally classed as child pornography where those servers are hosted. The servers I've noticed being really picky about who they federate with tend to be smaller.
1. while they're still not quite there, the protocol is federated, so they aren't the only servers storing your data once that happens.
Federation only makes it easier for everyone to scrape the public data, which most contents of a social network of this kind is. And we all know that by delaying the Federation Bluesky is making sure they will be the most popular and most used instance by default because it makes discovery and easiest engagement.
Everything in AT is public. No need to scrape.
Depends on what you mean by "engagement and discovery." If you mean, "How will people hear about AT, by BlueSky or by StevesPDS.com, then sure, BlueSky has a ton of attention. But if you mean "engagement with other people's posts" or "discovering other users", that's the same no matter where their content is hosted.
3. I agree that open source doesn't prevent this.
You can always erect walls around things. We at least try to poison pill it enough that if the company tried to, people would exit with the data first. Which is why internally we don't see us as having a strong moat around the data.
Yep! I think it's great that y'all are open sourcing stuff. Necessary, not sufficient. Glad you're going further than that.
When I talked through the game theory of BlueSky with the founder, it seemed that it would tend more towards competition between a few large services with fairly nuanced and predictable moderation policies. It is very easy to move your account and your followers to a new server, so if a big server started operating in the way you describe a large exodus would happen fairly quickly. But you have to make sure you are on a server that isn't being blocked by the other large servers, e.g. Donald Trump's server, some spammer's server, or a server that is difficult to distinguish from a spammer (like your own small server) so there will be an incentive for popular accounts that value their reach to stay on big servers shared by many other popular accounts that are hard to block without users noticing.
So, the situation isn't so bleak as you describe, but also, yeah, controlling the website or app called "Bluesky" is still a moat (until it's not!)
it's a Jack Dorsey initiative so I'm sure it is "cross-subsidization through Square's investors and balance sheet"
Jack doesn't own the company, the employees do. He is on the board though.
I'm pretty sure it's "we will figure that out later".
A bit presumptive but the answer to that is likely ads. Unless they try the whole premium subscription model like Twitter (X) and realize nobody cares that much to pay $5/mo for social media.
Not sure how they still could hope to gain enough traction to become profitable. Meta is already running circles around Bluesky both in terms of active users and features.
Wish posts that require a login would at least appear in the feed. That would be like RSS feeds from a site with a paywall. If I logged into BS from my RSS reader I'd be able to see them.
Now that you mention it Bluesky might actually find some adoption if they allowed monetizing private feeds (Is twitter doing this? I know you can monetize via subscriptions but AFAIK it's not a paywall, more of a tip). They'd compete for marketshare with patreon, substack and onlyfans combined.
There are Telegram bots that do paywall private channels, a few examples I can mention:
- InviteMember (accepts most payment methods, including Stripe)
- CanalFans (accepts only USDT, and it's only available in Spanish, South American focused)
The way they work is that you add them to your private channel and the bot executes the sale, invites the member and kicks them out if they don't renew their subscription.
Of course they take a commission on the sales.
On a small scale, it’s probably also quite straightforward to roll your own using Telegram’s built-in bot payments API (which acts as a gateway to a number of processors including Stripe). Not sure if one should, but it’s a possibility.
I've looked into it from the technical side, and it's not that straightforward.
I mean, yes, it's on the scope of a toy project, but it's definitely not on the scope of a weekend project.
My software development estimation looks like at least 2-3 months with at least 3 hours daily on the IDE (on the Subscription Management side, ignoring the payment gateway, that as you mentioned: it's on Telegram already).
Substack has this working.
I have some paid substack blogs in my RSS feed. Some give you part of the post in the feed and then you have to click on the post to see the rest (in you’re a subscriber, else not). Others just say “click here to read” and again, if you are a subscriber (I am) you see the post.
I’m surprised they don’t just use private RSS feeds for posts like they do for podcasts.
This approach acts like a sales tool, which I think is better all around.
The Bluesky protocol doesn't really allow non-public posts (which is why blocking doesn't work the way some people would like it to, and why there can't be features like Circles)
I believe Twitter does support paid private posts that you can subscribe to, but I've never seen anyone I follow use it
Yeah, that's kind of janky. Because in Bsky, there is a user setting to ~"ask clients to respect login required."
However, there are things like firesky.tv which access AT Protocol directly and I believe don't respect that setting. You can make a user RSS feed from firesky by using Filter and setting a user handle.
At least I think I am responding to your issue...
I noticed this shortly after the loginwall came down, and am subscribed to a few feeds. The post mentions the lack of links, but what I find more frustrating is the lack of embedded media (or indication thereof) on posts where it's present. This is also a problem with Mastodon feeds.
Check it out: https://bsky.app/settings/external-embeds
Thanks! I didn't know about this, have toggled some of them on, and will see how it changes things. I think this is limited to the web client, though - I don't see how it could impact RSS feed generation, since those are being fetched logged-out by my RSS reader. Mostly I'm frustrated by the lack of <img>s in RSS <description>s on posts that contain photos.
It is very new.
And yeah that does sound frustrating, maybe file a bug?
yeah please do https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/
Mastodon feeds do have embedded media, not sure what you mean.
Interesting. I just checked, and Mastodon feeds do seem to be emitting xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" <media:content> tags with image URLs. NetNewsWire doesn't attempt to render them at all. Other feeds using vanilla RSS with <img> tags in the <description> do render. Maybe it's just a client issue.
Edit: Yep, https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/issues/2538. My bad; not a Mastodon issue.
Or do you mean an image or other media in the <enclosure> tag?
I'm using https://bluestream.deno.dev/ which does include embedded media.
I've one test user I'm following where I have an RSS feed from Bluestream and one directly with Bluesky. When they reach parity I'll swap over.
This is a little bit off topic, but Openrss page information about how to obtain RSS link is poor.
"To find the RSS Feed for a website, just navigate to the website and the RSS feed for it is usually located at the domain of the website followed by /rss.xml, /rss or /atom.xml".
Recently on HN there were infos that pages provide meta links to atom. This is cleaner solution than guessing.
There was also Firefox extension 'want my rss', etc etc.
This should be better explained on RSS site.
Back in the day, browsers would have native RSS support. Somewhere around the URL bar of the favourites bar you'd have a little RSS button that would take you to the RSS feed of your choice, as configured by the <link> tags in the HTML.
Most browsers have removed RSS, so now you need to either read the HTML (which sucks even if you're familiar with it) or just guess. If you want to instruct the general audience on how to get RSS feeds these days, and you don't want to link to browser extensions (because only a few mobile browsers support them), then "just add /atom.xml" seems like the most foolproof solution to me.
The RSS reader I use (Feedly) will do this for you automatically. Just paste in the normal web URL and it'll go search for the relevant <link> tag, just like your browser used to do.
Yes. It's common practice for them to be called rss.xml and atom.xml but they can be anything you want. I use a `link` tag on my site -- I am not an expert here, but it seems applicable[1], RSS etc readers find it, and `meta` is documented only for use for cases that elements like `link` cannot represent.[2] So I'm confident enough this is correct-ish enough to write in a comment on HN :)
<link href="https://example.com/rss.xml" rel="alternate" title="RSS feed for example.com" type="application/rss+xml"/>
<link href="https://example.com/atom.xml" rel="alternate" title="Atom feed for example.com" type="application/atom+xml"/>
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/me...
Indeed. WordPress runs a big part of the web and is probably more likely for blogs, which is what you are likely to want to follow with RSS, and it's located at /feed.
At this point, I just use CTRL+U and search "rss" and "atom", hoping to find a the corresponding <meta /> tag. It's a shame Firefox does not automatically display a feed icon anymore, it would be much better if I want to tell non technical people about RSS. Installing an extension is workable but it's also an additional step.
I appreciate that someone created this page which is handy when introducing people to web feeds:
It too could use a mention of autodiscovery though.
Bluesky launching RSS feeds is a direct result of Bluesky not being a distributed protocol. Yes, I know, it's aiming to be federated. But there are fundamental issues with the protocol they decided to go with that is keeping them from creating a social network that actually has self-authenticating posts.
And all of this starts with their DIDs being a substring of the hash of your first post? It just doesn't make sense. In these kinds of systems you hash the data and sign the hash, then you can send a message that can be authenticated anywhere.
And thus, RSS is one answer I guess.
No one ever asked for an RSS feed of a Scuttlebot log back before that network was scuttled. Why? because you could authenticate the sender and the posts on your own computer.
While individual posts are not self-authenticating (largely because it makes deletion much more complicated) all of a users posts are in a merkle-tree that it itself self-authenticating. A Post and the merkle-proof to the root its a complete verifiable entity.
Our community can have the best of both worlds here. We can have the users sign their posts with a keypair on their own computer, and allow faux delete, and authenticate a merkle-tree back to the root.
Delete can't be real because someone will always have their phone out there ready to screenshot your post.
Imagine the @ protocol was
```<ed25519 Public Key><Signature>```
and that opened to
``` <timestamp><ed25519 Public Key><Previous Post Hash><Data Hash> ```
And the previous post hash could point to a post before a delete if we consider deletes to be real.
The hashes are used to lookup the post content, which we could also send with the message for the sake of convenience.
For key rotation we just need to sign a message pointing to our new keypair, no federated servers required! "My new key is EVxe89AeRwmTT0hfrT7sHe0wAuzvH9Yvg9TFUgqPh4M="
The fact that someone can screenshot something does not make deletion not real. Deletion is still valuable for many threat models and day-to-day situations humans run into.
As someone working on a p2p app that has done a lot of user research, I see it as a really good sign when a federated/p2p systems prioritize deletion, because I know based on my own research that it's something users care about and ask for.
100% agree with you. You can allow the illusion of a delete, and also allow messages to be signed using a keypair. When you build the merkle tree you stop linking to the deleted post and link to the next best non-deleted post.
BUT, if the content is already out there in a distributed system then you have to expect all of the nodes to respect your delete and not optimize for it.
After registering, almost every post was related to nazi substack drama... I don't get it. I've also used Threads and it's a much more chilled app...
My wife and I get IG ads for threads that are full of racist, bigoted posts by its users. We have no idea why, since we never click on those sorts of post, and our IG accounts are 100% hobby centric between our own posts and follows. As such, I have not touched Threads and keep telling IG the ads are not relevant to my interests.
Presumably that is not your experience with it. It's wild how easily an algorithm can skew our perception.
I suppose IG ads are not recommended based on your interests, rather on what's more popular in some circles. I get some ads too and these are totally unrelated to my classic Threads feed. In the feed I mostly get travel-photo posts, some posts related to renewables, some related to uk brexit(lol why, I'm not in uk) and some from my country, but most of them are photography/travel related
nazi substack drama.
That's because there are a decent amount of indie journalists there and a lot of them are moving away.
I for one don't understand why one would switch to yet another corporate controlled social network. Have people learned nothing?
Because "user first" orgs like cohost have learned the hard way that the money math doesn't work out when your service gets even a few users. Lots of hidden costs to running social media.
Then you have the other end, mastodon and federation. At the very least, solves the user culture problem somewhat but does not solve the hidden costs of hosting and moderation at all. Especially if you get a sudden influx of users.
IMO VC money, corporate money, whatever you want to call it, is more or less required to run social media at scale.
The fact that links are broken is a pretty serious flaw. But hopefully that will be fixed soon.
Yikes. Who knows when I'll remember to look them up again.
Signed up a couple of months ago and it was barren.
Went back yesterday and it's still that way.
There's literally nothing to read and nobody interesting to follow there.
Yeah I don't really get the invite-only strategy during the height of Twitter's self-inflicted woes. Very dumb move.
Threads is already much better overall despite the delayed launch in Europe.
I love RSS, but I predict that these will be removed at some point.
With RSS, you can't gauge impressions and engagement with content, and you can't force all sorts of ads into people's feeds.
I suspect that's why they're not including links in the feed content. You're forced to go to their site to click through.
Like every Mastodon user apparently: https://www.rssboard.org/news/211/every-mastodon-user-has-rs...
Yeah, would be even better if it where atom feeds with pagination, IMO.
It beats Facebook's plans to integrate w/ ActivityPub because they actually did it but I will point out some advantages of ActivityPub over RSS because polling with RSS is terribly inefficient as you have to keep polling a file over and over again asking for changes whereas ActivityPub lets you ask for what you haven't read already.
Threads has already started testing bi-directional follows with ActivityPub.
And the plan is to rollout a "mixed Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them" by late 2024.
http://plasticbag.org/archives/2024/01/how-threads-will-inte...
The title displayed is not good At the moment: https://bsky.app/profile/ulrischa.bsky.social/post/3khanuwle... But all in all a nice feature
Logged into BS after getting an invite and immediately realised what X (twitter) users from the US where talking about when they mention political "dispute" being a big driver of the social network.
Goodbye BS! Even looking at the endless stream of xxx-coint posts on nostr is not that exuasting.
I said 8 months ago that the invite system would be the death of BlueSky[1]. I think that’s true. Just like clubhouse, but the time they actually open it up, hype is gone.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35754628
Why do they still have it? They are super late to the "twitter replacement" game. The only thing carrying them is jack Dorsey's name and that's slowly slipping into irrelevance.
The invite system is ostensibly rate limiter and moderation tool, rather than a hype machine. They've mentioned getting rid of it soon. Maybe they "missed the boat" in some sense, but I'd rather see steady and sustainable growth.
Dorsey hasn't been doing them any favours for a long time, he's all but publicly disavowed it, deleting his account to focus on nostr. He's still on the board of directors last I heard, but if his public statements are anything to go by, he's not actively involved.
With a social network, steady and sustainable is usually not an option. If they don't have a strong launch when they remove the restrictions they'll fade into irrelevance within a few weeks. Threads had a surprisingly strong launch and it still has an uphill battle to climb if it wants to challenge Twitter and that's in spite of all the ways Twitter is attempting to self-sabotage.
Explosive growth is not a requirement. Take a look at reddit's long-term trajectory, for example. It's remarkably linear (although I have a feeling it's not going to continue for much longer)
Reddit’s value is the historical content. Old content on a feed-based app is literal garbage, however.
Isn't Threads kinda proving that explosive growth isn't a requirement to a successful social network?
Threads is backed by Meta so can survive for decades running at a loss.
Not sure if the same applies to BlueSky, X, TruthSocial etc.
Social networks typically demand large user bases because it goes hand in hand with advertising.
They were actually super early but the invite system squandered that opportunity. For months it was just a tiny subset of oldschool twitter users.
There was a time when people I followed on twitter started making accounts. But 99% of their followers (like me) couldn’t follow them there. So those people of course stopped posting there.
Actually think Theads made the same mistake, you signed up and your followers were not carried over.
If I was at IG I’d have made the number carry over even if the users were not there yet, seemed catastrophic to sign up day one and see like 10 followers when you have thousands on IG
Jack Dorsey moved his support to Nostr, I don't think he has any involvement with Blue Sky. Jack doesn't even have or use a Blue Sky account, to the best of my knowledge.
I generally wouldn't trust any social media app that's not used the leadership. Threads is still half baked but at least Mark uses it regularly. And Elon is regularly posting on Twitter.
Some part of that is due to the design of BlueSky. But I think most of it was ironically due to the invite system simply existing. Jack wanted an open platform.
Letting in the eternal September from Twitter would be its death. Threads can be about hype.
I have so many Bluesky invites, I think most people do. If anyone I know needs one, I have one for them. They sign up and they will immediately have people they know to follow.
I stopped giving them away to random people.
Send one to me. greg at the email qbix.com
bsky-social-pwjar-yjsxa
bsky-social-zweux-qaqar
bsky-social-4il6n-kuumm
bsky-social-n23po-7dedu
bsky-social-7fey2-v5fw6
It looks like all of them have been used.
Yeah, when posted publicly they get scraped immediately. Invite people you know.
Well, some people are more random than others!
For example I dated this girl who was always stopped for a random search in an airport.
Bluesky invites have been abundantly available for months now, and they're processing the waitlist directly if you don't feel like asking someone.
I've found engagement is surprisingly high, much much higher than Mastodon, but of course it depends on the niche.
Only in a bubble where everybody already has an account I suspect.
I've been giving away my invites on Twitter and it has become increasingly more difficult to find any takers. I think I'm currently sitting on like ten invites since my friend is feeding me his spare invites too.
1. When people actually wanted invites, they couldn’t get one. Timing matters.
2. People may be interested, but they’re people that are outside of the existing niche that is on Bluesky. But clearly BlueSky only wants people that are part of that existing niche. The monoculture.
What?
There is one single hivemind on the network because of their invite-only system.
It was designed that way so they wouldn't have to worry about moderation so much right away.
Same, I’ve more invites to hand out than I know what to do with.
This doesn't really matter. It's replicated all of the features that matter, twitter has very few user-facing features that matter anyway. The only thing preventing Blu Sky from succeeding is user interest.
Are all users paying - or users are the product?
They will be offering paid services in the future (see my link above) but only one has shipped yet: a partnership with namecheap to make it easy to get your handle as a domain name without technical knowledge.
Sorry, which link are you referring to?
If https://bsky.app/settings/external-embeds - I don't have an account.
I'm curious what the partnership fees with Namecheap look like, if there's even transparency to make that public?
I am working on a similar centralized-aggregation system and integrating-partnering with registrars is one future aspect of the system I've been planning; it's of course always a matter of prioritizing resources, and I'll be at a major disadvantage compared to Bluesky with Jack's early involvement/launching it getting BLuesky plenty of press and at least some momentum.
As around a decade ago I wrote a comment and made a blog post of it, all else being equal, the final layer of competition will be governance - which will ultimately be different nodes that govern well enough - including providing enough value at a fair cost - to gain enough mass to begin snowballing and ideally as many as possible find a stable state; then hopefully they all copy the best features and policies of the most successful; the problem here though is virtue signalling is a survival mechanism, and pretending to offer something that may even appear quite similar on the surface may actually integrate an inherent flaw in the system - say allowing for an ideological mob to more easily form and become indoctrinated, say based on very nuanced decisions on how informatio is presented to end users (can it be more easily gamed by greedy or bad-authoritarian actors, etc).
Sorry, forgot I had posted two links; I meant this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39008877
They don’t mention what the business structure of the partnership is, yeah.
BlueSky has a slightly different take than yours, that you might find interesting. Things are split up into “speech” layers vs “reach” layers on top of them. So “governance” gets a bit weird: at the base level, you can say whatever you want, but how accessible that is depends on the popularity of various things in the reach layer. Nobody can stop you from running a PDS and putting your posts out into the network, but if say, the most popular moderation service decides to not show your posts, users wouldn’t see them unless they use a different tool in the reach layer, say one feed that uses it and another that doesn’t.
I think the invite system worked. They managed to keep high-bandwidth low-effort users out until nicest of online people recreated early-Twitter-like culture, unlike how Mastodon Fediverse had gone with flood of empty calories trying to make a big exodus happen. There are probably lessons on how to build a successful social medium, more so than about architecting a technically scalable system.
You say that as if it's a good thing. Bluesky turned into one of the most toxic networks out there. Just browsing the discover feed should dispell any illusions of a healthy community - most posts are whining about american politics or whining about some other unimportant memes like AI art instead of fostering growth about common interests like Mastodon does.
Bluesky had their chance with invite only and curated feeds (with some really dedicated community admins) but they've fumbled it all by focusing on american culture wars instead of the nice thing they had.
Not my experience at all. This is one such strange online remarks.
Personally I would agree. Of all these services Bluesky is the only one I have an account on and actually use directly (I "use" Twitter indicrectly via Nitter). I was actually excited to get an invite.
It just feels... cleaner somehow. The slow trickle has, I think, kept it from being overrun by low effort posters and bots.
BlueSky has for some reason far more biologists than Mastodon: Searching for 'PAG31', a currently ongoing large plant and animal genomics conference, reveals about 20 different posters on BlueSky with about 60 posts and only two posters on Mastodon with four posts (one's a company). Twitter/X still has more posts than BlueSky, though. Scientists are creatures of habit.
That’s probably because many people have not enabled search indexing on their Mastodon accounts. If instead you search for the #PAG31 hashtag you’ll find nine different posters (still too few, but more than two).
It was always going to be a struggle to compete with Threads.
But if you don't bring your A-game when you're competing against the world's best social media company then what is the point. Meta is already feeding behavioural data into Instagram's ads which means they have no need to monetise it anytime soon. And the free advertising they are running on Instagram/Facebook is bringing in new users at a rapid pace. What advantages does BlueSky have ?
And the fact that there are no AT protocol servers means that you have the ActivityPub ecosystem with such a huge head-start and likely set to dominate in 2024.
If we had ditched invites we never would've been able to ship the open network / relay system. As it stands we're on track for open hosting in Q1¹.
Same story with features. We didn't deprioritize the protocol because that's core mission, so we had to put resources there instead of into features. Features will accelerate as core stabilizes.
Shipping a novel technology, building a product, and growing a userbase all at once isn't easy. I wouldn't declare us dead unless we've missed the boat so badly with market timing that nobody bothers, but we have good runway and (IMO) a pretty solid community of users.
¹ Probably. Maybe. Pretty sure.
I signed up for a login directly from the site and got one quickly. It was pretty easy to get access overall.
Now that I’m on the site though, I feel the same about it as I do Twitter: a) Most posts are uninteresting, exist to virtue signal or are by people who _think_ it’s important to try desperately to be funny (which they often are just cringy and not funny) b) It’s extremely confusing to know any context on a reply post when it’s reply 22 of a 39 reply long thread c) It’s not fun or engaging. It doesn’t really add anything to my life d) I don’t want to post myself because inherently I, like many social media users, have nothing worthwhile to say to the digital world - so I choose not to post while others force it anyway.
It’s not my cup of tea and I’ve considered deleting the login a few times. I think I’ve just outgrown traditional social media.
Blue sky invites are plenty. But they make it quite likely that when you join, you directly find your peer group there since that's where you got your invite from. You directly know a person to follow and via their posts, repsots, followers, ... directly find a network.
If you open without connection to any of your peers you first have to find anybody who is active.
Signed up day one for the waitlist. Still no invite (and it doesn't sound like I am missing out on anything anyway).
Out of principle, I am refusing to beg on the internet and take invites from the cool kids that have been let in, and at this point I can only assume they deleted all the mere mortals who dared request to join early on.
They're apparently getting registrations at a steady linear rate though:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bluesky_Registered_U...