It reminds me of google plus. Technically better than the existing top dog, but the forced migration and trying to bootstrap with a huge but only semi involved userbase let it fizzle soon after the start.
Has there ever been a successful case of bootstrapping a new social media product with an existing userbase? Like not just added features or merging two together.
Not sure how you define "technically better" but in any way I'd add "citation needed". G+ was kinda horrible with a couple good ideas and I think the lack of widespread adoption spoke for that.
It's not exactly new social media product, but Facebook did add messaging to their then Facebook app, build up usage of messaging itself (network effect within the user's friend list), and then split it off into its own Messenger app. They are sharing the same Facebook login through.
I never used and would never use Threads for the same reason I never even considered Google+. It was DoA and I guess everyone could see it, even the people who were trying it. Such is the case with Threads.
I mean that morning when Zuck woke up and decided that a Threads a/c would need an Instagram a/c he must have seen on his daily astronomy calendar "Day of self-sabotage".
No they don’t. That’s untrue. The fact that so many replies are speaking as if it’s true is quite telling. Instagram continually pesters me to create a Threads account, but doesn’t just “make one for me”. Threads’ user growth would look very very different if this were true. It’s another app. Instagram won’t even let you expand one of the stupid Threads posts it shows you until you install the app.
For the most part the types of people who find Instagram interesting (and would have a Threads account created automatically) are simply not the audience for a tool like Bluesky (or Twitter).
Yes, this! I wanted to join Threads as an alternative to Twitter, but I changed my mind when it tried to force me to create an Instagram account. I don't want an Instagram account because I think posting or looking at people's pictures is idiotic. So as long as Threads requires me to touch Instagram in any way, it's a hard pass.
This is dripping with personal bias. Bluesky gets the stamp of being a “tool”. It can be just as much of a mind-numbing fuckaround as Threads. Most replies in this thread are just starting from “Bluesky is where my people are” and trying to turn it into something self-righteous. Why are HN users so afraid of admitting that they’re dumb humans like everyone else? Christ.
But I still think there is a difference with Bluesky and the other big social medias with full customization of how the feed(s) works, third party servers, custom labelers, etc. To me it seems plausible that they actually want to create more of an empowering tool that the users can control.
That will of course not stop users from using ”dumb” feeds. But the users doesn’t have the incitament of Facebook to always produce higher engagement and show more ads.
It is of course also troublesome that we do not know how Bluesky will act down the road to get their ROI.
i wouldn’t say falsely created, but i would say “padded statistics”
threads is beholden to KPIs unlike every other activity pub implementation
their team obviously wants to be successful to continue developing against activity pub
their metrics are akin to a company bragging about how much software they’ve written with the assistance of AI
threads was able to approximate how many instagram users wished they had twitter in the same way intellisense is able to provide auto complete for dot notation; as a magician, i spot the misdirection for investors
I agree. But then a big premise of Bluesky (hence AT Proto) is that it is not centralised however when we say BlueSky we just mean Bluesky i.e https://bsky.app and that is, frankly, very concerning. It might not sustain.
While Threads is just forced Instagram users, bsky is a decentralised social network which is not decentralised. Comparing bsky with Threads is anything but a compliment.
You know, they stopped Amazon from buying iRobot because of I guess unfair robot vacuum competition (why does that sound hilarious?). It's almost luck that Threads isn't that successful, because then they'd have to deal with monopoly concerns. At least now they can just say it's a shitty twitter knock off, don't bother us.
> but now the Bluesky app has exploded to 3.5 million daily active users, putting it just 1.5 times behind Meta’s Threads
Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it hard to believe. Realistically he is off by at least an order of magnitude.
Mashable used to be one of my go-to blogs, but I haven't been there in a while. Has it really fallen this far?
Aha I see clearly now. So that is my Reddit make you reload a comment thread when you click the 'expand thread' sometimes. To get more add views? I just thought it was inline with all their other crappy ux choises.
In this case they want to increase some KPI instead.
Christ. Some people are willing to believe anything when it affirms their baseless beliefs. You’ve taken some reply that was about another situation entirely and let it convince you. I can think of multiple more likely explanations. Enough for this to at least be in the “who knows?” bucket.
You can't interact with that without creating a Threads account (manually) and without having Threads app installed at the moment of click on the Instagram embed. And if you did that, you are a proper user of Threads, so no double count happens.
It does. If all you do is tap on a post then immediately hit back you’re not really engaging with the platform. But I’m sure they’ll still count you as an active user.
The meaningful stats would be number of posts seen, engaged with, and number of posts the user made themselves.
Does Google do that for advertising? I always wonder if my little game of hitting SKIP ASAP shows up as a valid engagement or a user-bailed or something.
Be interesting to see if they count people with the app or not. As far as I’m aware you need the app to view threads in their entirety. I tried it but uninstalled shortly after
I wonder how many of those 20 million BlueSky users are squatters that are registering every popular brand name, in the hope it becomes a lot more valuable in a year
You can use your domain as a handle, so apple.bsky.social is likely to be a fake, as the real Apple would have the account apple.com. Certainly you could fool some users, but it's not like Apple would want apple.bsky.social to use as their actual account.
There's an interesting dynamic because of the domains, I originally registered with `n1c.bsky.social` because like you say whether I intended to use the service or not it's nice to lock in the name. But then the next level is that it's actually more valuable or makes more sense for me to use it as `n1c.dev` as it's more closely tied to "me".
I am kinda sad that now someone else who isn't me is n1c.bsky but so be it.
It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes.
All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else.
That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare. Over time, this has polarized people to ever further extremes and normalized disrespect and bickering (as opposed to discussion).
It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
Added to that is user choice over moderation and algorithms.
That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life.
Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.
On “safe spaces”, as you hint at I think many of us don’t want to be shielded entirely from opposing or otherwise differing lines of thought. Speaking personally, I welcome it if there’s actual discussion to be had. Good faith discussions and exchange of perspectives is great, but I have no patience for trolls, circular logic, insults, “debate” that wouldn’t even pass for high school level, etc.
Then you need to choose the safe space option. Under no circumstances should you opt to advertise removing content for others. Because your justification with "circular logic" could mean anything. This is the safe space option.
That more free platforms employ spam protection is no excuse.
I've just started using Bluesky. How does it compare to Reddit? There are dedicated subreddits for the conservatives and the liberals, and every subreddit has moderation rules. I use the right and left-focused subreddits to keep track of what's going on in different universes. However, I must mention that you won't find a reasonable discussion of left vs right ideologies on the main sub-reddits, as Reddit users are predominantly left-leaning. But at least there are smaller forums where these two groups meet and interact, and there is some debate.
Bluesky is a lot more like old, early algorithm twitter.
Reddit is a cluster of independently operated communities that occasionally get signal blasted onto the main feed. The top moderator of a subreddit owns it and sets any standard they like.
With Bluesky there are no defined communities outside of collective engagement with particular topics or hashtags or networks of follows. There is also a "Show me [more/less] of this" button every post, and so far it seems like the platform is pretty solid at respecting your preferences. They also seem to be actively moderating the really open bad behaviour off the platform.
I don't think Bluesky is as good as a well-moderated subreddit for long form discussion, but if you spend a little time curating your feed I think you might enjoy it.
> It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians.
Presumably, normal people who want to interact with people they already know? interaction with journalists and politicians is valuable in an entirely different manner.
Their advertising model certainly is a problem. But it isn't the only one, there are more and more users that demand other users be removed because of their opinion. When social networks started to listen to a few of them, they made themselves hostages to more demands. Platforms like Twitter or reddit certainly suffered from this.
I agree that ads are basically controlling most of the internet and public discourse now. Like you can't even use normal words in youtube videos anymore, because your video will be less visible/removed.
On the other hand, there are way too many people/accounts/bots out there that don't actually want to talk or discuss something, but spread false information and incite rage and anger. Those need to be moderated even harder than they already are, i think.
It shouldn't be any surprise: it's not like the internet's userbase of 1990 represented a broad cross-section of American society, let alone western or global societies. It was mainly a bunch of academics and college students and government users. It's just gotten more and more fragmented as more people have been added.
In most ways they were far more social than modern social media, in that they were about socializing. The distinguishing characteristic that sets modern social media apart from the old school stuff is the performative aspect of it—where everyone is now encouraged to behave as a content producer optimizing for engagement—which is hardly social.
Those mediums do not have algorithms, feeds, followers, profiles, influencers, likes, or any features that many people point to as the toxic aspects of pretty much every commercial social media site of the last decade.
I’d say livejournal was the tipping point where the internet became very self-centered and your value in the platform was measured by how much engagement you were able to get.
Up until that point, in a world before blogs, social sites were mostly centered around shared interests and communities would aggressively police off topic content
> Usenet, BBSs, mailing lists etc. are social media
In a generic sense, yes. People did socialize.
But "social media" today really means: a proprietary platform controlled by a single corporation, where all the user interaction is ultimately just a ploy to keep the participation metrics up so the corporation can profile you better and sell more advertising.
Not everyone on Twitter uses their real name. Meanwhile I knew the real names of about half the top 20 most active users on a retro gaming phpbb board in the early 00s and had meet many in person and knew we everyone lived, what other hobbies they had and what they did for work or school.
Real names were absolutely used on Usenet especially in the early days, ditto for mailing lists (and still are for that matter), even though technically they are pseudonymous. In any case pseudonymity doesn't seem like it's relevant for whether something is a social medium or not – many social media are pseudonymous (or even anonymous, like the chans). HN is pseudonymous. Reddit. Tumblr. The various Fediverse services.
I wouldn't call the old stuff social networks. What made social networks a new thing was the social graph of connections becoming the information architecture of the content rather than topics. You found stuff (or it found you) by person rather than subject.
Usenet was topic based (eg reddit seems closest these days), mail lists were usually topic based, forums were organised around topics etc.
I disagree somewhat. Social media apps are powered by feed algorithms that fall into two camps:
The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model.
The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well.
The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.
There’s multiple feeds, which is one of its main features. There’s user created feeds, which are just aggregates of tags and keywords. These are alright, but prone to issues with cross domain terminology. ie, say you want a football/soccer feed and use the word “spurs”, you’ll end up having it filled with basketball and rodeo posts.
The two default feeds are your followed accounts in chronological order, the other is an algorithmic feed. The algorithmic feed is pretty good to be honest. I “disliked” around 20 political posts the first day, and it has seemed to responded fairly quick to that feedback.
The "echo chamber" argument really doesn't speak to me because all I want is a place where I can get timely updates about: people in my research field, pictures of cute dogs, and municipal government activities. The more a website stays laser-focused on my interests, the better.
I think those things you’ve mentioned are what most people came to social media for originally, but it’s gotten lost in all the noise. The original point of social networks was to be social and connect with people in your industry or who share your interests or share a locality in common, and X especially has drifted far from that ideal — lots of users now log onto it to find something/somebody to be angry at and to argue/troll.
I’m still using an RSS reader for that very purpose. I want my trusted content displayed chronologically; miss me with the algorithm and the recommended influencers. I’ve been on the internet long enough to know what I want and how to find it.
It's kind of alarming, not that I'm not guilty of it, but you do see people whose entire online presence is just stuffing their face with negative interactions.
That makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of the content provided by the recommendation algorithms, as well as human nature. A good recommendation engine, for example, would recognize when someone either likes a broad range of sources politically speaking, or likes a neutral region.
Conversely, it's unclear that a recommendation engine would be able to predict what would be best at "disrupting an echo chamber", and more importantly, when that is desirable, and what "desirable" even means. It's also unclear that the first model is successful at all in disrupting echo chambers, as opposed to exacerbating or amplifying existing positions. I think there's good reasons to think that provocative can be less effective if anything.
I disagree with this: if the only thing you allow to pierce the veil is selected based on engagement metrics you just walk away with a shallow view of your opposition. If anything this may entrench your existing views and give you a false sense of intellectual and/or moral superiority.
You need to “meet people where they are” and the first type of algorithm just doesn’t do that. It just says “conservatives/liberals really like this, so you’re going to be forced to see this too because you show interest in politics”
To give an example: let’s say I’m a small business owner who voted Trump but has some lingering concerns around how tariffs might impact my business. Am I going to be better informed reading some engagement-bait post from liberals talking about how I’m going to get “deservedly” crushed by tariffs or a post from a conservative economist laying out the cold hard facts (both good and bad)?
Your argument is in support of mine. Separate networks are an interesting legal and software engineering detail, but from the POV of the user, as long as they see what they want to see, they will stay with the network.
I think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups.
Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel").
This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.
I don't know, the entire point of the "algorithmic bubble" was to keep the tribes separate but happy, no? And the value of the network still increases with more people on it. Maybe some future social media will figure out how to keep everyone happy at the same time. For example, I think everyone but a couple of hardcore FOSS advocates and the far-right are still using Youtube.
It does seem natural to happen. But there are loads of "neutral" accounts: gov agencies, businesses, etc that use social media for announcements and simple broadcast communication. Most are on Twitter now. I think I big question is will they add bluesky, or move (probably not, because of inertia), or something else.
The press coverage is a bit misleading. Everyone is leaving Twitter. Liberals are just leaving faster.
Keep in mind that a lot of Twitter users never wanted political content. They were there for sports, art, science discussions, etc. Some of those communities are clearly migrating.
See the Fediverse for example, which prides itself on not having algorithms, and is yet the most echo-chambery and radical place I know of. People automatically filter themselves into different servers, and defederate with each other with frequency.
(Whether or not this is good or bad depends on your moral views. But I think it is obvious that "algorithms" are not really to blame.)
It's more a product of cheaper and easier content distribution. When TV is expensive to produce, there are only three channels, and it's heavily regulated, you target your content to be broadly appealing and inoffensive. The rise of cable TV, revocation of the fairness doctrine, rise of the internet, and fall of the USSR all led to more exposure to broader views. Like GP said, whether this is good or bad depends on your view.
This is another good point. I didn't actually intend to make this point, but I wanted to thank you for pointing this out.
I am not a sociologist, just a layman. But I feel that there seems to be two axis of communication. Mass (you don't know who you're talking to) vs targeted (you do know who you're talking to, like friends). Then, professional (you try to be unoffensive) vs casual (you have no such obligation).
Before the Internet, generally communication happened either mass-professional (e.g. TVs, newspapers, magazines) or targeted-casual (e.g. chatting with friends and family). This reduced offense, since mass channels were largely unoffensive as you said, while targeted channels knew how to avoid offense (i.e. you knew how to not offend your friends and family).
However, the Internet enabled a lot of mass-casual communication. And this created a lot of offense, because you didn't know who would read your messages (i.e. Twitter posts), while you didn't have the professional obligation to make sure it was unoffensive and easy to understand. This created a lot of misunderstandings, offense, etc., which leads to cancellations, hate mobs, etc.
Do note that once again I am not a sociologist, and there seems to be holes in this view. What about large group gatherings? Trashy magazines? Clubs? They seem to be examples of mass-casual communication too.
You are correct, but my point was that it seems to me, that even though engagement algorithms aren't really a thing in the Fediverse, such filter bubbles still appear via self-sorting and de-federation. So yes, perhaps algorithms are to blame for filter bubbles in centralized social media, but removing algorithms doesn't remove filter bubbles, because people create it by themselves anyway.
TL;DR: Blaming the algorithm (correct or not) doesn't actually matter in the end, because filter bubbles happen with or without them.
The issue is that social media sites produce feeds and content matching, forcing alternative views in your face.
Its like, they have decided to push metcalfes law as far as possible, to see when the breaking point is. Like a giant social experiment.
But if everyone is in one place thats still the most desirable network to be on. Just dont push Joe Blo's dumbest political opinions in my face as sponsored content.
Is it all the ways that matter? The author mentions one way, DAU. Sure, that is important but I can think of other things that matter. The number of “creator” accounts matters just as much as the number of lurkers.
From my experience Bluesky is way better and has respect for the user’s choice front and center. Lists of users to follow is a first-class citizen feature. Their algorithm is a chronological feed, not boosting engagement bait.
Here's one metric that matters – revenue per user. Bluesky's is, I assume, zero, and soon that will have to change. Threads meanwhile has the largest social media ads and monetization platform in the world behind it ready to make the dollars flow at the push of a button.
If the revenue per user is enough to cover costs, does it matter? Will it have to change?
We’ve all had “hockey stick growth!” shouted at us so many times that we’ve internalised it but Bluesky is a team is 20 odd people. They don’t have the kind of footprint Meta has and right now they don’t need it. I hope they stay small and chart a different path to success.
> Bluesky Social is a benefit corporation; as such, it is allowed to use its profits for the public good, and is not obligated to maximize shareholder value or return profits to its shareholders as dividends.
I have no idea but I suspect the investors see monetary value in an open social network not owned and operated by today’s tech giants. There’s a difference between users making money via the social network and the social network making money via the users. But both involve making money.
[Public] Benefit Corporations¹ are this weird sort of in-between between a non-profit and a regular corporation. My first encounter with this was the benefit corp that was set up for This American Life and Serial (although the latter is now owned by the New York Times) and after reading a whole bunch, it’s still not entirely clear to me what it means. Everything I’ve seen talks about transitioning from a non-benefit corp to a benefit corp, I don’t know if the concept is old enough for the reverse to have ever happened.
⸻
1. Whether it’s called a “benefit corporation” or “public benefit corporation” apparently depends on the state, and not all states have laws to allow them to be established.
The only protection that the "public benefit corporation" status provides is that investors can't sue the company for failing to maximize shareholder value. There's lots of other avenues they can take to make the company do what they want (assuming sufficient share ownership) such as pressuring the board, voting in directors, or converting the company to a regular corporation (it's not like a 501(c)(3) where this isn't possible in most cases).
Well, they’re not doing the same thing aren’t they?
I’m cautiously optimistic that the open/decentralised nature of these sites can act as a powerful forcing function to keep them in check, keeping their incentives more inline with their users compared to traditional commercial social media sites.
Mastodon’s financial (and so far technical) structure seems more inline with this compared to taking on investment, so we’ll see how it goes.
I just want a network that’s not going to juice engagement to optimise for page views for ad revenue. I want a reverse chronological feed. I want third party clients that might have different UX ideas
Not necessarily. There could be different types of content that requires different types of creators, like imagine professional video producers vs your friends posting about their day.
There could also be a different algorithm/network that allows for a few creators to feed a large number of consumers.
It absolutely is. Sure it's the default, but it's the default to measure against and beat. It's like comparing ML algos against the average prediction, or forecasts against the previous known value.
I made a Bluesky account long ago and started cross-posting my tiktoks, often on the popular and titillating topic of project management. For a long time it was sleepy as I would have expected. I got a sudden uptick recently, which prompted me to figure out how to port my follows from X, which I did with "sky follower bridge." Bluesky has been a lively, friendly place.
Sky follower bridge was able to scrape my X blocklist, but could not turn it into a Bluesky block list. No troll problems yet so that's OK for now. I still have to host my videos on titok because some are too long for Bluesky.
My tiktok "for you page" has turned to sludge and my followers are not getting my posts without setting notification options. I wonder if the magical algorithm was sequestered in China to hide it from inquiries. Hopefully a Bluesky presence helps.
Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them).
That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.
Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.
Right. After the pay-to-play change that boosted Blue Checks to the top of everything it became unusable. No better than going into the local news comment section or Craigslist discussion forums.
the impact of existence on perception is mediated by group attitudes, which are lessened in influence by anonymity ... my personal maxim is that hatred does vary on what is said and more so by where it is said
I got some of this years back, by offending Milo Yiannopoulis (who apparently used to search his own name for stuff to point his followers at), back when he was still a far-right darling. Took about a day of mass-block-lists to weed the enraged Nazi teenagers out of my at-mentions.
That was just a single incident, being noticed by far-right weirdos thankfully not being a regular thing for me. But I can imagine it would get old quickly if you were the sort of person who was. Bluesky’s far superior self-moderation is absolutely very useful here.
And you say this to people you label not like you. You probably have more in common than you think. You both agree to label the other and you decided to fight a proxy battle from the agreed among identities. Do you want the other side not to exist as well? If yes let them know.
People defending themselves from bigotry, and bigots themselves, are not equivalent. Black people not wanting racists to exist, and racists not wanting black people to exist, do you see a distinction?
There has been such a consistent attempt at ramming square pegs into round holes online in trying to “both sides” a bunch of these issues.
One trait is immutable and the other is not.
One trait is entirely internally focused and is not defined by a rejection of anyone external to the subject, the other's trait is entirely defined by such an external focus on the rejection of another person's immutable identity.
You guess racist? I had a different first guess. Then I had a better second guess. I then had a three and fourth guess. Then I wasn't sure at all. None of them were racism. This becomes a personality test that speaks about who you are and what battles you always see.
I support the concept of gender fluidity. Yes not everyone is hardwired as gay or straight or bisexual.
Being black.. is that referring to skin tone because people can slightly change their color and many products exist to lighten and darken skin tone. Or identifying from black culture in this case you can be white or black or something else and still identify.
People can't change height either. Why you jumped to race tells us what your focus is.
Why not Palestine / Jewish? It equally describes both depending on what your point of view is.
Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.
'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.
Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.
But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.
There is more momentum against Musk now than when threads launched. Not sure it is enough to overcome the network effect - but there is a lot of illwill towards his projects.
I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.
Free speech is the upside of X. People leaving to join the echo chambers of Bluesky or Threads, only serves to turn X into the echo chamber they claim it is.
I don’t know what you are referring to. I’ve never seen someone self-censor Bluesky. I see people talking about it on X all the time. Mainly to highlight some of the worst content they find there but that’s another subject…
I tried checking out Bluesky the other day. The feed was mainly unhinged political rants of a very particular flavor.
A feature of Bluesky is the ability to change your feed algorithm (or code your own - yes I wrote ‘code’). You can easily filter all political (labeled) content. To say that BS is an echo chamber is untrue, though I do not disbelieve that you observed that algorithmic choice when you first tried the app. There are many echo chambers for sure, but the protocol is designed to permit you to exclude or join them. Unlike competitor systems (which I also use, and dislike more and more due to the lack of ability to choose what I see - despite trying).
Right, and what's more the charge of echo chamber has always been intellectually lazy.
You can have a fruitful exchanges of ideas and information and debates on a foundation of similar values in a way that amounts to more than just repeating ideas back and forth. Using the term as a catch-all for a shared desire for conversations to have certain ground rules or certain community values, or subjects that spark your intellectual curiosity, calling those echo chambers is shallow and is not going to inform you about the real cultural dynamics that drive those kinds of communities.
It's just a lazy way to try absence of critical thought by looking for the wrong thing. If people labeling things as echo chambers cared about the things they said they cared about, they would look at entirely different criteria, such as epistemic closure, the quality of relationships, propensity for trolling, and so on.
Yes, people on X seem very upset that they can be blocked on bluesky. But if I've heard what you have to say and don't want to hear the same thing 1000x, that's not an echo chamber. That's me hearing you, disagreeing, and you having nothing more of value to add.
Discussion requires communication, not simply repeating propaganda over and over and over, which is 99% of the time all that anyone crying "echo chamber" tends to do.
There is no "free speech" on X. Musk has banned journalists. Banned users he didn't like. Arbitrarily banned random words. Banned links to Mastodon. Banned links to linktree. Encouraged harassment of users and news organizations until they left the platform. Banned links to articles about political candidates. No unpaid user's reply can appear in the replies to one of Musk's tweets in any practical sense. X is not a free speech platform. Musk is a liar. He is lying to you. You are being lied to. If you think X has anything resembling "free speech" I have bridge made of solar powered tiles to sell you. (That was another scam of Musk's if you missed it). The lively debate you crave does not and cannot happen on X.
lol, you seriously believe that a network fully controlled by the world's richest man, accountable to no one, is a bastion of free speech? I presume you have a bridge to sell me as well?
I don’t care much for Musk one way or the other. What I do know is that old Twitter actively censored ideas that didn’t align with their world view and new Twitter stopped that fascistic approach. Musk fired 6,000 Twitter employees and the site not only continues to work fine but has rolled out many new features. What were those 6,000 people even doing? Just how big was the censorship team?
But it does censor idea that don’t align with their world view. They do it even more now than they did before; the only difference is now they claim they don’t.
And it continues to run, but not well. The nice thing about the kind of site it is, is that if you don’t see a particular message, you can’t tell it’s missing.
idk, I specifically go to twitter for my political fix and when I go to the for you section I see a ton of liberal stuff and a ton of conservative stuff, many posts are unhinged in either direction. Others are more moderate, in general I don't really follow any political accounts, and yet I see a many posts that give me a great view of the zeitgeist for each side.
As someone (who likes to think) is pretty unbiased politically, I can say I’ll go wherever the people I’m interested post. I have been somewhat surprised that pretty non political accounts have moved to Bluesky which I have interpreted as both political and motivated by the loads of political bs that are posted on x that normal people simply get tired of. I think Bluesky will gain more traction than threads but will end up being a more successful mastodon. A place where people with massive followings who simply don’t like x will post and there will be two competing apps.
It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not, it's that it's flavor of politics is increasingly resembling that of 4chan. I just skimmed though the auto-play videos on my account and the algorithm decided to show me this for some reason: https://x.com/AlaskanTom/status/1860339990992925170
That's far from the worst I've seen on there either, evidently you can just post about how Hitler was right and it won't affect your visibility at all now, nevermind get you banned.
> It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not
But this is not true. I always use my "following" feed and not my "for you" feed. Other than sponsored ads the only thing I see are posts from people I follow. I don't understand why people persist with the narrative that Twitter forces people into "the algorithm".
I've been splitting time between Twitter & Bluesky for the last year or so. The only real difference i notice is the set of people I follow as until recently most of my Twitter follows weren't on Bluesky
I also only use the following feed, but a fairly recent change to the video player means it now immediately cuts to the next video in the auto-play queue (or an ad) when it finishes, and that's always algorithmically driven regardless of which feed you were using.
Fair. I almost always refuse to click on videos in twitter-like sites, so wouldn't have noticed this. I (usually) hate video content, especially the massive shift towards video content in our media sources.
IMO the biggest difference is that they aren’t paying users based on engagement. That’s the #1 worst decision Musk made after buying Twitter, it incentivizes people to post incendiary content, to troll and to outright lie in the aim of going viral. You see it all the time on Twitter these days and Bluesky is vastly better not having that motive.
I think overzealous moderation was what drove some people off Twitter in the first place.
Another social media site asking for my phone number, no thank you.
I read the occasional Twitter/X and probably now Bluesky post, but this offers nothing that would attract me. Twitter/X/Bluesky/Insta/Threads is for people that like celebrities with some interesting stuff in between. But overall that isn't worth it.
I'm not sure Threads ever had that much of a spike in usage beyond the first day of new accounts. Got the impression a huge number of people curious about it signed up due to the very easy onboarding if you already had an instagram, looked around a little and then never went back.
Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.
I have given Threads a good try, and recently when Bluesky activity started up I restarted using Bluesky (it didn't stick for me the first time). The technology doesn't really matter that much, as long as it's basically competent. It's only the social network itself.
I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't.
Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us.
X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two.
Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.
> Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same.
Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads.
I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.
It would be the worst thing for Bluesky if the eternal September came over from Twitter. I think that population is too passive to make the move and will put up with any level of advertising etc.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation
Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there!
It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in.
There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss.
The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to.
There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on.
Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping.
The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049
It's not just checkbox features that matter, it's also the entire algorithm and who is allowed to have their posts gain organic traction. X actively penalizes high quality information, and pushes misinformation in an attempt to become an echo chamber.
If you want to find your colleauges' posts, if you want to find high quality information, if you want good links to long articles, X is no longer the place to be.
If you want to have click-bait and rage-bait or lots of right-wing politics, X will cater to your needs. But it won't cater to somebody that's trying to get to highly-curated high-signal information networks that Twitter allowed in the past. That's all been actively destroyed, with great intention.
Threads attracted a lot of people that I left behind on Facebook. It also gets a lot of people that cross-post to every platform. I can't think of a single post that I saw and still remember.
Bluesky lets you block reposts and that has been the killer feature for me. Original content from people I choose is the best recipe for my tastes. Also, I spend a lot of time on niche creative feeds and really enjoy the things I see.
I also like the idea of seeing regional and local feeds. That was an interesting part of early Twitter that was obliterated by national political emphasis. No more political hot takes, where is a good Korean BBQ spot?
I've fallen for the Threads-links shown in Instagram. Obviously the instagram connection is what gave them a great start at a user-base. But, everytime I try to use Threads, something seems off (mainly see lame, boring, engagement-bait). Bluesky seems different and better. Also a much better story in-terms of open data, open protocol, etc.
Yeah, getting anywhere near what the major tech companies are capable of should be understood as a triumph.
Does anyone remember now Spoutible? Substack Notes? How about Spill, Hive, or Post? Being even with in anything approximating striking distance of Threads would have been a triumph for any of them.
The head of instagram/threads (Mosseri) appears to have no idea how the algorithm on these platforms work. He is shocked to see how many people are talking about threads in his feed. It may explain how threads has managed to waste such a large captured audience.
I think the factor which will determine which networks survive is the ability to handle bots driven by modern AI agents. I’m not sure how even the best moderation features can detect and mitigate these.
It’s gonna be incredibly interesting to see what happens concerning this. I suspect that bots will probably thrive in feeds where ‘the algorithm’ is responsible for recommending most content. However, bots probably won’t do as well with vanilla follower feeds.
For me it's a very easy choice to go with Bluesky over Threads.
With Threads you can already see that Facebook/Instagram is in it's DNA. There's no pure "following" feed. It's instead an algorithmic feed that mixes people you follow with people Threads decides to push. So it's going down the enshittification path from day one.
With Bluesky there's at least some hope that it will not end up as the algorithmic time sinks all other social media has slowly become. I'm all for discoverability, but allow me to decide when and how I discover new people to follow. Never touch my "following" feed, and I'll be happy.
> Meta-owned Threads started November with 5 times the daily app users of Bluesky. That number is now down to just 1.5.
Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Today are either within an order of magnitude of X?
> Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Looks like no, threads is pretty flat and bluesky is hockey stick-ing
Gotta ask, am I missing something with how bluesky is supposed to be used? Every time I open something from there it takes over 30 seconds to load on my phone
Probably worse. Mastedon runs on self hosting, Threads has a parent company with deep pockets and is a Instgram mod at best.
Twitter burned cash for years and it could because it was new, innovative and growing quickly. Once BlueSky burns through its initial money whats the plan and why would anyone invest in it?
Threads has a massive problem in that it recruits its users from Instagram (there are others but primarily its still a branch of Instagram) which is the domain of AI generated slop and people I actually know in real life.
The whole point of the twitter style firehose is to be not be either of those things. Bluesky honestly probably has a decent shot but I think its still attracting some hyper-orthodox, censorious, thinkers. Musk has gone too far with X[0] but I don't think his vision in the abstract is wrong.
[0] Every accusation is a confession - X is now near-directly attached to the US Gov!
I think the Bluesky crowd will probably chill out with time, but right now if you don’t readily use the block feature there you’re going to have your feed and notifications peppered with the same trolls that are currently making X inhospitable. The majority of users getting blocked aren’t interested in actual discourse, they’re just there to get a rise out of people.
It’s difficult to envision any social network staying healthy in the long term without either decent moderation or robust tools to help users manage harassment and the like. There’s just too many bad actors who will take advantage of low-control environments.
I don’t get much trouble myself personally either, but it shows up in the replies to the posts in my feed which isn’t great and why a good block feature is necessary.
Yes, but the root cause is that Twitter doesn't stop rendering posts when there are no replies left to display. Instead it fills the silence with posts that aren't replies.
BlueSky just stops, like a normal program. When there's nothing more to show, silence is okay. So I don't need a blocklist there.
People keep missing the point of Threads. It isn't designed to be a pure Twitter clone and doesn't want to become the public square for news, politics etc.
It wants to be a text-centric network that helps release Instagram to be more video-centric to compete with TikTok. And so it wants content that is fun, interesting and light. And of course easily monetisable.
So I know people like having a fight but I see the two sites as being complimentary and both needing to thrive in order to relegate X to the dust bin.
Instagram was the only social network that kept me around because it was mostly art and nice photos. Recently i caught myself scrolling past endless videos and thought, shit, I've been tiktokked. Back to scrolling through hacker news comments to rot my brain instead.
I had to disable my YouTube watch history recently because I got trapped into shorts frequently and the only way to disable those is to kill the watch history.
One might think it's only Gen Z/Alpha that is susceptible to the Tiktok dopamine squeeze, but no, works just as well on us old geezers and it's pretty nefarious how well it works.
threads federates with mastodon, what stops threads getting on the AT protocol? is it just their assumed desire to not share data? they could be a mastodon / AT bridge
I find it's interesting that React which Bluesky was built on, was originally license with BSD + patents, which disallow building Facebook competing products.
I agree there's some irony to be had but I must make a correction: it revoked your license if you infringed on patents owned by Facebook. Does Facebook have patents on "add friend" buttons and "timeline"s ? (Asking, I don't know the answer)
Social media was doomed the moment its users were demoted from customers to exploitable sources of data. Bluesky will inevitably follow the same path of enshittification as every other social network before it. Its current success hinges solely on the nostalgic desire for a single platform where people can gather in peace. The real question is: How many cycles of doom will people endure before they finally stop jumping from one sinking ship to another?
> Bluesky will inevitably follow the same path of enshittification
Why do you say that? Bluesky is a protocol-first non profit. To my knowledge no company set up that way has achieved this level of success before. They don’t have the same motivations to enshittify that other networks do.
OpenAI was a nonprofit to make sure benefit of AGI was distributed equally.
I think it's plausible AT protocol allows a new level of interop/portability between services. It's also possible Bluesky burns through Blockchain Capital's money and starts doing crypto air drops like Keybase.
How is a company that has received investments, a non-profit? Those investors will require returns, which means the primary objective must be profit. Otherwise they would have just asked for donations.
There are no ads so that is one aspect that could prevent enshitification. Businesses can't just spend money to force their way into peoples feeds. At least not in a traditional advertising kind of way.
To be fair, is it better for customers to jump from sinking ship to sinking ship, or to permanently stay with a smaller, leaky boat?
Even though I don't like the term "enshittification", I do think that it is inevitable that BlueSky would need to make some unpopular changes in the future to become financially sustainable.
But is this such a bad thing? I used the Fediverse before, which is the "permanent place" that many people claim. But it had many disadvantages, from my point of view. No algorithms, no search, and I didn't like how defederation made it hard to follow anyone I liked.
I hosted a server myself, but it cost money. BlueSky doesn't, until it does. But maybe it is better to basically "exploit" BlueSky's free offers, before it changes?
TLDR: Is it better to jump from free service to free service (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Reddit), or is it better to permanently stay on a paid or lower-resourced service (e.g. IRC, forums)? I think many people seem to prefer the free version, and jump off when it starts "sinking" (trying to become financially sustainable).
How is Threads? I keep getting ads to push me to join it on Instagram, but whatever they recommend me via those ads is usually vapid Linkedin-type drivel. And I can’t see it on phone without the app.
I open it up once in a while but it mainly seems to be ranked by predicted CTR/engagement. For example, out of the first 20 posts in my feed I got a ton of travel/finance guru garbage and multiple posts with some variant of “Do not buy a Tesla, plenty of better EV choices.” And random memes stolen from other sites.
Tons of posts trying to get me to click on them to read more.
None of the accounts in my feed are ones I follow. It’s basically algorithmically driven slop.
I have gotten lured by engage-bait from Instagram. IMHO there is something off about Threads. It surely depends on who you follow and how you use it, but I find it totally un-engaging. Bluesky recently, seems better.
I see the Fediverse as pretty left-wing, but Bluesky seems unlikely to stay that way because moderation works differently. (No admins blocking each other over policy.)
Another day, another advert for Bluesky. There've been 70 stories with "bluesky" in the title submitted to HN this week alone, compared with 130 in the past month.
Threads is a good product. My twitter feed is dumpster fire of right wing politics and rage baity post. Threads has been much more balance. Open the app and have a good time.
People have been trying to make Bluesky happen for years. It won't. I believe moderation is fundamental to any social network, otherwise the bad actors always take over. Meta has been content moderation for years and understands the nuances.
People seek "Political discourse", but they will quickly realize our politics are too much of shit-show to have any kind of intellectual conversation. The rage bait and culture wars have taken over. Important discussions of policy, small vs big govt, taxes have taken the backseat. Our "politics" are no longer politics, and won't be for at least the next 4-8 years.
I've tried both Threads and Bluesky and I like Bluesky much better, I mean both UI & UX.
One issue I have with Threads is that I stumble upon many users that came from Instagram automatically that are not used to post in this format. So the content is mostly a mirror of IG which makes it pointless. In Bluesky I feel like the posts come from people that fleed X and it's just more interesting somehow.
Big names like Lichtman announced he was leaving X for Bluesky and came back on X in less than 24 hours.
What makes social media work is the echo effect, you just won't be able to get it on a heavily censored platform like Bluesky and Reddit and a big reason why X is overtaking even mainstream media as much as people who lean left.
Its a huge problem to be imposing political leanings of the moderator on a public square because you end up creating an echo chamber which people inevitably abandon because you just won't reach enough people.
Who is Lichtman? Doing a web search for that name brings up many different first names in the top hits. I don't think you can consider whoever that is a "big name." And who wants "big names" on social media? Screw that, only echo chambers need "big names" to bring views.
>Its a huge problem to be imposing political leanings of the moderator on a public square because you end up creating an echo chamber which people inevitably abandon because you just won't reach enough people.
This describes the problem that X is facing. It censored heavily, and heavily penalizes politically "incorrect" posts that its owner doesn't like, creating an echo chamber that only fringe weirdos can enjoy. I don't need to see any more low-signal hate posts. Please just auto-delete anybody using copious slurs or with a username like N*iggerSlayer42069, it's not an "echo chamber" to not expose oneself to the lowest of the low discussion levels, it's an echo chamber to let those people dominate conversations while censoring technical terms I use every day in the workplace.. I don't need to go to 4chan to "broaden my horizons" and any platform owner that decides to shove that stuff down my throat will not find me on their platform any more.
I'm moderately active on X, and helped build an early version of what became Threads (on which I am almost entirely inactive these days). I'm not surprised Bluesky's been more successful than Threads as the X-alternative:
* A lot of the popular content on X is political; Threads' decision to downrank or ban political content makes the posts less engaging. It's understandable from a certain perspective — a lot of the political content is just dishonest ragebait (and I learned to unfollow most political X accounts as a result). However, one of the most interesting things about X is that it's where news travels fastest, and it's significantly less-filtered than traditional journalist editorialization. It's hard to compete with X if you don't allow it, or downrank it.
* Obviously Elon's massive political spending will have an impact on the userbase of the product, since the spending is so one-sided. X has become dramatically more right-wing since he took over, and even more so after Trump's campaign, so there was pent-up demand for something else... Especially something else that allows left-wing political content (i.e. not Threads). There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Elon changing the X ranking algorithm to favor right-wing content, but TBH I think it's simpler than that: more left-wing people left the site (or used it less) due to distaste for Elon, and Elon unbanned hordes of right-wing accounts, who are very enthusiastic about supporting it.
* There's also one way in which X is (openly) biased in its ranking: paid accounts have their posts ranked higher than free accounts... And paying for X is public: you have a blue check next to your name if you pay. In right-wing spaces, having a paid bluecheck account is a badge of honor, in part due to it supporting Elon; in left-wing spaces, it's a badge of shame for the same reason. Although from a technical standpoint the ranking change isn't specifically political, in practice it's very political: many more right-wingers are bluechecks, so in practice you see more of their content and less left-wing content. Bluesky doesn't have paid accounts, and even if it did, it wouldn't organically result in right-wing content being prioritized to the same extent, so for left-wing users it's a much friendlier place.
* This is perhaps more of a personal gripe, but Elon Musk's decision to downrank external links has been pretty bad for the quality of X content. I understand the reasoning: he's trying to keep people engaged in-app, and external links make you leave. But plenty of interesting people use X as a promotional channel for their (interesting) content, which I want to see, and which often doesn't suit tweet formats. So by downranking posts with external links, I see less of the things I actually am interested in. I don't think I'm alone in this, and Bluesky doesn't do it — and I've heard (anecdotal) reports of people really enjoying being able to more reliably engage with that kind of stuff again on Bluesky.
Mastodon is too complicated and segmented to take off. But Bluesky isn't, so I can see why it's having a zeitgeist post-Trump's-election, which Elon helped fund. I'm not sure how much Bluesky will manage to retain its current spike in users: Threads at one point had a similar spike, and most users churned back to X. But it makes sense to me that Bluesky is a more natural home for the ex-X diaspora than Threads, given the reasons many of them left X.
I refuse to use Bluesky because it is clearly being pushed on the masses, in collusion with mainstream media, as an alternative to X. Clearly another attempt by certain people to control information. It's shocking how people fall for this stuff over and over again.
I hope if backfires, mostly draws in users from existing speech-unfriendly platforms and then the number of social media platforms will multiply from here onward and a large number of platforms will compete based on who is most permissive with regards to speech.
Most of the highly suggestible masses already moved off X to Threads... So now that Bluesky is being pushed hard, I hope the suggestible people from Threads will switch over and split up their censorship ecosystems.
It makes sense from that perspective. The censored ecosystems should be separated into lots of small platforms because you need a lot of different filter bubbles to maintain the deceptions and impermeable information silos. A large centralized ecosystem will create too many opportunities for exposure to alternative information so it cannot be controlled as well.
In the future, there will be a different platform for every kind of delusion and each one will focus on its own delusion and will make up stories to discredit rival platforms so people always doubt information received outside.
It's a matter of time before large corporations start preventing their employees from using non-approved platforms. They'll probably use cybersecurity safety as an excuse. They might carry out hacking false flags on their own employees to convince them to not use other platforms they won't feel forced.
I broadly agree with your perspective however I think you've missed that bluesky is specifically architected to facilitate the coexistence of bubbles : shared block lists, client based moderation, portability in case you account is banned from a particular host etc, Bluesky is well positioned for a future where cliques don't want to hear from one another
That's too bad but I guess if people want to silo themselves in, they should be allowed. I just hope that big corporations don't eventually coerce everyone into this through economic force.
I can see a future where corporations control the entire economy. Startups or parallel economy would be impossible due to regulatory moats and monetary asymmetries and everyone would be forced to lock themselves into a filter bubble in order to get a job... To survive.
Imagine knowing what's happening and not having the power refuse... And by that point, the power would be granted fully artificially out of a money printer, distributed straight into the coffers of select big corporations on the basis of secret mutual agreements between each other. All under the banner of MMT? This is beyond immoral.
More specific to your point, it makes sense why the entities behind the censorship push might still want a single platform, but simply with better 'siloing' capability. It's likely that the same people who want censorship, also want mass surveillance. Mind-bending to think that there exist a conflict between these two dystopian aspects! They really want to have the cake and eat it too.
>It's a matter of time before large corporations start preventing their employees from using non-approved platforms. They'll probably use cybersecurity safety as an excuse.
And you don't think the desire to get away from Elon Musk and the MAGA crowd had anything to do with it? Nothing good was ever going to come about because of Elon's stupid acquisition. That was made painfully obvious when Xitter stopped paying their bills - I guess in the hopes that creditors would be forced to arbitrate lower payments on debts owed to them (which is bullshit for a billionaire to be doing, but you don't get to be a billionaire by being nice, fully ethical, moral or legal). Then we had a demonstration of sheer stupidity Elon told advertisers to fuck off, so they did, and now he's all hurt and lawsuity.
What good do you see in that? Who wouldn't want to get away from that stupidity?
From my perspective, X experience has improved a lot since Elon's acquisition.
What actually got worse materially? I hear a lot of gesturing 'Orange man bad', 'Elon help orange man, so Elon bad' but I cannot reach any of these conclusions from first principles looking at Trump's policies while he was President... Aside from the Jan 6 incident... But I don't see consensus there between either side so I do have some doubts and questions about the true nature of that incident. The fact is, nobody on Jan 6 had guns besides police officers. How can that possibly be an insurrection? Please correct me if I'm wrong there.
All politics aside (not a minor point for many), Twitter has been made much worse IMHO in the Musk era.
They de-prioritize links, prevent 3rd party apps, closed the API, and blocked access for non-logged-in viewing.
And a smaller meta-point: changed from an iconic name to a simple non-informative letter (Besides Google and maybe Uber, who have added a popular verb to the lexicon?)
I feel this is a downside only to a particular bunch. For most people, Twitter is doing better than ever. Community notes are amazing and innovative and should be adopted by every social media platform. X feels legitimately more fun than most other apps. Plus, at this point, I think a solid portion of people have been banned from social media apps. You can't exile your way towards whatever ideal society you want. The barbarians are always at the gates.
I especially feel this sort of enforced community separation is so prevalent among those who are so reticent to build a border wall, but I'm sure psychology has an explanation somewhere.
> For most people, Twitter is doing better than ever.
Citation needed...
Twitter went from a highly useful daily visit for getting news in my field to being a gigantic time suck to even try to avoid the politics and low-quality posts.
>enforced community separation is so prevalent among those who are so reticent to build a border wall
Ah, so you have a certain form of politics, and its beneficial. But Is that "most people" who are on Twitter, were on Twitter, or most people in general? If I want what Twitter is serving me, I can go to any sort of right-wing forum or Fox News article comments (do they still have comments?).
But for those of us that had practical uses for Twitter that weren't partisan politics, its value has been destroyed.
And ad revenue shows that "most people" definitely do not want to be associated with such partisan politics. Twitter's past neutrality allowed all sorts of political views. Now it's become an echo chamber as the owner pushes his own strong partisan politics, and pushes to spread extremist views that may be fine on 4chan, but that 95% of people would rather never expose themselves to.
> Ah, so you have a certain form of politics, and its beneficial.
Yes.. I believe a recent analysis shows that of all social media, Twitter's political composition now best matches America. If one's response to that is to run away, it's that person that is problematic, not the rest of society that is able to co-exist just fine.
Well to play devil's advocate the only things on that list that affect the logged in experience are the verification badges and the crypto scams. But I'm curious what the improvements are too since I haven't been on twitter in at least 2 years except for reading the occasional tweet that someone posts a link to somewhere
Certain groups are trying to will bluesky into being successful. From my personal experience, X/Twitter is still killing it.
I'd imagine Threads will be successful unless Zuckerberg kills it to focus on other things. It's integrated with Instagram and could potentially be integrated into Facebook and WhatsApp too.
I still feel that an enormous amount of why threads shows up in data analytics is because Instagram just added it on and made an account for everyone.
It wasn't adopted, it was falsely created.
I'd go even further to say that it isn't a social network, it's an add-on to another social network.
It reminds me of google plus. Technically better than the existing top dog, but the forced migration and trying to bootstrap with a huge but only semi involved userbase let it fizzle soon after the start.
Has there ever been a successful case of bootstrapping a new social media product with an existing userbase? Like not just added features or merging two together.
Google+ was wildly successful in certain circles. Tabletop RPG design still hasn’t entirely recovered from its loss.
Google+ was successful from any real metric but it didn’t replace Facebook so it was axed.
By which metrics was Google+ successful? I don’t doubt you, I just never heard that before.
I can't say user metrics but Google Photos came out of Google+ and it is a massively successful product.
Hangouts (now Meet?) was also a product out of Google+ but considering GChat (the xmpp version) existed before, it was kind of a step backwards.
I think Google Local Guide also has some parts of Google+, not sure.
I definitely preferred it to Facebook, even before the feed became 100% inflammatory political stuff or ads and 0% my friends
Not sure how you define "technically better" but in any way I'd add "citation needed". G+ was kinda horrible with a couple good ideas and I think the lack of widespread adoption spoke for that.
Yes. WeChat bootstrapped off of QQ accounts, which were basically like Yahoo or MSN messenger + pages for desktop users.
It's not exactly new social media product, but Facebook did add messaging to their then Facebook app, build up usage of messaging itself (network effect within the user's friend list), and then split it off into its own Messenger app. They are sharing the same Facebook login through.
Well Facebook bootstrapped using the MySpace userbase.
When MySpace essentially died. There was no such void to fill for Google+.
I never used and would never use Threads for the same reason I never even considered Google+. It was DoA and I guess everyone could see it, even the people who were trying it. Such is the case with Threads.
I mean that morning when Zuck woke up and decided that a Threads a/c would need an Instagram a/c he must have seen on his daily astronomy calendar "Day of self-sabotage".
No they don’t. That’s untrue. The fact that so many replies are speaking as if it’s true is quite telling. Instagram continually pesters me to create a Threads account, but doesn’t just “make one for me”. Threads’ user growth would look very very different if this were true. It’s another app. Instagram won’t even let you expand one of the stupid Threads posts it shows you until you install the app.
For the most part the types of people who find Instagram interesting (and would have a Threads account created automatically) are simply not the audience for a tool like Bluesky (or Twitter).
Yes, this! I wanted to join Threads as an alternative to Twitter, but I changed my mind when it tried to force me to create an Instagram account. I don't want an Instagram account because I think posting or looking at people's pictures is idiotic. So as long as Threads requires me to touch Instagram in any way, it's a hard pass.
This is dripping with personal bias. Bluesky gets the stamp of being a “tool”. It can be just as much of a mind-numbing fuckaround as Threads. Most replies in this thread are just starting from “Bluesky is where my people are” and trying to turn it into something self-righteous. Why are HN users so afraid of admitting that they’re dumb humans like everyone else? Christ.
Absolutely.
But I still think there is a difference with Bluesky and the other big social medias with full customization of how the feed(s) works, third party servers, custom labelers, etc. To me it seems plausible that they actually want to create more of an empowering tool that the users can control.
That will of course not stop users from using ”dumb” feeds. But the users doesn’t have the incitament of Facebook to always produce higher engagement and show more ads.
It is of course also troublesome that we do not know how Bluesky will act down the road to get their ROI.
That's false. I've tried their app once and they certainly did not made an account automatically.
100%.
i wouldn’t say falsely created, but i would say “padded statistics”
threads is beholden to KPIs unlike every other activity pub implementation
their team obviously wants to be successful to continue developing against activity pub
their metrics are akin to a company bragging about how much software they’ve written with the assistance of AI
threads was able to approximate how many instagram users wished they had twitter in the same way intellisense is able to provide auto complete for dot notation; as a magician, i spot the misdirection for investors
Threads is so confusing. I have no idea who's replying to who when I click into a discussion.
I agree. But then a big premise of Bluesky (hence AT Proto) is that it is not centralised however when we say BlueSky we just mean Bluesky i.e https://bsky.app and that is, frankly, very concerning. It might not sustain.
While Threads is just forced Instagram users, bsky is a decentralised social network which is not decentralised. Comparing bsky with Threads is anything but a compliment.
Same thing happened to TikTok and Lemon8 recently, though the move had to do more with US banning.
> Instagram just added it on and made an account for everyone.
They didn't.
You know, they stopped Amazon from buying iRobot because of I guess unfair robot vacuum competition (why does that sound hilarious?). It's almost luck that Threads isn't that successful, because then they'd have to deal with monopoly concerns. At least now they can just say it's a shitty twitter knock off, don't bother us.
> but now the Bluesky app has exploded to 3.5 million daily active users, putting it just 1.5 times behind Meta’s Threads
Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it hard to believe. Realistically he is off by at least an order of magnitude.
Mashable used to be one of my go-to blogs, but I haven't been there in a while. Has it really fallen this far?
I’d bet Meta is counting all the random Instagram users that accidentally interact with the forced threads clickbait posts in their feed.
It's so transparent too, the way every single threads post shown in the Instagram widget ends halfway through with "..."
I've managed to never go there because I'm only on Instagram for the pretty pictures
Aha I see clearly now. So that is my Reddit make you reload a comment thread when you click the 'expand thread' sometimes. To get more add views? I just thought it was inline with all their other crappy ux choises.
In this case they want to increase some KPI instead.
Christ. Some people are willing to believe anything when it affirms their baseless beliefs. You’ve taken some reply that was about another situation entirely and let it convince you. I can think of multiple more likely explanations. Enough for this to at least be in the “who knows?” bucket.
You can't interact with that without creating a Threads account (manually) and without having Threads app installed at the moment of click on the Instagram embed. And if you did that, you are a proper user of Threads, so no double count happens.
But that doesn't really matter right? They got tricked into using it but they're still using it
It does. If all you do is tap on a post then immediately hit back you’re not really engaging with the platform. But I’m sure they’ll still count you as an active user.
The meaningful stats would be number of posts seen, engaged with, and number of posts the user made themselves.
Does Google do that for advertising? I always wonder if my little game of hitting SKIP ASAP shows up as a valid engagement or a user-bailed or something.
And the ads, I can't skip, I hate those MFers.
They have a general metric for it:
> An ad is counted as viewable if at least 50% of its area is visible for at least 1 second for display ads, or at least 2 seconds for video ads.
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7029393?hl=en
It certainly matters as a bellwether for future traction.
Be interesting to see if they count people with the app or not. As far as I’m aware you need the app to view threads in their entirety. I tried it but uninstalled shortly after
Treads is accesible via the browser now too
This seems to be where they are getting the data from (as they get their data from FinancialTimes who get it from SimilarWeb)
https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/b...
I wonder how many of those 20 million BlueSky users are squatters that are registering every popular brand name, in the hope it becomes a lot more valuable in a year
You can use your domain as a handle, so apple.bsky.social is likely to be a fake, as the real Apple would have the account apple.com. Certainly you could fool some users, but it's not like Apple would want apple.bsky.social to use as their actual account.
Sure but if you are Jim you'd want to register jim.bsky.social, regardless of whether you intend to use the service or not.
There's an interesting dynamic because of the domains, I originally registered with `n1c.bsky.social` because like you say whether I intended to use the service or not it's nice to lock in the name. But then the next level is that it's actually more valuable or makes more sense for me to use it as `n1c.dev` as it's more closely tied to "me".
I am kinda sad that now someone else who isn't me is n1c.bsky but so be it.
that would defeat the purpose of a decentralized network if only one person was jim, jim.
It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes.
All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
I don’t think it’s inevitable at all.
In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else.
That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare. Over time, this has polarized people to ever further extremes and normalized disrespect and bickering (as opposed to discussion).
It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
Added to that is user choice over moderation and algorithms.
That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life.
Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.
I like that aspect about Bluesky too.
On “safe spaces”, as you hint at I think many of us don’t want to be shielded entirely from opposing or otherwise differing lines of thought. Speaking personally, I welcome it if there’s actual discussion to be had. Good faith discussions and exchange of perspectives is great, but I have no patience for trolls, circular logic, insults, “debate” that wouldn’t even pass for high school level, etc.
Then you need to choose the safe space option. Under no circumstances should you opt to advertise removing content for others. Because your justification with "circular logic" could mean anything. This is the safe space option.
That more free platforms employ spam protection is no excuse.
I've just started using Bluesky. How does it compare to Reddit? There are dedicated subreddits for the conservatives and the liberals, and every subreddit has moderation rules. I use the right and left-focused subreddits to keep track of what's going on in different universes. However, I must mention that you won't find a reasonable discussion of left vs right ideologies on the main sub-reddits, as Reddit users are predominantly left-leaning. But at least there are smaller forums where these two groups meet and interact, and there is some debate.
Bluesky is a lot more like old, early algorithm twitter.
Reddit is a cluster of independently operated communities that occasionally get signal blasted onto the main feed. The top moderator of a subreddit owns it and sets any standard they like.
With Bluesky there are no defined communities outside of collective engagement with particular topics or hashtags or networks of follows. There is also a "Show me [more/less] of this" button every post, and so far it seems like the platform is pretty solid at respecting your preferences. They also seem to be actively moderating the really open bad behaviour off the platform.
I don't think Bluesky is as good as a well-moderated subreddit for long form discussion, but if you spend a little time curating your feed I think you might enjoy it.
> It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians.
> Who would read it?
Presumably, normal people who want to interact with people they already know? interaction with journalists and politicians is valuable in an entirely different manner.
Their advertising model certainly is a problem. But it isn't the only one, there are more and more users that demand other users be removed because of their opinion. When social networks started to listen to a few of them, they made themselves hostages to more demands. Platforms like Twitter or reddit certainly suffered from this.
I agree that ads are basically controlling most of the internet and public discourse now. Like you can't even use normal words in youtube videos anymore, because your video will be less visible/removed.
On the other hand, there are way too many people/accounts/bots out there that don't actually want to talk or discuss something, but spread false information and incite rage and anger. Those need to be moderated even harder than they already are, i think.
It wasn’t like this as little as 10 years ago
You didn't really have people posting from their prepaid phones 10 years ago. Old internet users were a select group.
It shouldn't be any surprise: it's not like the internet's userbase of 1990 represented a broad cross-section of American society, let alone western or global societies. It was mainly a bunch of academics and college students and government users. It's just gotten more and more fragmented as more people have been added.
And even then we were segregated by usenet, mailing lists, etc.
And social media didn't exist
Usenet, BBSs, mailing lists etc. are social media
In most ways they were far more social than modern social media, in that they were about socializing. The distinguishing characteristic that sets modern social media apart from the old school stuff is the performative aspect of it—where everyone is now encouraged to behave as a content producer optimizing for engagement—which is hardly social.
Not in the modern sense.
Those mediums do not have algorithms, feeds, followers, profiles, influencers, likes, or any features that many people point to as the toxic aspects of pretty much every commercial social media site of the last decade.
I’d say livejournal was the tipping point where the internet became very self-centered and your value in the platform was measured by how much engagement you were able to get.
Up until that point, in a world before blogs, social sites were mostly centered around shared interests and communities would aggressively police off topic content
I wonder if Arthur T. Murray would count as an influencer?
> Not in the modern sense.
Yes, no one was making that comparison.
> Usenet, BBSs, mailing lists etc. are social media
In a generic sense, yes. People did socialize.
But "social media" today really means: a proprietary platform controlled by a single corporation, where all the user interaction is ultimately just a ploy to keep the participation metrics up so the corporation can profile you better and sell more advertising.
So in that sense, the absolute opposite.
Those are very social places but I would classify them as not social media because real names / identities weren't attached.
Not everyone on Twitter uses their real name. Meanwhile I knew the real names of about half the top 20 most active users on a retro gaming phpbb board in the early 00s and had meet many in person and knew we everyone lived, what other hobbies they had and what they did for work or school.
Real names were absolutely used on Usenet especially in the early days, ditto for mailing lists (and still are for that matter), even though technically they are pseudonymous. In any case pseudonymity doesn't seem like it's relevant for whether something is a social medium or not – many social media are pseudonymous (or even anonymous, like the chans). HN is pseudonymous. Reddit. Tumblr. The various Fediverse services.
They are social networks not social media, social media is when you scream in a void and the void screams back.
The latrinalia of our age if you will.
I wouldn't call the old stuff social networks. What made social networks a new thing was the social graph of connections becoming the information architecture of the content rather than topics. You found stuff (or it found you) by person rather than subject.
Usenet was topic based (eg reddit seems closest these days), mail lists were usually topic based, forums were organised around topics etc.
I disagree somewhat. Social media apps are powered by feed algorithms that fall into two camps:
The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model.
The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well.
The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.
As far as I understand it, Bluesky's default feed is chronologically sorted posts from who you follow. It is as a dumb pipe as it gets.
There’s multiple feeds, which is one of its main features. There’s user created feeds, which are just aggregates of tags and keywords. These are alright, but prone to issues with cross domain terminology. ie, say you want a football/soccer feed and use the word “spurs”, you’ll end up having it filled with basketball and rodeo posts.
The two default feeds are your followed accounts in chronological order, the other is an algorithmic feed. The algorithmic feed is pretty good to be honest. I “disliked” around 20 political posts the first day, and it has seemed to responded fairly quick to that feedback.
No matter how many times I choose "Show less like this" on furry manga art in the algorithmic feed, I still see it show up. :(
The second camp is just artificially creating echo chambers, a virtual "separate and distinct network" for the parts that matter.
The "echo chamber" argument really doesn't speak to me because all I want is a place where I can get timely updates about: people in my research field, pictures of cute dogs, and municipal government activities. The more a website stays laser-focused on my interests, the better.
I think those things you’ve mentioned are what most people came to social media for originally, but it’s gotten lost in all the noise. The original point of social networks was to be social and connect with people in your industry or who share your interests or share a locality in common, and X especially has drifted far from that ideal — lots of users now log onto it to find something/somebody to be angry at and to argue/troll.
I’m still using an RSS reader for that very purpose. I want my trusted content displayed chronologically; miss me with the algorithm and the recommended influencers. I’ve been on the internet long enough to know what I want and how to find it.
I share the sentiment.
It seems some people got on the internet to argue and never learned to enjoy anything. I'm a bit sorry for them, to be honest.
It's kind of alarming, not that I'm not guilty of it, but you do see people whose entire online presence is just stuffing their face with negative interactions.
HackerNews is an echo chamber. You're not even allowed to call people f*ggots or speculate about the Jews here!
That makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of the content provided by the recommendation algorithms, as well as human nature. A good recommendation engine, for example, would recognize when someone either likes a broad range of sources politically speaking, or likes a neutral region.
Conversely, it's unclear that a recommendation engine would be able to predict what would be best at "disrupting an echo chamber", and more importantly, when that is desirable, and what "desirable" even means. It's also unclear that the first model is successful at all in disrupting echo chambers, as opposed to exacerbating or amplifying existing positions. I think there's good reasons to think that provocative can be less effective if anything.
I disagree with this: if the only thing you allow to pierce the veil is selected based on engagement metrics you just walk away with a shallow view of your opposition. If anything this may entrench your existing views and give you a false sense of intellectual and/or moral superiority.
You need to “meet people where they are” and the first type of algorithm just doesn’t do that. It just says “conservatives/liberals really like this, so you’re going to be forced to see this too because you show interest in politics”
To give an example: let’s say I’m a small business owner who voted Trump but has some lingering concerns around how tariffs might impact my business. Am I going to be better informed reading some engagement-bait post from liberals talking about how I’m going to get “deservedly” crushed by tariffs or a post from a conservative economist laying out the cold hard facts (both good and bad)?
Your argument is in support of mine. Separate networks are an interesting legal and software engineering detail, but from the POV of the user, as long as they see what they want to see, they will stay with the network.
Ah you’re right.
Is it inevitable? I am not sure either way.
I think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups.
Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel").
This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.
I don't know, the entire point of the "algorithmic bubble" was to keep the tribes separate but happy, no? And the value of the network still increases with more people on it. Maybe some future social media will figure out how to keep everyone happy at the same time. For example, I think everyone but a couple of hardcore FOSS advocates and the far-right are still using Youtube.
It does seem natural to happen. But there are loads of "neutral" accounts: gov agencies, businesses, etc that use social media for announcements and simple broadcast communication. Most are on Twitter now. I think I big question is will they add bluesky, or move (probably not, because of inertia), or something else.
> All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
Did this happen at all? Social networks have always been balkanized by culture.
The press coverage is a bit misleading. Everyone is leaving Twitter. Liberals are just leaving faster.
Keep in mind that a lot of Twitter users never wanted political content. They were there for sports, art, science discussions, etc. Some of those communities are clearly migrating.
There's one single that prevents this: sharing screenshots, and the impossibly difficult task of blocking those in practice.
I'm not convinced everyone sharing a singular global network was ever a good idea in the first place.
If the algorithm doesn't make the filter bubble, people will make it on their own.
See the Fediverse for example, which prides itself on not having algorithms, and is yet the most echo-chambery and radical place I know of. People automatically filter themselves into different servers, and defederate with each other with frequency.
(Whether or not this is good or bad depends on your moral views. But I think it is obvious that "algorithms" are not really to blame.)
Didn't it spring up in response to those blameless "algorithms"?
It's more a product of cheaper and easier content distribution. When TV is expensive to produce, there are only three channels, and it's heavily regulated, you target your content to be broadly appealing and inoffensive. The rise of cable TV, revocation of the fairness doctrine, rise of the internet, and fall of the USSR all led to more exposure to broader views. Like GP said, whether this is good or bad depends on your view.
This is another good point. I didn't actually intend to make this point, but I wanted to thank you for pointing this out.
I am not a sociologist, just a layman. But I feel that there seems to be two axis of communication. Mass (you don't know who you're talking to) vs targeted (you do know who you're talking to, like friends). Then, professional (you try to be unoffensive) vs casual (you have no such obligation).
Before the Internet, generally communication happened either mass-professional (e.g. TVs, newspapers, magazines) or targeted-casual (e.g. chatting with friends and family). This reduced offense, since mass channels were largely unoffensive as you said, while targeted channels knew how to avoid offense (i.e. you knew how to not offend your friends and family).
However, the Internet enabled a lot of mass-casual communication. And this created a lot of offense, because you didn't know who would read your messages (i.e. Twitter posts), while you didn't have the professional obligation to make sure it was unoffensive and easy to understand. This created a lot of misunderstandings, offense, etc., which leads to cancellations, hate mobs, etc.
Do note that once again I am not a sociologist, and there seems to be holes in this view. What about large group gatherings? Trashy magazines? Clubs? They seem to be examples of mass-casual communication too.
You are correct, but my point was that it seems to me, that even though engagement algorithms aren't really a thing in the Fediverse, such filter bubbles still appear via self-sorting and de-federation. So yes, perhaps algorithms are to blame for filter bubbles in centralized social media, but removing algorithms doesn't remove filter bubbles, because people create it by themselves anyway.
TL;DR: Blaming the algorithm (correct or not) doesn't actually matter in the end, because filter bubbles happen with or without them.
Not really.
The issue is that social media sites produce feeds and content matching, forcing alternative views in your face.
Its like, they have decided to push metcalfes law as far as possible, to see when the breaking point is. Like a giant social experiment.
But if everyone is in one place thats still the most desirable network to be on. Just dont push Joe Blo's dumbest political opinions in my face as sponsored content.
Is it all the ways that matter? The author mentions one way, DAU. Sure, that is important but I can think of other things that matter. The number of “creator” accounts matters just as much as the number of lurkers.
From my experience Bluesky is way better and has respect for the user’s choice front and center. Lists of users to follow is a first-class citizen feature. Their algorithm is a chronological feed, not boosting engagement bait.
Here's one metric that matters – revenue per user. Bluesky's is, I assume, zero, and soon that will have to change. Threads meanwhile has the largest social media ads and monetization platform in the world behind it ready to make the dollars flow at the push of a button.
If the revenue per user is enough to cover costs, does it matter? Will it have to change?
We’ve all had “hockey stick growth!” shouted at us so many times that we’ve internalised it but Bluesky is a team is 20 odd people. They don’t have the kind of footprint Meta has and right now they don’t need it. I hope they stay small and chart a different path to success.
They just raised $15M. Surely their investors expect a large return.
They’d be dumb to:
> Bluesky Social is a benefit corporation; as such, it is allowed to use its profits for the public good, and is not obligated to maximize shareholder value or return profits to its shareholders as dividends.
I have no idea but I suspect the investors see monetary value in an open social network not owned and operated by today’s tech giants. There’s a difference between users making money via the social network and the social network making money via the users. But both involve making money.
[Public] Benefit Corporations¹ are this weird sort of in-between between a non-profit and a regular corporation. My first encounter with this was the benefit corp that was set up for This American Life and Serial (although the latter is now owned by the New York Times) and after reading a whole bunch, it’s still not entirely clear to me what it means. Everything I’ve seen talks about transitioning from a non-benefit corp to a benefit corp, I don’t know if the concept is old enough for the reverse to have ever happened.
⸻
1. Whether it’s called a “benefit corporation” or “public benefit corporation” apparently depends on the state, and not all states have laws to allow them to be established.
The only protection that the "public benefit corporation" status provides is that investors can't sue the company for failing to maximize shareholder value. There's lots of other avenues they can take to make the company do what they want (assuming sufficient share ownership) such as pressuring the board, voting in directors, or converting the company to a regular corporation (it's not like a 501(c)(3) where this isn't possible in most cases).
Remember when open ai was a not for profit?
It still is.
Yea good point, kind of a commodotize your complement kind of thing , Blockchain Capital needs a new landscape of marks to scam.
> largest social media ads and monetization platform in the world behind it ready to make the dollars flow at the push of a button
At the direct cost of making a worse product for users.
I remain hopeful that Bluesky is able to monetise/fund development without succumbing to working against its users.
Hoping that the people who made twitter what it is will somehow create a different outcome when doing the same thing is ... something.
Well, they’re not doing the same thing aren’t they?
I’m cautiously optimistic that the open/decentralised nature of these sites can act as a powerful forcing function to keep them in check, keeping their incentives more inline with their users compared to traditional commercial social media sites.
Mastodon’s financial (and so far technical) structure seems more inline with this compared to taking on investment, so we’ll see how it goes.
I just want a network that’s not going to juice engagement to optimise for page views for ad revenue. I want a reverse chronological feed. I want third party clients that might have different UX ideas
It’s free to hope :)
wouldn't things like creator-lurker ratio be captured within DAU? as in, poor ratio leads to poor DAU?
Not necessarily. There could be different types of content that requires different types of creators, like imagine professional video producers vs your friends posting about their day. There could also be a different algorithm/network that allows for a few creators to feed a large number of consumers.
> Their algorithm is a chronological feed
Why does a chronological feed get considered and algo? Do we consider SQL queries with WHERE and ORDER BY clauses an algo now?
What else could it possibly be?
It absolutely is. Sure it's the default, but it's the default to measure against and beat. It's like comparing ML algos against the average prediction, or forecasts against the previous known value.
fun sum(x, y) { return x + y }
Congratulations, you have yourself an algorithm.
I mean, it's all just quicksort under the hood, right? By extension...
I mean, it's all just quicksort under the hood, right? By extension...
I made a Bluesky account long ago and started cross-posting my tiktoks, often on the popular and titillating topic of project management. For a long time it was sleepy as I would have expected. I got a sudden uptick recently, which prompted me to figure out how to port my follows from X, which I did with "sky follower bridge." Bluesky has been a lively, friendly place.
Sky follower bridge was able to scrape my X blocklist, but could not turn it into a Bluesky block list. No troll problems yet so that's OK for now. I still have to host my videos on titok because some are too long for Bluesky.
My tiktok "for you page" has turned to sludge and my followers are not getting my posts without setting notification options. I wonder if the magical algorithm was sequestered in China to hide it from inquiries. Hopefully a Bluesky presence helps.
Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
The difference in moderation is night and day.
Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them).
That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.
Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.
Right. After the pay-to-play change that boosted Blue Checks to the top of everything it became unusable. No better than going into the local news comment section or Craigslist discussion forums.
Man, I wish I could be even a hundredth as effective at pissing people off online. I only piss off boring people I guess.
A lot of the hate you get depends not on what you say, but what you are.
On the internet, I'm a dog.
the impact of existence on perception is mediated by group attitudes, which are lessened in influence by anonymity ... my personal maxim is that hatred does vary on what is said and more so by where it is said
What the hell are you doing or saying to warrant that kind of negative attention?
That kind of attention is never warranted.
I got some of this years back, by offending Milo Yiannopoulis (who apparently used to search his own name for stuff to point his followers at), back when he was still a far-right darling. Took about a day of mass-block-lists to weed the enraged Nazi teenagers out of my at-mentions.
That was just a single incident, being noticed by far-right weirdos thankfully not being a regular thing for me. But I can imagine it would get old quickly if you were the sort of person who was. Bluesky’s far superior self-moderation is absolutely very useful here.
It's pretty easy to get that kind of vitriol if you say that you want people like you to continue existing.
And you say this to people you label not like you. You probably have more in common than you think. You both agree to label the other and you decided to fight a proxy battle from the agreed among identities. Do you want the other side not to exist as well? If yes let them know.
People defending themselves from bigotry, and bigots themselves, are not equivalent. Black people not wanting racists to exist, and racists not wanting black people to exist, do you see a distinction?
There has been such a consistent attempt at ramming square pegs into round holes online in trying to “both sides” a bunch of these issues.
One trait is immutable and the other is not.
One trait is entirely internally focused and is not defined by a rejection of anyone external to the subject, the other's trait is entirely defined by such an external focus on the rejection of another person's immutable identity.
You guess racist? I had a different first guess. Then I had a better second guess. I then had a three and fourth guess. Then I wasn't sure at all. None of them were racism. This becomes a personality test that speaks about who you are and what battles you always see.
Substitute homosexuality, being transgender, or whatever you'd like.
Try words you may not like too like right wing or Trump supporter. Still work?
Being a right wing trump supporter is an immutable characteristic like being black or gay?
I support the concept of gender fluidity. Yes not everyone is hardwired as gay or straight or bisexual.
Being black.. is that referring to skin tone because people can slightly change their color and many products exist to lighten and darken skin tone. Or identifying from black culture in this case you can be white or black or something else and still identify.
People can't change height either. Why you jumped to race tells us what your focus is.
Why not Palestine / Jewish? It equally describes both depending on what your point of view is.
lol I don’t want the bigots and people sending death threats to exist, I’ll stand on a soapbox and say that
Your guess is bigots. Care to provide more details. Racism or a broader bigot definition?
I’ll be honest, I have better things to do with my time then help you narrow down your personal definition of bigot. Sorry.
I haven't heard that word since the 70s. It's outdate like 'to the moon Alice'. What were you trying to convey with that word?
Let’s not pretend the disagreement is about fiscal policy.
Lets pretend we know what the disagreement is about. What's your guess?
> They don’t seem to offer anything new
Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.
'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.
Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.
But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.
There is more momentum against Musk now than when threads launched. Not sure it is enough to overcome the network effect - but there is a lot of illwill towards his projects.
I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.
Free speech is the upside of X. People leaving to join the echo chambers of Bluesky or Threads, only serves to turn X into the echo chamber they claim it is.
I know I'm falling for the bait, but saying X is some last bastion of free speech is baffling, considering it's actual actions.
Why do the remaining posters keep self-censoring "Blues*y"?
I don’t know what you are referring to. I’ve never seen someone self-censor Bluesky. I see people talking about it on X all the time. Mainly to highlight some of the worst content they find there but that’s another subject…
I tried checking out Bluesky the other day. The feed was mainly unhinged political rants of a very particular flavor.
A feature of Bluesky is the ability to change your feed algorithm (or code your own - yes I wrote ‘code’). You can easily filter all political (labeled) content. To say that BS is an echo chamber is untrue, though I do not disbelieve that you observed that algorithmic choice when you first tried the app. There are many echo chambers for sure, but the protocol is designed to permit you to exclude or join them. Unlike competitor systems (which I also use, and dislike more and more due to the lack of ability to choose what I see - despite trying).
Right, and what's more the charge of echo chamber has always been intellectually lazy.
You can have a fruitful exchanges of ideas and information and debates on a foundation of similar values in a way that amounts to more than just repeating ideas back and forth. Using the term as a catch-all for a shared desire for conversations to have certain ground rules or certain community values, or subjects that spark your intellectual curiosity, calling those echo chambers is shallow and is not going to inform you about the real cultural dynamics that drive those kinds of communities.
It's just a lazy way to try absence of critical thought by looking for the wrong thing. If people labeling things as echo chambers cared about the things they said they cared about, they would look at entirely different criteria, such as epistemic closure, the quality of relationships, propensity for trolling, and so on.
> more than just repeating ideas back and forth.
Yes, people on X seem very upset that they can be blocked on bluesky. But if I've heard what you have to say and don't want to hear the same thing 1000x, that's not an echo chamber. That's me hearing you, disagreeing, and you having nothing more of value to add.
Discussion requires communication, not simply repeating propaganda over and over and over, which is 99% of the time all that anyone crying "echo chamber" tends to do.
There is no "free speech" on X. Musk has banned journalists. Banned users he didn't like. Arbitrarily banned random words. Banned links to Mastodon. Banned links to linktree. Encouraged harassment of users and news organizations until they left the platform. Banned links to articles about political candidates. No unpaid user's reply can appear in the replies to one of Musk's tweets in any practical sense. X is not a free speech platform. Musk is a liar. He is lying to you. You are being lied to. If you think X has anything resembling "free speech" I have bridge made of solar powered tiles to sell you. (That was another scam of Musk's if you missed it). The lively debate you crave does not and cannot happen on X.
> Free speech is the upside of X
lol, you seriously believe that a network fully controlled by the world's richest man, accountable to no one, is a bastion of free speech? I presume you have a bridge to sell me as well?
> Free speech is the upside of X.
You can’t possibly believe that, can you? Have you not noticed the vast gulf between what Musk says and what Musk does?
I don’t care much for Musk one way or the other. What I do know is that old Twitter actively censored ideas that didn’t align with their world view and new Twitter stopped that fascistic approach. Musk fired 6,000 Twitter employees and the site not only continues to work fine but has rolled out many new features. What were those 6,000 people even doing? Just how big was the censorship team?
But it does censor idea that don’t align with their world view. They do it even more now than they did before; the only difference is now they claim they don’t.
And it continues to run, but not well. The nice thing about the kind of site it is, is that if you don’t see a particular message, you can’t tell it’s missing.
idk, I specifically go to twitter for my political fix and when I go to the for you section I see a ton of liberal stuff and a ton of conservative stuff, many posts are unhinged in either direction. Others are more moderate, in general I don't really follow any political accounts, and yet I see a many posts that give me a great view of the zeitgeist for each side.
Eh, post Musk I see may more straight-up StormFront shit from "verified" posters.
The question was what he censored, not what was allowed. Allowing something is not a case of censorship.
As someone (who likes to think) is pretty unbiased politically, I can say I’ll go wherever the people I’m interested post. I have been somewhat surprised that pretty non political accounts have moved to Bluesky which I have interpreted as both political and motivated by the loads of political bs that are posted on x that normal people simply get tired of. I think Bluesky will gain more traction than threads but will end up being a more successful mastodon. A place where people with massive followings who simply don’t like x will post and there will be two competing apps.
It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not, it's that it's flavor of politics is increasingly resembling that of 4chan. I just skimmed though the auto-play videos on my account and the algorithm decided to show me this for some reason: https://x.com/AlaskanTom/status/1860339990992925170
That's far from the worst I've seen on there either, evidently you can just post about how Hitler was right and it won't affect your visibility at all now, nevermind get you banned.
> It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not
But this is not true. I always use my "following" feed and not my "for you" feed. Other than sponsored ads the only thing I see are posts from people I follow. I don't understand why people persist with the narrative that Twitter forces people into "the algorithm".
I've been splitting time between Twitter & Bluesky for the last year or so. The only real difference i notice is the set of people I follow as until recently most of my Twitter follows weren't on Bluesky
I also only use the following feed, but a fairly recent change to the video player means it now immediately cuts to the next video in the auto-play queue (or an ad) when it finishes, and that's always algorithmically driven regardless of which feed you were using.
Fair. I almost always refuse to click on videos in twitter-like sites, so wouldn't have noticed this. I (usually) hate video content, especially the massive shift towards video content in our media sources.
IMO the biggest difference is that they aren’t paying users based on engagement. That’s the #1 worst decision Musk made after buying Twitter, it incentivizes people to post incendiary content, to troll and to outright lie in the aim of going viral. You see it all the time on Twitter these days and Bluesky is vastly better not having that motive.
>but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same
I disagree. Bluesky will grow further and then be like a "Coke or Pepsi" to Twitter. (Albeit, it will stay smaller than Twitter.)
I have 2 threads accounts and never created a single one. That's because I had 2 Instagram accounts.
The difference is people chose to go to Bluesky, Threads accounts were just added on to your Insta account by Meta.
Bluesky's custom labels, algorithm choice, client choice, and starter packs seem like legitimately cool features.
I think overzealous moderation was what drove some people off Twitter in the first place.
Another social media site asking for my phone number, no thank you.
I read the occasional Twitter/X and probably now Bluesky post, but this offers nothing that would attract me. Twitter/X/Bluesky/Insta/Threads is for people that like celebrities with some interesting stuff in between. But overall that isn't worth it.
For social media, moderation makes the product
I'm not sure Threads ever had that much of a spike in usage beyond the first day of new accounts. Got the impression a huge number of people curious about it signed up due to the very easy onboarding if you already had an instagram, looked around a little and then never went back.
Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.
I’m going to guess you don’t use the service much… You’d likely have a very different opinion otherwise
I have given Threads a good try, and recently when Bluesky activity started up I restarted using Bluesky (it didn't stick for me the first time). The technology doesn't really matter that much, as long as it's basically competent. It's only the social network itself.
I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't.
Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us.
X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two.
Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.
> Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same.
Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads.
I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.
It would be the worst thing for Bluesky if the eternal September came over from Twitter. I think that population is too passive to make the move and will put up with any level of advertising etc.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation
Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there!
It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in.
There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss.
The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to.
There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on.
Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping.
The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049
It's not just checkbox features that matter, it's also the entire algorithm and who is allowed to have their posts gain organic traction. X actively penalizes high quality information, and pushes misinformation in an attempt to become an echo chamber.
If you want to find your colleauges' posts, if you want to find high quality information, if you want good links to long articles, X is no longer the place to be.
If you want to have click-bait and rage-bait or lots of right-wing politics, X will cater to your needs. But it won't cater to somebody that's trying to get to highly-curated high-signal information networks that Twitter allowed in the past. That's all been actively destroyed, with great intention.
X is pretty great now. Once the politics dies down a little it'll be the best place to be for the next 4+ years
Threads attracted a lot of people that I left behind on Facebook. It also gets a lot of people that cross-post to every platform. I can't think of a single post that I saw and still remember.
Bluesky lets you block reposts and that has been the killer feature for me. Original content from people I choose is the best recipe for my tastes. Also, I spend a lot of time on niche creative feeds and really enjoy the things I see.
I also like the idea of seeing regional and local feeds. That was an interesting part of early Twitter that was obliterated by national political emphasis. No more political hot takes, where is a good Korean BBQ spot?
> overtaking Threads
So the lowest bar possibly imaginable?
I've fallen for the Threads-links shown in Instagram. Obviously the instagram connection is what gave them a great start at a user-base. But, everytime I try to use Threads, something seems off (mainly see lame, boring, engagement-bait). Bluesky seems different and better. Also a much better story in-terms of open data, open protocol, etc.
I don't think it's that low of a bar. Threads benefited from easy account creation and promotion from Instagram (2b MAU?)
Bluesky started from word of mouth invite only
Yeah, getting anywhere near what the major tech companies are capable of should be understood as a triumph.
Does anyone remember now Spoutible? Substack Notes? How about Spill, Hive, or Post? Being even with in anything approximating striking distance of Threads would have been a triumph for any of them.
I can think of a "Truthier" "social network/platform" that is lower than Threads...
Trumpet (AKA Truth Social)?
Really ? Right in front of my lemmy username ?
I downloaded threads when it came out, but I only used it once.
The head of instagram/threads (Mosseri) appears to have no idea how the algorithm on these platforms work. He is shocked to see how many people are talking about threads in his feed. It may explain how threads has managed to waste such a large captured audience.
An extension to port your following from Twitter to Bluesky:
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/sky-follower-...
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated in any way. I just tried it and it worked well.
I think the factor which will determine which networks survive is the ability to handle bots driven by modern AI agents. I’m not sure how even the best moderation features can detect and mitigate these.
AI doesn't matter. Moderation should apply to humans and AIs equally.
It does matter because AI can be more effectively leveraged and scaled to support "coordinated inauthentic activity" campaigns.
AI has the ability to overwhelm systems of moderation at a much greater scale than humans. That's the issue.
Good.
Care to share your IP address?
Can you explain how that's a good thing?
> Moderation should apply to humans and AIs equally.
Unless you’re trying to create a social network to promote human voices and not bots.
It’s gonna be incredibly interesting to see what happens concerning this. I suspect that bots will probably thrive in feeds where ‘the algorithm’ is responsible for recommending most content. However, bots probably won’t do as well with vanilla follower feeds.
For me it's a very easy choice to go with Bluesky over Threads.
With Threads you can already see that Facebook/Instagram is in it's DNA. There's no pure "following" feed. It's instead an algorithmic feed that mixes people you follow with people Threads decides to push. So it's going down the enshittification path from day one.
With Bluesky there's at least some hope that it will not end up as the algorithmic time sinks all other social media has slowly become. I'm all for discoverability, but allow me to decide when and how I discover new people to follow. Never touch my "following" feed, and I'll be happy.
For all the ways that matter, find a more meaningful bar.
> Meta-owned Threads started November with 5 times the daily app users of Bluesky. That number is now down to just 1.5.
Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Today are either within an order of magnitude of X?
Blusky started at 0. Threads started with existing meta users. That seems like a big difference to me.
> Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Looks like no, threads is pretty flat and bluesky is hockey stick-ing
from this graph: https://bsky.app/profile/jburnmurdoch.bsky.social/post/3lbmp...
not sure what x data looks like
> Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity
Threads has ~300m MAU and will be on track to being larger than X in a year.
In fact X is struggling so much they now provide the option to hide engagement metrics: https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-hides-x-engagement-figure...
Gotta ask, am I missing something with how bluesky is supposed to be used? Every time I open something from there it takes over 30 seconds to load on my phone
You're experiencing a bug.
Did thread have significant traffic to begin with? The last four to six times I logged on it was a ghost town.
They claim to have about 300 million MAUs but it feels empty compared to X.
Where's Google's Twitter clone?
It can have AI nobody wants, a bland name nobody will remember, and be quietly sunsetted when nobody uses it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
It was actually okay. Half-surprised they didn’t bring it back when Twitter self-immolated.
Can't help you on the first item there, but everything else:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaiku
I predict Bluesky will go the way of Threads and Mastodon.
Probably worse. Mastedon runs on self hosting, Threads has a parent company with deep pockets and is a Instgram mod at best.
Twitter burned cash for years and it could because it was new, innovative and growing quickly. Once BlueSky burns through its initial money whats the plan and why would anyone invest in it?
Threads has a massive problem in that it recruits its users from Instagram (there are others but primarily its still a branch of Instagram) which is the domain of AI generated slop and people I actually know in real life.
The whole point of the twitter style firehose is to be not be either of those things. Bluesky honestly probably has a decent shot but I think its still attracting some hyper-orthodox, censorious, thinkers. Musk has gone too far with X[0] but I don't think his vision in the abstract is wrong.
[0] Every accusation is a confession - X is now near-directly attached to the US Gov!
I think the Bluesky crowd will probably chill out with time, but right now if you don’t readily use the block feature there you’re going to have your feed and notifications peppered with the same trolls that are currently making X inhospitable. The majority of users getting blocked aren’t interested in actual discourse, they’re just there to get a rise out of people.
It’s difficult to envision any social network staying healthy in the long term without either decent moderation or robust tools to help users manage harassment and the like. There’s just too many bad actors who will take advantage of low-control environments.
> inevitable
I don't get any trolls on either platform. I guess I'm too boring :)
I don’t get much trouble myself personally either, but it shows up in the replies to the posts in my feed which isn’t great and why a good block feature is necessary.
Yes, but the root cause is that Twitter doesn't stop rendering posts when there are no replies left to display. Instead it fills the silence with posts that aren't replies.
BlueSky just stops, like a normal program. When there's nothing more to show, silence is okay. So I don't need a blocklist there.
People keep missing the point of Threads. It isn't designed to be a pure Twitter clone and doesn't want to become the public square for news, politics etc.
It wants to be a text-centric network that helps release Instagram to be more video-centric to compete with TikTok. And so it wants content that is fun, interesting and light. And of course easily monetisable.
So I know people like having a fight but I see the two sites as being complimentary and both needing to thrive in order to relegate X to the dust bin.
Instagram was the only social network that kept me around because it was mostly art and nice photos. Recently i caught myself scrolling past endless videos and thought, shit, I've been tiktokked. Back to scrolling through hacker news comments to rot my brain instead.
I had to disable my YouTube watch history recently because I got trapped into shorts frequently and the only way to disable those is to kill the watch history.
One might think it's only Gen Z/Alpha that is susceptible to the Tiktok dopamine squeeze, but no, works just as well on us old geezers and it's pretty nefarious how well it works.
threads federates with mastodon, what stops threads getting on the AT protocol? is it just their assumed desire to not share data? they could be a mastodon / AT bridge
There are a couple. They’re… shaky, but they exist.
I find it's interesting that React which Bluesky was built on, was originally license with BSD + patents, which disallow building Facebook competing products.
I agree there's some irony to be had but I must make a correction: it revoked your license if you infringed on patents owned by Facebook. Does Facebook have patents on "add friend" buttons and "timeline"s ? (Asking, I don't know the answer)
Social media was doomed the moment its users were demoted from customers to exploitable sources of data. Bluesky will inevitably follow the same path of enshittification as every other social network before it. Its current success hinges solely on the nostalgic desire for a single platform where people can gather in peace. The real question is: How many cycles of doom will people endure before they finally stop jumping from one sinking ship to another?
> Bluesky will inevitably follow the same path of enshittification
Why do you say that? Bluesky is a protocol-first non profit. To my knowledge no company set up that way has achieved this level of success before. They don’t have the same motivations to enshittify that other networks do.
OpenAI was a nonprofit to make sure benefit of AGI was distributed equally.
I think it's plausible AT protocol allows a new level of interop/portability between services. It's also possible Bluesky burns through Blockchain Capital's money and starts doing crypto air drops like Keybase.
How is a company that has received investments, a non-profit? Those investors will require returns, which means the primary objective must be profit. Otherwise they would have just asked for donations.
> Those investors will require returns, which means the primary objective must be profit
It doesn’t mean that has to be the primary objective, just that at some point it should happen.
That's what OP was referring to, the same path of enshittification
There are no ads so that is one aspect that could prevent enshitification. Businesses can't just spend money to force their way into peoples feeds. At least not in a traditional advertising kind of way.
To be fair, is it better for customers to jump from sinking ship to sinking ship, or to permanently stay with a smaller, leaky boat?
Even though I don't like the term "enshittification", I do think that it is inevitable that BlueSky would need to make some unpopular changes in the future to become financially sustainable.
But is this such a bad thing? I used the Fediverse before, which is the "permanent place" that many people claim. But it had many disadvantages, from my point of view. No algorithms, no search, and I didn't like how defederation made it hard to follow anyone I liked.
I hosted a server myself, but it cost money. BlueSky doesn't, until it does. But maybe it is better to basically "exploit" BlueSky's free offers, before it changes?
TLDR: Is it better to jump from free service to free service (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Reddit), or is it better to permanently stay on a paid or lower-resourced service (e.g. IRC, forums)? I think many people seem to prefer the free version, and jump off when it starts "sinking" (trying to become financially sustainable).
How is Threads? I keep getting ads to push me to join it on Instagram, but whatever they recommend me via those ads is usually vapid Linkedin-type drivel. And I can’t see it on phone without the app.
I open it up once in a while but it mainly seems to be ranked by predicted CTR/engagement. For example, out of the first 20 posts in my feed I got a ton of travel/finance guru garbage and multiple posts with some variant of “Do not buy a Tesla, plenty of better EV choices.” And random memes stolen from other sites.
Tons of posts trying to get me to click on them to read more.
None of the accounts in my feed are ones I follow. It’s basically algorithmically driven slop.
I have gotten lured by engage-bait from Instagram. IMHO there is something off about Threads. It surely depends on who you follow and how you use it, but I find it totally un-engaging. Bluesky recently, seems better.
I see the Fediverse as pretty left-wing, but Bluesky seems unlikely to stay that way because moderation works differently. (No admins blocking each other over policy.)
Another day, another advert for Bluesky. There've been 70 stories with "bluesky" in the title submitted to HN this week alone, compared with 130 in the past month.
For all the talk of leaving Twitter, Twitter has 30x the daily visits of its rivals: https://www.axios.com/2024/11/14/elon-musk-x-attention-war-s...
My personal view is if you're on Twitter, leave it and don't replace it with anything. Find peace and tranquility in your life.
> For all the talk of leaving Twitter, Twitter has 30x the daily visits of its rivals.
Over the whole world maybe, but perhaps not among the HN crowd.
Threads is a good product. My twitter feed is dumpster fire of right wing politics and rage baity post. Threads has been much more balance. Open the app and have a good time.
People have been trying to make Bluesky happen for years. It won't. I believe moderation is fundamental to any social network, otherwise the bad actors always take over. Meta has been content moderation for years and understands the nuances.
People seek "Political discourse", but they will quickly realize our politics are too much of shit-show to have any kind of intellectual conversation. The rage bait and culture wars have taken over. Important discussions of policy, small vs big govt, taxes have taken the backseat. Our "politics" are no longer politics, and won't be for at least the next 4-8 years.
I've tried both Threads and Bluesky and I like Bluesky much better, I mean both UI & UX. One issue I have with Threads is that I stumble upon many users that came from Instagram automatically that are not used to post in this format. So the content is mostly a mirror of IG which makes it pointless. In Bluesky I feel like the posts come from people that fleed X and it's just more interesting somehow.
Big names like Lichtman announced he was leaving X for Bluesky and came back on X in less than 24 hours.
What makes social media work is the echo effect, you just won't be able to get it on a heavily censored platform like Bluesky and Reddit and a big reason why X is overtaking even mainstream media as much as people who lean left.
Its a huge problem to be imposing political leanings of the moderator on a public square because you end up creating an echo chamber which people inevitably abandon because you just won't reach enough people.
Who is Lichtman? Doing a web search for that name brings up many different first names in the top hits. I don't think you can consider whoever that is a "big name." And who wants "big names" on social media? Screw that, only echo chambers need "big names" to bring views.
>Its a huge problem to be imposing political leanings of the moderator on a public square because you end up creating an echo chamber which people inevitably abandon because you just won't reach enough people.
This describes the problem that X is facing. It censored heavily, and heavily penalizes politically "incorrect" posts that its owner doesn't like, creating an echo chamber that only fringe weirdos can enjoy. I don't need to see any more low-signal hate posts. Please just auto-delete anybody using copious slurs or with a username like N*iggerSlayer42069, it's not an "echo chamber" to not expose oneself to the lowest of the low discussion levels, it's an echo chamber to let those people dominate conversations while censoring technical terms I use every day in the workplace.. I don't need to go to 4chan to "broaden my horizons" and any platform owner that decides to shove that stuff down my throat will not find me on their platform any more.
Whats the point? bluesky, threads, mastodon, we have x.com works just fine.
ICYMI, Actor/director/activist Rob Reiner just proclaimed Bluesky to be a racist platform full of evil.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/rob-reiner-says-maga-scum-...
Catch me checking into a mental facility cause all the padded rooms online were taken
I'm moderately active on X, and helped build an early version of what became Threads (on which I am almost entirely inactive these days). I'm not surprised Bluesky's been more successful than Threads as the X-alternative:
* A lot of the popular content on X is political; Threads' decision to downrank or ban political content makes the posts less engaging. It's understandable from a certain perspective — a lot of the political content is just dishonest ragebait (and I learned to unfollow most political X accounts as a result). However, one of the most interesting things about X is that it's where news travels fastest, and it's significantly less-filtered than traditional journalist editorialization. It's hard to compete with X if you don't allow it, or downrank it.
* Obviously Elon's massive political spending will have an impact on the userbase of the product, since the spending is so one-sided. X has become dramatically more right-wing since he took over, and even more so after Trump's campaign, so there was pent-up demand for something else... Especially something else that allows left-wing political content (i.e. not Threads). There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Elon changing the X ranking algorithm to favor right-wing content, but TBH I think it's simpler than that: more left-wing people left the site (or used it less) due to distaste for Elon, and Elon unbanned hordes of right-wing accounts, who are very enthusiastic about supporting it.
* There's also one way in which X is (openly) biased in its ranking: paid accounts have their posts ranked higher than free accounts... And paying for X is public: you have a blue check next to your name if you pay. In right-wing spaces, having a paid bluecheck account is a badge of honor, in part due to it supporting Elon; in left-wing spaces, it's a badge of shame for the same reason. Although from a technical standpoint the ranking change isn't specifically political, in practice it's very political: many more right-wingers are bluechecks, so in practice you see more of their content and less left-wing content. Bluesky doesn't have paid accounts, and even if it did, it wouldn't organically result in right-wing content being prioritized to the same extent, so for left-wing users it's a much friendlier place.
* This is perhaps more of a personal gripe, but Elon Musk's decision to downrank external links has been pretty bad for the quality of X content. I understand the reasoning: he's trying to keep people engaged in-app, and external links make you leave. But plenty of interesting people use X as a promotional channel for their (interesting) content, which I want to see, and which often doesn't suit tweet formats. So by downranking posts with external links, I see less of the things I actually am interested in. I don't think I'm alone in this, and Bluesky doesn't do it — and I've heard (anecdotal) reports of people really enjoying being able to more reliably engage with that kind of stuff again on Bluesky.
Mastodon is too complicated and segmented to take off. But Bluesky isn't, so I can see why it's having a zeitgeist post-Trump's-election, which Elon helped fund. I'm not sure how much Bluesky will manage to retain its current spike in users: Threads at one point had a similar spike, and most users churned back to X. But it makes sense to me that Bluesky is a more natural home for the ex-X diaspora than Threads, given the reasons many of them left X.
I refuse to use Bluesky because it is clearly being pushed on the masses, in collusion with mainstream media, as an alternative to X. Clearly another attempt by certain people to control information. It's shocking how people fall for this stuff over and over again.
I hope if backfires, mostly draws in users from existing speech-unfriendly platforms and then the number of social media platforms will multiply from here onward and a large number of platforms will compete based on who is most permissive with regards to speech.
Most of the highly suggestible masses already moved off X to Threads... So now that Bluesky is being pushed hard, I hope the suggestible people from Threads will switch over and split up their censorship ecosystems.
It makes sense from that perspective. The censored ecosystems should be separated into lots of small platforms because you need a lot of different filter bubbles to maintain the deceptions and impermeable information silos. A large centralized ecosystem will create too many opportunities for exposure to alternative information so it cannot be controlled as well.
In the future, there will be a different platform for every kind of delusion and each one will focus on its own delusion and will make up stories to discredit rival platforms so people always doubt information received outside.
It's a matter of time before large corporations start preventing their employees from using non-approved platforms. They'll probably use cybersecurity safety as an excuse. They might carry out hacking false flags on their own employees to convince them to not use other platforms they won't feel forced.
I broadly agree with your perspective however I think you've missed that bluesky is specifically architected to facilitate the coexistence of bubbles : shared block lists, client based moderation, portability in case you account is banned from a particular host etc, Bluesky is well positioned for a future where cliques don't want to hear from one another
That's too bad but I guess if people want to silo themselves in, they should be allowed. I just hope that big corporations don't eventually coerce everyone into this through economic force.
I can see a future where corporations control the entire economy. Startups or parallel economy would be impossible due to regulatory moats and monetary asymmetries and everyone would be forced to lock themselves into a filter bubble in order to get a job... To survive.
Imagine knowing what's happening and not having the power refuse... And by that point, the power would be granted fully artificially out of a money printer, distributed straight into the coffers of select big corporations on the basis of secret mutual agreements between each other. All under the banner of MMT? This is beyond immoral.
More specific to your point, it makes sense why the entities behind the censorship push might still want a single platform, but simply with better 'siloing' capability. It's likely that the same people who want censorship, also want mass surveillance. Mind-bending to think that there exist a conflict between these two dystopian aspects! They really want to have the cake and eat it too.
>It's a matter of time before large corporations start preventing their employees from using non-approved platforms. They'll probably use cybersecurity safety as an excuse.
Already happened with TikTok.
And you don't think the desire to get away from Elon Musk and the MAGA crowd had anything to do with it? Nothing good was ever going to come about because of Elon's stupid acquisition. That was made painfully obvious when Xitter stopped paying their bills - I guess in the hopes that creditors would be forced to arbitrate lower payments on debts owed to them (which is bullshit for a billionaire to be doing, but you don't get to be a billionaire by being nice, fully ethical, moral or legal). Then we had a demonstration of sheer stupidity Elon told advertisers to fuck off, so they did, and now he's all hurt and lawsuity.
What good do you see in that? Who wouldn't want to get away from that stupidity?
From my perspective, X experience has improved a lot since Elon's acquisition.
What actually got worse materially? I hear a lot of gesturing 'Orange man bad', 'Elon help orange man, so Elon bad' but I cannot reach any of these conclusions from first principles looking at Trump's policies while he was President... Aside from the Jan 6 incident... But I don't see consensus there between either side so I do have some doubts and questions about the true nature of that incident. The fact is, nobody on Jan 6 had guns besides police officers. How can that possibly be an insurrection? Please correct me if I'm wrong there.
The confederate flag has only been raised inside our capital buildings once, and that was on Jan 6.
Well, you can't overthrow a government with a piece of cloth. So I still don't see how it could be called an insurrection.
Twitter does not need a replacement. There seem to be a popular opinion that it does, but it's not something people are willing to act on.
It's a better app than it used to be, overall.
All politics aside (not a minor point for many), Twitter has been made much worse IMHO in the Musk era.
They de-prioritize links, prevent 3rd party apps, closed the API, and blocked access for non-logged-in viewing.
And a smaller meta-point: changed from an iconic name to a simple non-informative letter (Besides Google and maybe Uber, who have added a popular verb to the lexicon?)
I feel this is a downside only to a particular bunch. For most people, Twitter is doing better than ever. Community notes are amazing and innovative and should be adopted by every social media platform. X feels legitimately more fun than most other apps. Plus, at this point, I think a solid portion of people have been banned from social media apps. You can't exile your way towards whatever ideal society you want. The barbarians are always at the gates.
I especially feel this sort of enforced community separation is so prevalent among those who are so reticent to build a border wall, but I'm sure psychology has an explanation somewhere.
Community notes was designed, implemented and released before the acquisition. Only the name is new. Previously it was called birdwatch.
That's great. Unfortunately, Twitter still had a Kafka-esque moderation policy that is antithetical to the most basic understanding of free thought.
> For most people, Twitter is doing better than ever.
Citation needed...
Twitter went from a highly useful daily visit for getting news in my field to being a gigantic time suck to even try to avoid the politics and low-quality posts.
>enforced community separation is so prevalent among those who are so reticent to build a border wall
Ah, so you have a certain form of politics, and its beneficial. But Is that "most people" who are on Twitter, were on Twitter, or most people in general? If I want what Twitter is serving me, I can go to any sort of right-wing forum or Fox News article comments (do they still have comments?).
But for those of us that had practical uses for Twitter that weren't partisan politics, its value has been destroyed.
And ad revenue shows that "most people" definitely do not want to be associated with such partisan politics. Twitter's past neutrality allowed all sorts of political views. Now it's become an echo chamber as the owner pushes his own strong partisan politics, and pushes to spread extremist views that may be fine on 4chan, but that 95% of people would rather never expose themselves to.
> Ah, so you have a certain form of politics, and its beneficial.
Yes.. I believe a recent analysis shows that of all social media, Twitter's political composition now best matches America. If one's response to that is to run away, it's that person that is problematic, not the rest of society that is able to co-exist just fine.
You can't view Tweets without being signed in.
API access is banned. Third party apps are banned.
A verification badge used to signal trustworthiness, now it can be bought.
All your posts are being used to train an AI model without the ability to opt out.
Every second Tweet is a crypto scam.
How exactly is the experience better than before?
Well to play devil's advocate the only things on that list that affect the logged in experience are the verification badges and the crypto scams. But I'm curious what the improvements are too since I haven't been on twitter in at least 2 years except for reading the occasional tweet that someone posts a link to somewhere
> but it's not something people are willing to act on.
Sure looks like they are.
Certain groups are trying to will bluesky into being successful. From my personal experience, X/Twitter is still killing it.
I'd imagine Threads will be successful unless Zuckerberg kills it to focus on other things. It's integrated with Instagram and could potentially be integrated into Facebook and WhatsApp too.