Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

254 pointsposted 2 days ago
by joelg
(joelgustafson.com)

249 Comments

josefresco

2 days ago

I must be one of those tiny dots just floating in nothingness because my BSKY feed is a dead zone. I've posted, I've replied, I've liked and tried to be an active participant but nothing seems to stick. There's only so many posts I can publish "for myself" before I lose interest.

Contrast this with early Twitter where everyone was just super excited, and eager to follow new people. I don't get it, shouldn't a new social network be full of people looking to create new... social networks?

lancewiggs

2 days ago

The account with your handle is following only a handful of people, and is broadcasting content rather than engaging in a conversation. Consider the reverse.

Zetaphor

a day ago

This is it, the typical model of throwing things out into the ether and hoping they go viral is less effective here. It's easier to build an audience by thoughtfully engaging in discourse rather than trying to advertise yourself as some kind of thought leader

jakevoytko

2 days ago

At the moment, BSKY has an enormous “rich get richer” problem caused by starter packs. If you get into starter packs made by influential people, you will get an infinite number of followers for free. If you’re bootstrapping your presence from scratch, you will be almost completely undiscoverable.

fsflover

2 days ago

Did you try Mastodon? Many have a better experience there.

josteink

2 days ago

Mastadon has a massive problem with furries, people with loli anime-avatars or people who fit the «purple haired» stereotype.

It’s very off-putting and alienating for normal people.

fckgw

2 days ago

These are also "normal people", they just choose to express themselves differently.

Maybe you should get over it?

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

colesantiago

2 days ago

Nobody important or relevant enough is moving to Mastodon.

djbusby

2 days ago

One can engage on multiple platforms. Don't have to leave something else to use Mastodon.

colesantiago

2 days ago

> One can engage on multiple platforms. Don't have to leave something else to use Mastodon.

Sure, and those who have a technically savvy audience can use Mastodon can post on multiple platforms.

In this instance of bad changes X has made, the majority of those who are moving away from X this time round are more likely not going to engage on Mastodon as a second platform.

Too much hassle for them.

They are more likely to engage on platforms that have more engagement, like Bluesky or Threads.

I cannot see artists, journalists, etc going to Mastodon when X makes changes to their platform time and time again.

mjmsmith

2 days ago

If it always remains so, I'm never leaving.

lepus

2 days ago

If you have a problem with too many furry posts I have bad news for you about Bluesky

saila

2 days ago

I used to see a lot of furry accounts in the Discover feed, but I mute them when I see them, and now I rarely see them any more. I don't have anything against furries, but it's not content I'm interested in. This is more a comment that Bluesky does seem to have an algorithm (at least in the Discover feed) that is sensitive to what you do or don't show interest in. Or it could just be that a lot more people have joined recently, so the furry stuff just isn't as prevalent.

extraduder_ire

2 days ago

Discover has a separate "show more/less like this" button too.

Every feed on the site is its own algorithm, and most are made by third-parties. Some of the more interesting ones have fallen over and broken a little as the volume of posts has increased. The various "catch up" feeds that show the most popular recent posts give a good impression of what's happening site wide (minus any blocks/mutes).

makoConstruct

a day ago

> I don't have anything against furries

If so, you're probably looking for the "show less of this" feature rather than muting?

jazzyjackson

2 days ago

Bluesky is trying to differentiate itself with moderation tools -- people have created lists of furry accounts so you can bulk-ignore. But yeah I haven't found my "people" there yet, most of the activity is people I wouldn't choose to interact with.

rsynnott

2 days ago

Twitter and Bluesky are also full of furries. Frankly, if your social network lacks furries, it is probably in trouble; they seem to be a viability indicator.

(Not that it’s a guarantee of anything; notably, SecondLife is essentially _only_ furries.)

kstrauser

2 days ago

Mastodon’s only algorithm is newest-on-top, so your complaint is that the people you’re following seem strange to you. Uh, follow other people then.

josteink

11 hours ago

This was my experience trying to find and instance to join. And as a result I didn't join any.

I'm pretty sure most "normal" people would react in a similar fashion, which kind of makes this a notable catch-22 for wider Mastadon-adaption.

fsflover

2 days ago

It strongly depends on the instance. You don't have to read the global timeline.

chefandy

2 days ago

The tough thing is that for the vast majority of end users, the interface that they see is the software or service. So if their instance has a bunch of disgusting pornography, as far as they’re concerned, mastodon has a bunch of disgusting pornography. For a lot of folks, the browser/server abstraction for regular websites and how that differs from native apps is about as far as they’re willing to go in their understanding of Internet architecture and for many, it’s too far. Requiring people understand that not all mastodon is mastodon despite it being kind of the same, in order to avoid explicit hentai, is a non-starter. My grandparents are dead, but they would probably take their computer out back and set it on fire if that shit flashed up on their screen. They sure wouldn’t have used it as an opportunity to get all of the base knowledge they needed to even realize they had to instance shop. Facebook is just riiiiight over there.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

typical182

2 days ago

Bluesky and atproto seem to be built to be hackable.

Someone in the community recently built a searchable directory of Bluesky "Starter Packs" (which are a way for a user to publish a set of interesting people & feeds to follow, primarily to help newcomers bootstrap their experience):

https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all

Dan Abramov posted about it earlier today, saying he liked it and:

"the fact that it can be done in the ecosystem is awesome. let the ecosystem cook" [1]

And maybe more poignantly:

"seeing random projects pop up in the atproto ecosystem reminds me just how much public web common were stifled by social companies closing down their APIs. an entire landscape of tools given up on and abandoned" [2]

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3sdna222d

[2] https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3xpuu4c2d

godelski

2 days ago

I was contemplating coming over, but this comment is the most convincing to me.

I think one of the fatal flaws tech companies have been making is locking things in. But what made the computer so great, what made the smartphone so great, was to make them hackable. You build environments, you build ecosystems. Lockin only slows you down. I mean how long would it have taken for smartphones to have a flashlight if it weren’t for apps? A stopwatch? These were apps before they were built into the operating systems.

Sebastyijan

a day ago

Had to make an account to just echo this sentiment. I recently joined bluesky and holy hotdog as a developer it feels good that you can actually build stuff, data wrangling or whatever you might feel inspired to do.

mhartz

2 days ago

Wasn't this also sort of a feature with Twitter? iirc the retweet and other now popular features were originally hacked together by users

frabcus

2 days ago

Retweet was original using the text "RT". Hashtags were also invented by Twitter users.

FranklinMaillot

2 days ago

Wasn't the @ also invented by users? I remember it was fascinating to watch this network self organize and create conventions of its own, that are now used everywhere.

rsynnott

2 days ago

Also hashtags. Though I think some of this stuff came from other social networks.

singleshot_

2 days ago

Seems to me like Jarkko Oikarinen or one of his crew invented hashtags, no? Denoting the context of your communication with something like #warez or #hack significantly predates web2.0.

sph

2 days ago

Rather I think Twitter-style hashtags take inspiration from IRC channels in the format of #topic

Because channel names are not hashtags. The syntax is purely because IRC is a text-based protocol, so you need a special way to distinguish channel names from regular text.

extraduder_ire

2 days ago

# also has the advantage of being on a key on a T9 keypad while using twitter over SMS was in style.

chefandy

2 days ago

That use— to define IRC channels— seems distinctly different than Twitter hashtags to tag individual posts. I wouldn’t be surprised if hash tags started as a nod to that, perhaps even jokingly, but I don’t think you could consider them a descendent.

soco

2 days ago

I think reblogs as a technical feature were added first in 2009 by Tumblr and slightly later adopted by Twitter - not that it matters in this context.

skybrian

2 days ago

Hashtags were invented. It's a convention that happened to work well with Twitter's search engine.

arcalinea

2 days ago

Yep, we intentionally built it to be hackable! We believe that social media will improve when people are free to build on it, change it, fork it, and remix it. Bluesky and the atproto ecosystem can evolve as fast as users and developers want them to.

zft

2 days ago

Starterpacks are great, what about seeing what is current top engaging accounts ? https://www.graphtracks.com

consumer451

2 days ago

That's the best looking Bsky tool that I've seen so far. Nice!

nuz

2 days ago

Another argument is that it could lead to a bot problem 10x worse than twitters ever was.

jsheard

2 days ago

The Twitter bot situation only seems to have got worse since they shut down free API access. LLM engagement farming bots everywhere in replies, hordes of scam bots replying if you use certain keywords, porn bots following and DMing everyone non-stop...

Evidently the people running the bots don't really care whether or not you give them an API to work with.

extraduder_ire

2 days ago

I think that coincided with them removing phone number verification for accounts. Probably due to my browser looking unusual (content blocker, linux user-agent string, other addons) any time I set up a new account and used it for a few minutes a few years ago, it'd lock the account and redirect every logged in page to one demanding SMS verification to unlock the account.

I would usually get support to manually unlock it after a few days by emailing them and mentioning why I didn't want to give them a phone number. Now the process only involves solving captchas. (and maybe some hidden waiting)

Zetaphor

a day ago

One of the nice things that make Bluesky different is that there isn't really a single central algorithm that everyone is forced to use. This combined with the many novel moderations tools like feeds and labellers mean it's pretty trivial to filter out entire categories of spam/botting.

As an example my feed is completely free of US politics, allowing me to curate an experience where I can go to enjoy myself instead of constantly being exposed to ragebait.

jazzyjackson

2 days ago

Check out bluesky's "labeling services", I think it will be a very simple matter to crowdsource lists of obvious bots and prevent their having any reach. You can create bots that make as many posts as you want, but bots aren't entitled to being included in any feed. It comes down to the posts that the relay choose to aggregate, and what the appview chooses to display according to user preferences.

asdf123wtf

a day ago

They have shareable block lists - like starter packs, but for blocking accounts. We'll see how that works out as the network grows.

realusername

2 days ago

I'm not sure you could be worse than Twitter right now on bots unless you are pursposely trying to be worse.

sneak

2 days ago

Computers that are operated by humans that are using APIs designed for computers is not a bug, but a feature.

nonethewiser

2 days ago

Well yeah that's why you can expect it to increase 10x

cwal37

2 days ago

Bluesky has really exploded in certain niches over the past week, I think my followers have gone up 5-6x since Saturday.

I'd been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now there's some real heat to it as things pick up.

Hopefully this surge is real, has certianly gotten me to be much more active.

Karrot_Kream

2 days ago

My X never really degraded (I also spend a lot of time on Japanese-language X which is probably a different beast) but I have been spending time on Bluesky over the last year. For a while it was a fun network but fairly quiet. I could go an hour or so without any new posts. Over the last 3 weeks I've seen Bluesky become a lot more active and now it's feeling a lot like X where there's no way to stay on top of my feed. I'm really excited as I'm a firm believer that larger communities lead to more diverse views.

I also run my own Bluesky labeler and Firehose ingester so I've been following as event throughput has roughly doubled over the last 3-4 months.

brendoelfrendo

2 days ago

Japanese language Twitter is indeed a very different beast. It's pretty much the social network over there, and most of Musk's changes that targeted or angered users were primarily targeted at English-language users, mostly in the US. So the Japanese users just kinda trucked on like nothing was happening.

SoftTalker

2 days ago

The spammers and trolls will be there soon. Nothing popular is ignored for long.

Sammi

a day ago

The problem on x is that the spammers and trolls aren't moderated.

I'm genuinely excited to see if bluesky manages to moderate them.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

jkestner

2 days ago

Nice thing is that block works there.

unpopularopp

2 days ago

I yet to find "utility" accounts on Bluesky. I use Twitter to follow news from games, game studios and publishers, news sites, bands, NASA etc. There is nothing like there yet and I don't care about random people (as I don't care about them on Twitter either)

I check time to time but basically it's 0/50

jacoblambda

2 days ago

If you are looking for stuff from big publishers then yeah it's gonna be a bit slow/empty but there are a lot of small/indie devs on bluesky and it's awesome being able to interact with them directly without all the spam that usually came with posts on twitter.

minimaxir

2 days ago

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Fortunately it appears that utility accounts are slowly popping up now that there's an audience.

Sammi

a day ago

I'm a web dev and follow a lot of companies and organizations in the web dev sphere and these all created accounts a week ago. Other sectors will probably also be jumping as lumps. When a sizable chunk moves, then the others follow.

threeseed

2 days ago

You will find a lot of games, studios and bands on Threads.

Since it leverages Instagram and has pretty fantastic photo features.

SubiculumCode

2 days ago

Yeah. Twitter/X after the Russian invasion quickly let me connect to serious professionals in US-Russia relations, war, etc. e.g. War on the Rocks and Mike Kofman, the Truth of the Matter by CSIS, etc.

Are there easy tools that allow you to post on multiple platforms from the same content, that also supports replies?

Sammi

a day ago

Yeah I've been missing these people too, but I just noticed them suddenly appearing on bluesky over the last 24 hours. Things are afoot.

threeseed

2 days ago

For me, everything is settling.

Threads is a half Twitter, half Instagram hybrid strong in creative, travel, social etc type content. Bluesky is original Twitter with strengths in news, politics, science etc. These days not sure it will ever be possible to have one app that does it all.

Which leaves X as the new 4chan.

meme3

2 days ago

In terms of toxicity, X is way beyond 4chan at this point. But the style is very different. Algorithmic vs organic, retweets vs (You)s, anonymous vs semi-anonymous and much more. All the way to how replies are visually presented which is awful on Twitter and it's clones.

Honestly, I've had more positive interactions and learned more on 4chan than I ever have on Twitter. I wish the few tech people I care about who are still on there would just move (to clarify, move anywhere, not to 4chan obviously).

bigstrat2003

2 days ago

Twitter has always been one of the most toxic places on the Internet. It's why I have refused to use it, because I have better things to do with my time than watch terminally online people get into diatribes about their extreme left/right political views. I don't have any faith that any replacement will be better, considering that they are primarily populated by the people who are so extreme left that they couldn't abide the idea of new Twitter ownership.

asdf123wtf

a day ago

Even worse... X as the new state affiliated/controlled 4chan. A truly nightmare scenario.

steve_adams_86

2 days ago

Whoa, new 4chan is remarkably apt. It’s shit-posting for days. It feels degrading to use it at all.

jcul

2 days ago

I never really "got" Twitter.

I don't know why, but I always felt like the hype went over me head, and it was a bit boring.

Though I'm tempted to check out Bluesky, the AT protocol seems really interesting.

saila

2 days ago

In its heyday, before the most recent acquisition, Twitter was really good for local info (ignoring celebrities, shitposting, and the like). Not just news but announcements, alerts, and other local stuff if you followed the right accounts.

Mastodon is cool, but it's hard to consistently find that local info. Bluesky seems like it has a chance of supplanting Twitter in this way, but it's not there yet. Some of the accounts I used to follow on Twitter are on Bluesky, but they don't post. If they started, I think they'd get tons of followers now.

jcul

a day ago

That does sound useful.

I signed up for twitter once as it was an effective way to get customer support from my bank :-/

In general it seemed to be celebrities that I didn't care about and people posting shower thoughts.

Applejinx

2 days ago

That's been my experience as well, in every sense. A sudden explosion of incoming people, many new options of interesting and salient people to follow, and the overall experience rapidly getting more engaging.

IAmGraydon

2 days ago

It's just getting a lot more attention everywhere, as evidenced by Google Trends.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...

There is an obvious need for Twitter-like platforms, but Twitter/X has become too right-wing for many users. The left needs a place to talk and vent about the election, and Twitter is no longer friendly to that. Therefore, Bluesky is taking off due to that event.

danieldk

2 days ago

Yeah, I've had an account for quite a while now (from before registrations were open), but it was largely a ghost town. The last few days there is a lot more stuff happening in my feed. And so far free of all the drama, bots, etc.

mrits

2 days ago

Considering X is an app used by the world I don't see how there could be any real momentum. To begin with, the world is more conservative than the US.

threeseed

2 days ago

The facts are that Threads has 275m MAU and has been #1 on the App Store almost continually since it launched. Bluesky is now #2 and rapidly growing. The momentum is real and significant.

And the world is sick of Elon Musk and US politics.

mrits

2 days ago

The facts are that the world is addicted to Elon Musk and US politics.

alexriddle

2 days ago

I don't think that's particularly true but even if it was, the site is overrun with crypto spam and porn bots that will drive people away. I know 3 people who have deactivated their account and switched to bluesky in the past week - and anecdotal evidence for many people on bluesky seems to suggest engagement levels are significantly higher. The network effects are really gaining traction as well.

I gave up on Twitter when I opened the app in public to find a porn video playing in the main feed, despite not following or interacting with any accounts of that nature previously. That was ~6 months ago and I haven't looked back.

Barrin92

2 days ago

Twitter is quite small as far as big social media platforms go (about 300 million, largest individual userbase by far US citizens [1]). Compared to Telegram with a billion users and Instagram, Facebook, TikTok/Douyin in the billions the constant talking about Twitter/Elon and so forth isn't that internationally relevant.

No offense but it's mostly Americans screaming at other Americans about how important America is. It's a little bit tiresome how much headspace that site and owner occupy these days on certain parts of the internet.

[1]https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/number-of-twitter-users-by...

mrits

2 days ago

If Telegram was used by a relevant country you might have a point.

loevborg

2 days ago

I'm part of the wave of users who migrated to bluesky last week. I have to say I really like it so far, which surprised me a bit given that I had been underwhelmed by mastodon before. I already spend more time in bluesky than in twitter.

For those (like me) who don't know what bluesky is, it's basically a carbon copy of twitter circa 2015, down to an almost identical UI. Except that there's no monetization, no ads, no growth hacking, which means that in the main features are there to serve the user. My favorite example is the simple expo/react native based mobile app, which lets you open links in safari rather than a useless in-app browser.

ndiddy

2 days ago

Given that Bluesky is VC funded, I imagine it'll just be a matter of time until the monetization, ads, and growth hacking start. Enjoy it while you can, I suppose.

loevborg

a day ago

Bluesky is a Public Benefit LLC: https://bsky.social/about/blog/2-7-2022-overview

Not sure how that interacts with the fact that the company raised a substantial amount recently https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a

ndiddy

a day ago

AFAIK all the "public benefit" aspect does is remove the ability for investors to sue the company for failing to maximize shareholder value. Given sufficient share ownership, it's still possible for VCs to force Bluesky to do whatever they want.

stiltzkin

a day ago

Enshitification. 100% guarantee if VC funded.

ZacnyLos

2 days ago

> it's basically a carbon copy of twitter circa 2015, down to an almost identical UI. Except that there's no monetization, no ads, no growth hacking, which means that in the main features are there to serve the user

Wow, that's just like Mastodon.

Pxtl

2 days ago

BlueSky's big killer features that Mastodon fails at:

1) Better (optional) algorithmic feeds. Mastodon's "explore" is weaker than Bluesky's "popular with friends" and "discover"

2) Quote-tweets.

3) Easier onboarding. Mastodon forces you to care about which server you're on and it does matter and migrating later is hard. Meanwhile, BSky has "starter packs" that people can produce for each other with lists of users to follow to easily jump into a community.

4) Username-as-domain is better than the Mastodon "confirmed links in profile" thing for self-verified accounts.

I wish the properly-federated OSS community-funded one had won but I'll take either to be done with Twitter.

panic

2 days ago

I don't think either platform is going to "win" in the sense of reaching the size and influence of Twitter, but both will hopefully be more resilient than Twitter was.

Pxtl

a day ago

Yeah, "resilience" is my big concern. After Facebook and Twitter, I'm mostly concerned about a social network getting compromised by a moneyed political interest. Obviously I'm a liberal so I have my political opinion on the interest here, but the point stands for any alignment - I'd rather see something like Mastodon where people can fund and run their own servers that reflect their own values and interests, and then those servers can federate and defederate as is appropriate.

Basically: governance matters.

sph

2 days ago

I tried it, the tech seems cool but I'd like more diversity. Now that Twitter mostly is crypto scams and American far-right political nonsense, I'd like something a little more interesting than American far-left political nonsense.

The world is much larger than American or Western internet drama, and there seems to be no way to escape it. As a European reading any mainstream social media, BlueSky included, makes me roll my eyes out of their orbit.

I do not care about politics or gender identity or keyboard activism. Can we please have something else on the menu? Literally anything else. I wonder if I should learn Russian or Chinese to be exposed to something new which isn't US politics or which gender people are most attracted to in their private lives. Who gives a damn. /rant

(I enjoyed Nostr tech-wise, but it never broke past the cryptobro phase and that saddens me)

lukev

2 days ago

If you are good about curating your follows, you can get a nice nonpolitical feed on Bluesky.

That said this is definitely not the week to try to calibrate that, since everyone currently has Big Feelings even if they're normally not overtly political.

sph

2 days ago

Fair enough. My issue is that it seems people have Big Feelings for one reason or another since 2015 and increasingly so. I really do not wish to have to work to train the "algo", especially when Twitter-like social media is worse than useless. It takes no time for my favourite people I follow to suddenly start spamming my timeline with the drama-du-jour.

On these social networks, either you are (un)willingly enlisted in the American Culture Wars, or you're best served not using them at all.

lukev

2 days ago

No no that's my point: Bluesky has no algorithm. You see only the posts of people you follow, in order, and nothing else (unless you deliberately subscribe to "discovery" feeds.)

So you have complete control.

testfoobar

2 days ago

How does it compare to Threads?

wittekm

2 days ago

Anecdotally, I see a lot more “normal” human to human engagement than the addressed-to-millions engagement bait I see on Threads.

Pxtl

2 days ago

The loudest complaint I see about threads (lack of hyperlinks) doesn't apply there. Also, Threads seems covered in growth-hacking dark patterns, like the notification/activity screen being flooded with "picked for you".

edit: my big worry about BSky is the lack of any coherent monetization plan. This isn't community-funded stuff like Mastodon, it's VC-funded software - there will be a need for revenue at some point and then what happens?

consumer451

2 days ago

> my big worry about BSky is the lack of any coherent monetization plan.

That's a reasonable concern. I assumed there would be ads at some point, but that's not the way that they are going for now.

> we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a

threeseed

2 days ago

> notification/activity screen being flooded with "picked for you"

Strange. Have been on Threads since launch and have never seen this.

Nor have I seen any growth-hacking dark patterns other than the For You algorithm pushing high-engagement content which they've said they are sorting out. But a lot of this is because Threads has the legacy of being built on Instagram.

Pxtl

a day ago

It mostly seemed to happen on the web client - I tend to avoid "apps" I'd click the "heart" to check my notifications and it would be just a firehose of "picked for you" streaming in. Also iirc it launched without a chronological feed.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

Etheryte

2 days ago

Hard to overstate just how much I like this. Not only does the end result convey information in many dimensions, it's also extremely appealing visually. The graininess that stems from rendering such a large number of nodes really adds a nice touch here, something that you don't often see in other graph visualizations.

bradgessler

2 days ago

The best thing about Bluesky is you can use your domain as your username. I'm @bradgessler.com on there, so if people want to "verify" me, they see something more meaningful than a blue checkbox, which is my website.

If I ever get blocked, banned, deplatformed, whatever—people would see my domain and be able to go there to determine what's going on. In a sense it's "censorship-evident".

I think this will be great for businesses—it's so much more less ambiguous if I can @example.com a business and get a response. I put a starter pack together of SaaS built on Rails that's already doing this at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u

I really like what BlueSky is doing and hope it doesn't get enshitified as the future plays out. Even if it does, it seems like now is a goldilocks moment where things are feeling really good there.

I highly recommend spending the 5 minutes it takes to setup an account and point it at your domain.

ZacnyLos

2 days ago

Verifying your identity on Mastodon is for everyone as well and based on open web standards.

https://joinmastodon.org/verification

jazzyjackson

2 days ago

Neat thing about BlueSky using DNS TXT record is I don't actually have to host a landing page. The way mastodon does it feels like a quid pro quo way of making you put a mastodon icon on your website. Bluesky is really good for corporate and government users who can get an @name.whitehouse.gov account or @name.npr.org etc without polluting the npr.org markup with a thousand "rel" links for each of their employees. I think bluesky is thinking about a different audience than mastodon.

Also I took a look at https://mastodonapp.uk/@stephenfry as an example of a verified profile and the UX is quite bad. Green check in a green box with a green border. The title tag just says "Website" and there's no indication of what it means.

bradgessler

2 days ago

Problem with Mastodon is you’re forced to associate with the identity of the sever or run your own instance, both of which are very awkward.

I’m @bradgessler@ruby.social, but I’m more than a Ruby dev.

I could run a Mastadon instance for bradgessler.com, but I have no desire to spend even 3 minutes figuring out how to set all that up. Maintaining my own instance sounds even worse.

Bluesky gets the ergonomics of this right: the usernames feel like they occupy a global namespace and I can point the aliases at my domains in a few minutes without having to worry about a bunch of standards that I don’t really care about.

For some reason I can’t explain, it also really bothers me that I have to @ people on Mastadon via @brad@bradgessler.com. I don’t want to say “@“ twice if I’m verbally telling somebody where to find me when presenting and “@me@bradgessler” is weird too. Much easier to say “Follow me @bradgessler.com”

Am I lazy? Yes, but most people are. Bluesky strikes a nice balance of control and identity that I’m comfortable with for the amount of time and effort I’m willing to put into it.

wink

a day ago

Maybe think about people who (deliberately or not) have neither chosen their domain(s) to read like their real name or online handle. I agree that yours kinda works, but I wouldn't want to be addressed by @<any of my domains>, that's why I use a handle (and have not chosen a matching domain since 1999 or so). And yes, I know you don't have to go that route, and I actually like that it works, I'm just saying it's not a universally good feature. It can be pretty useless.

extraduder_ire

2 days ago

The default handles (ending in .bsky.social) you get from signing up also redirect to your profile on bsky.app by default. Even if someone has no idea what bluesky is, they can load up that URL (even with the @) and be looking at your social profile right away.

elforce002

a day ago

To be honest, bluesky will become the left version of "Truth social". That's good for them in the long run (ad money) but it'll be another echo chamber. I follow both left-leaning and right-leaning people on Twitter and I don't see the "balance" going one way or another.

The other thing is reach. Twitter, Fb, Instagram are global brands. It'll be really, and I mean difficult to move the rest of the world to other platforms (TikTok is the exception because they went ahead with video from the get-go).

bbzealot

a day ago

How can a platform owned by a far-right man with a clear political agenda be the place for "political balance"?

It's inevitable that left-leaning people will increasingly leave Twitter, as long as it is run by Musk

elforce002

20 hours ago

Musk was left-leaning not so long ago. I follow left-leaning media (WYT, Pod Save America, etc...) and right-leaning media (Ben Shapiro, etc...) equally and see both posts without any issues. If the left-leaning people leave Twitter, the new platform will become an echo chamber the same way Reddit, gab, parler, and Truth Social are.

bbzealot

19 hours ago

> Musk was left-leaning not so long ago

So what? He's been clearly far right leaning since before he purchased Twitter.

He's been one of the main supporters of the Trump campaign and he's vocal about his political ideas. Twitter has no credibility as a neutral platform as long as it's run by him

elforce002

18 hours ago

I beg to differ. It's important because I can equally see both left and right posts. If you consume more left-leaning posts, you'll get more of that content. My feed is Web Dev, Machine Learning, Mobile Dev, etc... you have to be hardcore right to get anything related to that (same goes if you consume left-leaning posts).

In the end, people will choose their echo chamber no matter if they know it's an echo chamber. I try to be as impartial as possible. I use Twitter, Reddit (specific subs), and occasionally, IG. I have a tiktok acct but I rarely use it.

bbzealot

11 hours ago

My feed was mostly leftist but since musk took over I started seeing a lot of musk posts and far-right propaganda.

Twitter is far from being a neutral platform.

metadat

2 days ago

> What happens if we throw the BlueSky matrix into UMAP? Well, we can't, at least not directly. Even though UMAP technically accepts sparse matrices, our scale is just to big for my home server. Instead, we can settle for using some other technique to derive embeddings for every user, in a medium-sized dimension like 32, and then feed that into UMAP. Easy!

How, exactly, are the embeddings derived?

skwee357

a day ago

Signed up due to the hype. My feed is filled with "Welp, he stole my meme" / "Would you prefer Go or Rust?" / anime images.

Social media is dead

openrisk

2 days ago

> Building and querying the quadtree is intrinsically heirarchical

Glad to see I am not the only one having problems with hierarchy.

Interesting work at many levels (no, no pun): starting with the bluesky data availability, the processing and the visualization algorithms.

But its not quite clear where to place these visualizations in the data science spectrum. Conventional numerical graphics have (over time) developed a sophisticated grammar that allows fairly precise reasoning and inference. So they are heavily used in scientific publications, in the financial sector etc. for real information transmission (People might even reverse engineer a plot to recover data!).

With networks and graphs, besides a general feel for the topology / connectivity or clustering its kinda hard to pin down what is the transmitted information. Not clear if useful grammars covering such large graphs are yet to be invented or if this is the nature of the beast.

OmarShehata

2 days ago

I'd love to see a more NLP look at this data, Google trends style. What topics of discourse come up regularly, what spikes during certain time periods? Can you summarize what economists are discussing? Can you find people talking about the same things but are not in each other's networks?

declan_roberts

2 days ago

Bluesky to me still seems like a place completely dominated by software type (HN crowd). I know there are obvious exceptions there's no need for you to list them.

Threads has extreme normies, bluesky has the nerds, and twitter seems to have just the right mixture of both.

anamexis

2 days ago

I won't list out exceptions, but my Bluesky experience is not at all how you describe. Obviously it just depends on who you follow, but I don't think "dominated by software type" describes the Bluesky demographic as a whole, and it hasn't for some time.

seanvelasco

2 days ago

if you don't follow anyone, like me, the timeline is dominated by journalists, furries, and people who post nudity. i'm not saying these are bad, just an observation.

spankalee

2 days ago

There's starting to be lots of news and politics sources on there. The Swifties are moving over, there's a nice "BlackSky" movement, and there's a bit of sports popping up now too.

sundarurfriend

2 days ago

This thread (no pun intended) is the first I'm hearing that anyone uses Threads at all. To me, it seemed like after the initial week or so, there was only bots left on Threads, trying to hook people to the person's Instagram, or whatever other place they actually post content at.

theshrike79

20 hours ago

Threads isn't a place where I specifically go to follow someone. To me it's more like TikTok, but text.

I open it, get a few random engagement bait posts, maybe reply to some and then close it. No meaningful discussion will happen.

jsheard

2 days ago

Threads is the highest ranked "social" app on the Play Store right now, so a lot of real people must be using it despite appearances. Next down the list is TikTok, then Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook, X (below Bluesky!), and finally Reddit.

threeseed

2 days ago

Also at least here in Australia, Threads is ranked #3 of all free iOS apps.

And it's been in the top 3 ever since it launched a year ago. X is #69.

dgellow

2 days ago

I’m pretty sure app stores rankings are regional. You should mention your region and device type if you want others to compare

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

seanvelasco

2 days ago

> dominated by software type (HN crowd)

i find this very surprising. i don't see a lot of technical people out there, except for the bsky devs or devs who are building apps on top of atproto.

i've visited bluesky enough over the months, and to me, there's 3 types of users you will always see on the Discover or What's Hot timeline - journalists, furries, and people who post nudity.

tech people are still on twitter. i feel like the "exodus" of tech people following the election are just them making an account, and then returning to X after some time. it happened then during the private beta, and i feel like the same is happening now

joelg

2 days ago

one of my biggest subjective takeaways from spending hours scrolling around the map is that my impression that the userbase was dominated by software types was ~mostly wrong! feels like less than half, and the rest is huge swaths of normie, artist, furry, and media people

Karrot_Kream

2 days ago

I find Mastodon much more dominated by that crowd. Bluesky seems to have a decent mix of software nerds and artists, but yes there's definitely a "nerd" bias there that Threads doesn't have which is more aggressively "normie".

YetAnotherNick

2 days ago

Bluesky seems to be also very common among artists.

kps

2 days ago

The mid-October bump was artists discovering that posting on Twitter allows them to use posts for training AI.

https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-year.html

jsheard

2 days ago

That and the change to how blocking works on Twitter, which coincided with the AI policy change.

YetAnotherNick

2 days ago

If Bluesky is decentralized, can't twitter still train on Bluesky posts?

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

rsynnott

2 days ago

There’s arguably a moral difference between having your stuff stolen, and giving it up as part of the TOS. Most artists, you’d assume, would prefer the former.

ZacnyLos

2 days ago

Fortunately using Bridgy Fed we can connect BlueSky with Fediverse and IndieWeb.

https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/

rustyboy

2 days ago

can I get a ELI10 on this - If I host a mastodon server, would I need to run this software along side it then and then everyone on my server could see these other platforms posts and such?

extraduder_ire

2 days ago

Accounts on any supported platform can follow the bot on their platform, and their posts get bridged to all the other ones as a subdomain of the bridgy bot. e.g. a mastodon instance with a handle for every bridged account.

It changed to require opting in to bridging because many mastodon users got very mad about it.

nomdep

2 days ago

> “I filtered out accounts that follow more than 50k accounts, or follow less than 5 accounts and have less than 5 followers, leaving 7.7 million nodes.”

So not quite 13M but almost half of them, pretty cool nonetheless

parsimo2010

2 days ago

That looks really cool. I would also be interested to see examples of what commonality links the clusters of nodes- like are there clusters of people with the same hobby? Are there clusters of people speaking the same language, or living in the same city?

Another thought since Bluesky is a pretty inclusive place, are the LGBTQIA+ folks clustering into their own respective labels, or is everyone mixing together? Is any of this behavior similar or different to what we see on other social networks?

treyd

2 days ago

Those groups are more on Mastodon.

rsynnott

2 days ago

Nah, lots of LGBT+ people on Bluesky, too. Especially in the last week or so.

dylan604

2 days ago

"We can't make a map of all of Twitter, because the data isn't available and scraping it would be difficult and illegal."

What makes scraping illegal?

mapt

2 days ago

Post-2024, with Elon running the government as fiscal/regulatory czar, Twitter policy is evidently stronger than judicial interpretation of Constitutional rights.

dylan604

2 days ago

What happens to Twitter when Musk has to step down from his roles with Twitter/SpaceX/Tesla? Will sanity be allowed to fill the void? I really doubt anything at SpaceX/Tesla changes, but Twitter has the most wiggle room under someone else's leadership

jazzyjackson

2 days ago

Why would he step down? He doesn't seem the type to give up power just because something shiny is taking his attention. It's not like the incoming administration has signed a pledge to avoid conflicts of interest or anything

barbazoo

2 days ago

Perhaps even the threat of being sued might be enough to even consider doing this.

fragmede

2 days ago

The LinkedIn vs HiQ case makes it so that scraping data behind a login screen is not okay but publicly accessible pages are fair game.

dylan604

2 days ago

Was this the main reasoning for moving everything behind login more than data hoarding of the viewers?

fragmede

2 days ago

My personal belief is yes. Legal talks to management after the case concludes, tells them this is the new reality, and management tells product to make the change.

At no time is management obligated or even remotely motivated to tell end users the real reason for making the change, because users believing that the platform is just a greedy corporation is better than them realizing that the platform will just roll over if the police presents them with a subpoena to snitch on a user.

atemerev

2 days ago

Nothing. A precedent determining that scraping is legal is already established.

minimaxir

2 days ago

"legal" doesn't imply that Twitter/X won't send a C&D due to scraping that is expensive for a normal person to fight. Moreso if Twitter/X invokes the CFAA which has been common for scraping cases post HiQ vs. LinkedIn.

swat535

2 days ago

It looks like the Internet is now being compartmentalized based on one's political affiliation and groups.

X is turning out to be where Conservatives are going to be living, Bluesky, Reddit and Treads will be for Liberals. These platform don't outright ban opposing views but I think moderation policies and the users will shift these groups into one or the other.

I'm not sure if one can have a platform where respectful discourse can take place. The only site I've seen so far is HN and its due to its small community and the relentless effort by Dan.

The days of having everyone connected on the same platform is now dead, which might ironically usher a revival of the old, non-centralized web.

jazzyjackson

2 days ago

Promise of bluesky is that different front ends can have different moderation policies, and you have account portability should you be prevented from interacting with bsky.app (provided you were self hosting your pod. I don't actually know if you can export your data if you are "banned" from the main instance, I'll have to look into that)

asdf123wtf

a day ago

Honestly, I'd get the F off twitter, because it's now in control of a state actor.

Any barriers, legal or otherwise, that existed between twitter and the state should be assumed gone once the new administration transitions in, especially considering it's an administration that has promised to abuse state power to target it's opposition.

consumer451

a day ago

Bluesky hit 15M this morning, and it is also the top free app in the US App Store.

Does anyone know if it is the first time that a truly open source app has hit that top spot?

gravico

2 days ago

As a platform trying to connect aspiring founders with successful experts, is it worth creating a Bluesky grouping consisting of founders, ceo's and successful experts wanting to help aspiring founder. Goal is to gain traction for https://www.gravi.co

jazzyjackson

2 days ago

It would be interesting to see a community onboarded where everyone's username is a subdomain @name.gravi.co, so people know they're officially associated. There's lots of software folk there so it would probably be a good place to try.

gravico

2 days ago

Thanks, that's the plan where each expert has a dedicated subdomain (e.g., jazzyjackson.gravi.co), allowing them to showcase their profile and offer bookable consultancy slots for entrepreneurs seeking personalised advice, focusing on UK and Europe but tempted to target US which is a more mature and willing to explore and experiment market.

user

a day ago

[deleted]

OmarShehata

2 days ago

> can't make a map of all of twitter

no, but nothing can stop you & a bunch of people from exporting your tweet archive and visualizing that!

Retr0id

2 days ago

Hard to get 13M people to do it, and harder to stop some subset of those 13M people polluting your dataset with fake data.

jsight

2 days ago

Yep, and there will be self selection biases even among people who don't export fake data.

IAmGraydon

2 days ago

As a broader comment about Bluesky, it seems to me that it's heavily left-leaning, while Twitter/X is obviously leaning more and more to the right. Amazingly, it seems that the BlueSky/X dichotomy is another emergent manifestation of a fracturing and continually more polarized society. In my opinion, what we will ultimately end up with is two echo chambers, each catering to opposite ends of the spectrum, each radicalizing their respective userbase, and each further amplifying the divide in society today.

purplethinking

2 days ago

I have no interest in being in a left-leaning bubble. I get both sides on X, so far. People think X has been leaning more and more to the right, but in truth it's just not being censored (sorry, moderated) anymore, leading to more right-leaning content. Leftists can't really tolerate any difference of opinion so they move to other platforms, it's sad. But I think they'll be bored and eventually come back for some more drama.

MeetingsBrowser

2 days ago

What specific type of content was being censored before Elon took over that is being allowed now?

purplethinking

a day ago

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115286/documents/...

"“A new [Twitter Files] investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics — all in secret, without informing users,” Weiss wrote in a tweet Thursday."

It's a very enlightening document, I recommend a full read through

MeetingsBrowser

21 hours ago

The same kind of censorship seems to still be happening on Twitter.

Joe Biden laptop was blocked before, J.D. Vance dossier is blocked today.

purplethinking

5 hours ago

Was there anything controversial in that dossier? The Guardian claims it was blocked for leaking JD Vance social security number

jazzyjackson

2 days ago

In the particular little culture war concerning gender identity, pre Elon you would get banned for "deadnaming" and criticizing the health claims of gender clinics (aka transphobia)

It's flipped now, Elon has tweeted that using cis to describe not-trans people is a slur. Which seems like going the other way on "free speech absolutism" but whatever.

AlexeyBelov

4 hours ago

To your first point: I've seen accounts not being banned for years doing exactly that intentionally.

samatman

2 days ago

I seem to recall at some point that that old Twitter banned the account of the sitting President of the United States.

Later, Twitter banned a comedy account, the Babylon Bee. That pissed Elon off enough to buy it.

Both are back on Twitter now, both the comedy account, and the politician who will be President for a second term in January, having won both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

That's just two examples, but I would call them salient ones.

willcodeforfoo

2 days ago

Love this kind of post! I was surprised to see you really can drink from the firehose:

  brew install websocat
  websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos
...haven't tried to decode it, though.

ericvolp12

2 days ago

Give Jetstream a try instead, it's all JSON for you already:

websocat wss://jetstream2.us-west.bsky.network/subscribe

alpb

2 days ago

Twitter used to have a Firehose API, too. Over time they closed it, and made it only available to large users like Google Search with real-time indexing needs.

anigbrowl

2 days ago

Twitter had a really outstanding search and streaming API, but after Musk bought it they put it behind a $60k/year paywall. You can see a corresponding and abrupt falloff in academic network research papers, with newer ones that revolve around Twitter largely limited to cannibalizing old datasets.

With luck bsky keeps growing and researchers invest effort in studying a more open-by-design platform.

tomrod

2 days ago

I hadn't come across this before, looking forward to exploring a new tool. Thanks!

andreygrehov

2 days ago

Is the "scraper" still running? If so, how many users are there today?

joelg

2 days ago

there are a other few places tracking those stats too; I just counted 14487454 in my database :)

ZacnyLos

2 days ago

Mastodon seems to be the most versatile app of all of them. With Mastodon account you can follow people from BlueSky (if they use BridgyFed) and people from Threads (if they turn on fediverse sharing).

zdimension

2 days ago

Very nice. Modern GPUs really are fast as drawing points.

It's pretty similar to a project I've been working on for the past year, scraping Facebook instead of BlueSky (which is a bit harder since FB doesn't expose an API for that). I currently have about 140 million nodes on my scraped graph and a GUI with pathfinding and stuff like that.

It's a shame though because as nice as the thing is, I'm not sure I can publish it online, given it contains names of people. I don't think the GDPR would be very happy.

Which is why I'm a bit surprised you published this, aren't you afraid of people, uh, disliking the fact that they're present in your dataset?

jchw

2 days ago

AT proto is an open network. Everything you do is public by default. e.g. anyone else can just drink from the firehose.

zdimension

2 days ago

Yeah, but that doesn't solve the data privacy problem. Not that I care, I'd love to be able to do all sorts of stuff with scraped datasets.

jazzyjackson

2 days ago

One would hope the people on bluesky understand that they're posting publically to a centralized database. What data privacy problem are you concerned with?

zdimension

2 days ago

As I understand it, the moment you're processing someone's personally identifiable information, you're in the red zone, GDPR-wise. The users consented to publish their info on BlueSky, but not on OP's website.

I get the idea behind the GDPR and it's nice to protect consumers but I'm scared for hobby projects like this.

jchw

2 days ago

I think GDPR itself is a bit unclear here. Google Search still operates in Europe as far as I know even though it scrapes and indexes people's websites without explicit consent, and I suspect GDPR doesn't intend to make it illegal to do this. Could be wrong...

IANAL but at least in the U.S. I'm pretty sure publicly-available data is generally excluded from whatever protections do exist on PII. I'm not sure what, if anything, has been said about this in the EU.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

nightski

2 days ago

I created a new account and the feed was flooded with anti-X, anti-gop, anti-religion content. Don't get me wrong, it's not that any of those particularly bother me but it doesn't seem any different than X except without the people I follow.

ZacnyLos

2 days ago

On Mastodon there are no longer people dragged by the crowd, only those who have something interesting to say remain.

akomtu

2 days ago

It's going to look even more mesmerizing if you imagine how tweets propagate in this cloud. It would look somewhat alive.

kristofferR

2 days ago

How do you guys crosspost to X, Threads, Mastadon and Bluesky?

ZacnyLos

2 days ago

Using Mastodon you can follow people from Bluesky and Threads if they only turn on sharing or use Bridgy Fed option as well. Mastodon is the most versatile piece of software.

Applejinx

2 days ago

"Bot rings show up clearly exposed, for one."

I like the sound of that. Surely there's usefulness in that observation.

atemerev

2 days ago

Scraping data is not illegal. Everything a human can see, can be legally scraped.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

SubiculumCode

2 days ago

A lot of high profile commentators were waiting until after the election to move to Bluesky. They felt that they'd be giving up their influence if they left then, but now that the election is over they have time to rebuild onto a new platform. Bluesky seems quite nice. I was on Mastadon for a while, but after the initial burst of activity, its silo-like orientation led to stagnant servers. That is, it neither fully embraced the community-first services that Discord provides, nor the easy-discoverability of open-platform of Twitter/X/.

Also, this may seem silly, but I like the butterfly logo.

pohl

2 days ago

There's another narrative that I've heard about the recent flood of former-X users into Bluesky: a new Terms of Service document goes into effect in about 4 days, giving X ownership of your content with respect to its use in training LLMs.

jazzyjackson

2 days ago

I thought Grok has been using Twitter content this whole time, are they just getting around to updating their ToS?

I can see some amount of protest, people who are anti-AI/pro-copyright might find a better niche on bsky, but everything you post there is public so it's legal for anyone to scrape and train with

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

tcdent

2 days ago

[flagged]

tomrod

2 days ago

We've had enough of that, thank you.

What I've found is you'll find open discussion and real free speech versus whatever Musk tried to implement at Twitter.

degosuke

2 days ago

I'm not up to speed. Are there currently any instances where free speech was limited on x/twitter? Genuinely curious

tomrod

21 hours ago

Several. Consider ElonJet as a silly but representative example of where the limits of free speech are considered for the far right.

Hate speech and harassment is totally fine, but not critique.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet

dylan604

2 days ago

Any of the people/journalists that were reporting on the inner workings of Twitter that Musk didn't like so he shut it down would be something that jumps to mind.

philodelta

2 days ago

Musk very clearly actively sticks his fingers in the pie to steer narratives. Easy example, one of his children came out as trans (to Elon's apparent dismay), and now "cisgender" is flagged as a slur/hate-speech. There is other, anecdotal evidence that certain posters (ridiculously, Musk included) have their posts elevated above baseline visibility, but I don't have any statistics to back that up. Other flavorful unsolicited changes to the platform, such as changing blocking to allow blocked people to still see your posts, seem again like self-serving dictates from the top. Perhaps generally not censorship, but heavily biased moderation very clearly steered by the agenda of a single man.

TinkersW

2 days ago

[flagged]

Karrot_Kream

2 days ago

Huge social media sites are not going to be legible without some sort of preference function from the individual. Whether that's follows, hashtags/keywords, or engagement-oriented algorithms, that's the way. If you're not the kind of person who enjoys socializing In The Large that's fine. That's what topical sites (like Reddit, HN) or group chats are for.

krapp

2 days ago

People are still making lame jokes about how "confusing" the LGBT acronym is? Get some new material.

andreygrehov

2 days ago

The visualization looks absolutely fantastic. Great work. Would love to dive deeper into the tech behind it.

I'll just share some irony. They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X/Twitter.

jamwil

2 days ago

Hate speech is derogatory or harmful speech targeted at a marginalized community. Hating a company or product is not the same thing.

andreygrehov

2 days ago

I just clicked "Discover" to see popular posts.

https://bsky.app/profile/lepapillonblue.bsky.social/post/3la...

https://bsky.app/profile/sethabramson.bsky.social/post/3larj...

https://bsky.app/profile/browneyedsusan.bsky.social/post/3la...

minimaxir

2 days ago

None of that is remotely close to hate speech. President Trump is not a marginalized community.

andreygrehov

2 days ago

Hate speech or not, there is nothing pleasant about it.

The irony is that the 'holier-than-thou' crowd, who are against hate and for love all over the world, overwhelmingly post negative political comments and are rooting for X/Twitter to collapse.

This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.

rsynnott

2 days ago

> This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.

What, that people are mean about a very special website sometimes? Seems a rather niche problem, tbh.

There is nothing inherently wrong with people being negative. If you had a social network where people could only be positive about things… now, that would be unhealthy.

barbazoo

2 days ago

It was about "hate speech" though, not "unpleasant speech", then you'd be right.

Stop thinking in us/them, everybody hates someone or something and that's fine. That's not what hate speech is I think. Take one example from the Canadian govmnt:

> The bill defines “hate speech” as the content of a communication that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.

> These grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered.

https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/chshc-lcdch/index.h...

That's just one "official" definition of many obviously.

andreygrehov

2 days ago

Sure, there are clear differences between hate speech and unpleasant speech. I can't disagree on the definition. But I’m seeing a lot of hateful anti-Trump posts on BlueSky, and on X/Twitter, there’s plenty of pro-Trump content. These two groups have polarized views, so they naturally clash.

What I find ironic is that BlueSky has many openly anti-Trump posts, while X/Twitter tends to have a significant amount of pro-Trump content. Because many minority and marginalized groups lean anti-Trump, again, these opposing viewpoints naturally clash, often leading to Twitter being labeled as a "hate speech platform". Yet on BlueSky, there’s no problem with people openly criticizing or spreading negativity about pro-Trump people. Since Trump supporters don’t typically fall into minority categories, it seems BlueSky users have the "privilege" to freely bash the Twitter crowd without facing the same scrutiny. Essentially, BlueSky is shielded from the hate speech label despite fostering a different kind of polarized environment.

jazzyjackson

2 days ago

Good news is you can create your own labeling service that people can subscribe and report posts to and you can have a feed completely devoid of hate speech against the government.

Also, if you're in a group of people that trumps policies target (immigrants with undocumented family members, women and trans people who want bodily autonomy, Arabs with family in Palestine) then all that pro-trump positivity starts to feel pretty hateful too, just in case you haven't looked at it from that angle.

jrflowers

2 days ago

It isn’t ironic to dislike intolerant people or to voice it. It is an individual’s prerogative to imagine that tolerance must be completely uniform, but that doesn’t reflect the reality of groups or systems made up of actual humans.

Here is a relevant article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

bastardoperator

2 days ago

Social networks require drama in order to stay relevant, this is baked in and by design. Capitalist love this feature. Also you'll never get 100's of millions of people to agree on anything.

Is it really fare to compare a political cartoon to the garbage twitter is allowing? I might still visit twitter if it wasn't so out of control.

rsynnott

2 days ago

… So, wait, two political cartoons (the first one’s been on the go for years; it’s pretty much a classic at this point) and a cat? Like, unless you’re going to claim that ol’ minihands is a marginalised group of one, very hard to read any of these as hate speech. Actually, even if one _was_ to accept that obviously silly premise, still probably not. Maybe the cat, at a serious push.

jkestner

2 days ago

Corporations are people, my friend. This is being tested again with anti-boycott laws and lawsuits.

throw7

2 days ago

So derogatory or harmful speech toward white people is perfectly fine.

jacoblambda

2 days ago

That's a current wave going through. There's a bit of discourse going on where some users were rage baiting by constantly posting twitter screenshots over to bluesky and people who left bluesky are pushing back about how they don't want to see that content.

That discourse comes in waves each time a major migration happens from twitter to bluesky but it settles down fairly soon after each time. Give it a few days and people will have moved on to the new topic of the day.

Also it's worth noting that the "Discover" feed is trained specifically per person so while the defaults aren't great, if you use the "show more like this" and "show less like this" options on posts (under the triple dot) then pretty quickly it tunes in towards content you care about vs content you don't.

andreygrehov

2 days ago

That's a reasonable explanation. Thanks.

> Also it's worth noting that the "Discover" feed is trained specifically per person so while the defaults aren't great, if you use the "show more like this" and "show less like this" options on posts (under the triple dot) then pretty quickly it tunes in towards content you care about vs content you don't.

This is the first time I clicked "Discover". I haven't logged into BlueSky for almost two years.

rsynnott

2 days ago

For the avoidance of doubt, saying you hate a website is not hate speech. That is not what hate speech means.

yen223

2 days ago

> They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech.

I've recently created a brand new account on X for a project. Looking at what was being recommended to the brand-new account with no interactions or likes or anything, they are not wrong.

andreygrehov

2 days ago

Can you share some examples?

yen223

2 days ago

Within the first 15 recommended posts or so there was

- a post about how Canada is overrun by Indians

- a post about how Melbourne is overrun by n-worders (they replaced the Gs with £s)

- a post about how a trans person is ugly

- 2 "nudes in bio" bot posts. This was not hate speech, and arguably the most positive posts I got.

This is not counting the Elon posts and the Trump posts, which were the first and second thing that got recommended. Nor the posts from Elon Musk imitators, who I assume are trying to take advantage of the fact that Elon Musk gets special treatment from the algorithm.

When you create a new account, X asks you to follow an account to determine what your interests are. I picked NASA. I did not get recommended a single space photo.

beardicus

2 days ago

Seems weird to find irony there, unless you think people and websites are the same thing.

YetAnotherNick

2 days ago

While I don't think it's technically hate speech, but yeah bluesky is either just unanimous negativity or positivity for different things, and it feels like groupthink. There is no middle ground.

minimaxir

2 days ago

Almost all social networks have been ideologically polarized since 2016. It's not new or specific to Bluesky.

The only reason Hacker News avoided that fate is due to downvote/flag mechanisms.

bigstrat2003

2 days ago

> The only reason Hacker News avoided that fate

It hasn't avoided that fate. If you doubt me, go into a thread about US politics and praise Donald Trump and watch as your comments get not just downvoted, but flagged so that they are hidden. This will happen no matter how good your arguments are.

Make no mistake, this site is ideologically polarized just like all the others. The only saving grace is that the vast majority of topics are about tech, not politics, so the polarization is usually hidden.

YetAnotherNick

2 days ago

Even in tech, there are various repeated themes you can see here, which are much more prevalent than say general tech spheres like the hate against AI, VCs, MongoDB or the love for Rust, privacy, open source, postgres etc.