The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance. I have a strong interest in interacting with cybersecurity professionals, so infosec.exchange was perfect for me, either browsing subscribed or local posts. Browsing all is something I do only when I'm bored, because many posts are not what I'd like to see. You can always migrate your account if you want.

https://instances.social/

That being said, BlueSky is simpler and easier because there's no real federation yet, and even if they have a "Discovery" algorithm, you get many options to control what you want to see. It's feels great, like Twitter before their 2012(ish?) IPO.

> Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.

I think what you're saying here is not that politics are terrible on microblogging platforms, but that microblogging platforms are terrible, which is a pretty valid sentiment.

I'm not sure Bluesky filters out angry content at all, as this is what I see when I don't follow anyone or have any followers [0]. I wish there was way more filtering than what I currently see as it makes me not want to even interact with Bluesky if that's what I see as a new user.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/XHmidRt

> My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable.

The activation energy of moving ones home is very different from moving a social profile. I also find in some old, dead communities I was a part of, the most toxic people can't pull themselves away and stick around

That just sounds like Mastodon users, many who are academics, are more to the left than you are, and you are cleverly framing their culture as more "divisive", "performative", and/or "tribal" compared to your own arguments which arguably are also just as tribal and performative.

I agree largely with what you wrote but have a small disagreement. I don't actually think the character count has that big of an effect. I've seen plenty of self-righteous posts on places like here (HN) and the LessWrong forums that just use more words to do the same thing.

I think the kind of person that's energized to comment online generally feels more strongly about the issue than most lurkers. This means that online conversations are dominated by the most passionate, most invested, and often least interested in impartiality. This post [1] comes to mind.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

> My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

It's certainly a better name, if nothing else. Names like Mastodon, Diaspora, are just terrible. One sounds lika a dinosaur, the other like an unpleasant condition of the large intestine (yes I know what diaspora means).

They recently shipped some changes to Discover to make Show Less and Show More actually work. If I understood right[0], they only collected data from them until that point.

The result isn't perfect, but I do notice it's much more in line with what I want in a timeline.

[0] I should save more links! The devs talk openly about what they're working on and the changes that end up in the app and protocol, so I have the knowledge that something changed, but not always a link to the source of that knowledge since it was just another post in the timeline.

In my experience the people who left first were the funny and interesting ones. I left a while later because I was bored.

Turns out HN is my Colorado.

I have bluesky and mastodon accounts and I’m always surprised at how people extreme people call them. I have them just as my music/photography accounts. So the people I add are doing the same stuff. My feed is just as extreme as Flickr aka zero extremeness. Just pictures of bridges and music and normal thoughts.

Is there any structural reason that will prevent Bluesky becoming like Twitter in the future?

> To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read)

I guess you'd be a year early but I mean, the outwardly fascist candidate just won the US presidency so I'm not sure what your point is?

> My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

For Mastodon, it's not just political, it's cultural

It's too out there for most people (as in, any random popular public instance you go to)

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> It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.

Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.

It'll be interesting if Twitter/X does drift rightward amongst contributors and still keeps its For You feed oriented toward "engagement" and view counts, whether or not it will just end up leading to infighting between far right and moderate right views.

It's still an empty place. I just moved over, and I could find NO ONE with my interests (a common hobby). There are / were thousands of people in this group on twitter. I doubt it's even one percent of even what's left on X.

> It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture

My belief is that there's some very real reasons for that!

First, incendiary posts seem to get boosted by the algorithm. It's good for engagement, which keeps people online and hooked, which feeds more ads, and is good for the business. Elon and his CEO of the company know this.

Second, the more you look at the replies, the more you find people who are weirdly into Elon Musk. They'll bring him up even in a thread where he's not mentioned and the topic isn't about him. "Thank god Elon saved free speech!" or something rather. Just profoundly weird stuff that I can't help but feel is designed to stroke his ego. Again, I believe the algorithm is intentionally boosting these things. It also serves to create a cult of personality. He's not just the site owner, but he's its "savior".

Lastly, the company is clearly in trouble financially. Revenue is down substantially by all accounts, and there's a very high valuation to live up to. They want to get people to pay money, look at ads, and keep them coming back again and again for more. Being community-first and focused on people having the kind of good time they want in their communities just doesn't align with those very difficult business constraints.

Duocultures, not monoculture.

Every shard speaks Common Tongue, the inoffensive moderate conversation that is acceptable everywhere.

Each shard also has its own local flavor, with local axioms and heresies.

Twitter is Elon’s megaphone. His tweets are mega boosted.

And the ads. Sooooo many scammy ads.

Bluesky is the blue version of Gab. You'll find that it's an ideological echo chamber and gets uninteresting fast.

The difference is that this version of Twitter isn't censoring and banning people for wrongthink. The people leaving are self selecting out of the idea gene pool, as opposed to being forced out.

Naval wrote it well, "Rigid ideologues move but the persuadable center does not. So they just move into irrelevance."

Is there going to be a plan for this blatant PR campaign and site manipulation? Is this not against HN's terms?

Sounds like they are confusing Merkle blocks with block chain.

Bluesky released a statement today about data use [0] - saying they will not use your data for "Generative AI" (surely in response to X's recent change to say they will).

As you imply, this is a bit meaningless for people who don't want their posts used for AI, because anyone can grab all data pretty easily (at least for now).

But, AI aside, this is so much better for a lively ecosystem - 3rd party apps, bots (the fun and useful kind), research, etc. A lots of things simply died when Musk decided effectively end the API program [1].

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3layuzbti6s2x

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-near... == https://archive.ph/ikPOk

Saying bluesky has won seems a bit pre-emptive, especially as its less than 2% the size of threads.

I know a lot of artists who hate the idea of their work being used to train generative models, and I can’t blame them tbh. That being said, most of them know that they can’t prevent that from happening unless they want to stop posting their work anywhere public.

HOWEVER: there’s a big difference between posting your work publicly and having someone come along and use it to train their models against your wishes, and a platform changing its terms to say “And you’re giving us permission to use this to train our models”. They’re saying “no, you don’t have my permission to use my work and you’ll have to go against my wishes to use it this way”. It’s not a big difference in terms of outcome, but I think the principle of the thing is important to a lot of artists.

The average user (non-tech oriented) doesn't really think about or care that much about openness. This is the kind of user who posts disclaimers on their Facebook wall saying that Facebook is not allowed to use their content.

> until the average user is completely aware of things like this.

The average user doesn’t care.

It takes a bit for content to go viral. Bluesky was mostly irrelevant until just over a week ago.

Since then I've seen plenty of Bluesky embeds in articles where there wouild have been Twitter/X embeds.

US soccer journalists seem to have migrated to bluesky en masse, and I just saw a very active thread, with a bunch of names that I recognized, cross posted to reddit.

That is definitely a quantum jump beyond a bunch of geeks posting about rust or whatever.

Saw one for a sports journalist on a subreddit. I think that's a clear sign of it making it, given how twitter and reddit are joined at the hip

They make it to the HN front page every so often https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bsky.app

Another data point. When Musk bought twitter and started wrecking it, several people I followed created an account on blue sky but most did not use it that much. This seems to have changed over the past week (i.e. after the US election). Dozens of users have moved, pro-Ukraine people in particular. Some double post. As certain content creators move, others do the same, amplifying the trend. It's interesting to see network effects at play.

This was true for my n=1 as well, until recently.

Search Reddit for "bluesky" and you will find a ton from the last month. Reddit does OCR on screenshots, so that is included.

Also, one of my highest upvoted comments on this site happens to be one. [0]

And finally, quite a few Bluesky content links have been submitted here recently [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42136408

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bsky.app

People do that when feel it's socially acceptable to do so. It feels like it could be a matter of time. A million people joined in a 24 hour period yesterday.

I saw my first local news story sourced to someone posting about something he photographed in the street to bluesky yesterday.

Thats a factor of time given how new it is - and likely inevitable.

I see a few in some Telegram chats that I'm in

The first post when I opened it after reading yours:

>The same people who’ve spent the last several years decrying “unqualified DEI hires” are now shoehorning through Cabinet nominations who can’t even pass a basic background test.

This is the opposite of what I want in any app I open. It's time we stop chasing engagement for sites and start filtering for content. I want sites that don't promise to be the place to do everything for everyone but one's which I can judge on their censorship to know if I want to join.

It was also a magical place that gave the CIA carte Blanche to monitor Americans and spread propaganda, and was happy to censor in behalf of the federal government. that’s my beef with the folksy view of old Twitter

> I loved Twitter. It was this magic place where I could connect with both friends and legends in my field (programmers). That’s not what it is anymore and it’s impossible to ignore how political it’s become.

It is a program. What has become political is society. Bluesky and Twitter are just the two sides of the fracture manifesting as online discussion spaces. Bluesky users are just as polarized as Twitter users, but perhaps more in line with what you’re comfortable with reading.

Bluesky is overwhelmingly the same hyper-political cult spam, just painted blue. To say it isn't political is just blatantly ignorant.

I can handle other view points, what I won't put up with is disinformation, straight up lies, and racism/sexism. They immediately go in the bin. Unfortunately that's simply not possible in the firehose feed on X since the trash is promoted to the top and I would guess that 90% of blue checks are bots either from American PACs or Russian/CCP/Iran/N. Korea.

Not too long ago I would have agreed with you. That was, for a long time a decent way to enjoy Twitter, even when people were already long claiming it was an unpleasant place.

But for the current situation you are just misrepresenting the problem.

Aggressively maintaining a decent follow list no longer helps.

And "other viewpoints" are not the problem. Every somewhat popular tweet has automated replies full of porn bots and clearly automated answers that say basically nothing or just try to provoke or advertise.

"Following" has become infuriatingly useless too because it algorithmically sorts in nonsensical ways.

The result: many tweets I would have liked to see get completely buried while others get shown to me over and over as I visit the site.

I'm so incredibly tired of algorithmic timelines.

It used to be a good tool on interesting updates on hobbies I enjoy. Now it just wants to waste my time, and I'm just not interested in screaming matches about daily politics.

That includes echo chambers too so it is not about differing opinions even, I don't need people from "my side" telling me again and again what the "enemy" is doing wrong and how I am supposed get angry at that.

I think the fundamental issue is running a social network as a for-profit business. Every business model people have tried so far has ruined the platform for the people who originally found it valuable.

Online services do scale, which is the root of the problem. It's more profitable to focus on a large number users who get a little value from the platform than on those who find it particularly valuable. No matter whether your revenue comes from ads or subscription fees, you want more users, more impressions, and more activity. Which turns your focus away from whatever the early adopters did when there was only a little activity.

Influencers are a convenient red flag. Once they find a platform attractive, it's probably no longer good for activities not centered around them.

> The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. ... Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.

Every problem you mentioned is solved by Mastodon. Independent instances can and should stay relatively small to allow good and independent moderation, while the whole network can grow a lot without being homogeneous.

I believe Threads active users are artificially conflated with Instagram and Facebook. In all my circles, I don't know anyone who uses Threads

The 15 million figure is several hours out of date, it's currently over 17m. (https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats)

9.4m active this month (and counting), according to https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

Threads artificially juicing their numbers with Instagram integration. I can't remember what it was but recently when posting to Instagram it offered me an option to enable all my posts to automatically cross-post to Threads, very possibly defaulted to "on" too.

> Bluesky has now 15 million total users (how many active?)

That is a very good question. One of the Bluesky developers gave the figure at around 2.25M DAUs [0]

This chart shows that they now have 3.74M DAUs and have 9.3M MAUs [1]

Mastodon does not give their DAUs, but their MAUs are down to less than 1M users. [2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953421

[1] https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

[2] https://joinmastodon.org/servers

It's more about the vision and momentum

Threads is not trying to be a Twitter replacement and is another brand in the Zuck conglomerate

What makes Bluesky different to me is ATProto and the possibilities for a new social media fabric, that they learned from some difficulties with ActivityPub to build something better

https://atproto.com

I literally forget Threads exists for months at a time.

Nobody I know uses it, or has even acknowledged its existence. I see people on other social media talking about their Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and directing people there, but I have never seen anyone do it for Threads. I have never seen anyone share a link to Threads, I don't even remember what its domain name is. I have never seen Threads included in those little sets of social media icon links that all brand websites have.

I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe Threads has actual users who care about it and aren't just clueless Facebook/Instagram users who were not-so-subtly encouraged to also use Threads by those apps.

You forgot to list one:

X/Twitter has over 500 million monthly active users.

X is at 600 million MAU, for reference.

Edit: Thanks @JumpCrisscross.

Yeah but what made Twitter twitter wasn't really the usercount, it was the mix of established voices and complete randos mixing. If the journalists and economists and politicians go to Bluesky, it will win. I definitely don't think that's a given but it seems much more plausible now than it did a few months ago.

Everyone who has an Instagram account is technically a Threads user as far as I can tell.

Threads is closer to 300m now.

According to Mosseri it is now adding 1m new users a day.

Threads is big in the same way that Facebook is big. No juice, as they say.

is that Threads, or is that Instagram and Threads? Kind of a cheat without calling that out

Many of these alternatives are piggybacking off the parent site. Google at pone point made anyone with a Gmail account a default user for its own social network.

> That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone.

When you want to reach people you go to where the people are. You fish where the fish is. It is that simple. People did not join twitter because the police was posting there, the police post on twitter because that is where they can reach the people.

One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above?

I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

The ironic bit is that conceptually Bluesky is RSS with WebSub <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub>

- PDS are websites with an RSS feeds, each a publisher

- Relays are WebSub hubs aggregating many sources into a central host

- App views, labelers, Feed Generators, whatever are subscribers being alerted when a new entry is received, making their internal sauce. They're also hubs for pushing content to any step that comes after

- PDS are at the end, subscribers of labelers, app views and feed generators. They make their internal sauce to have a nice social-oriented UI.

A properly decentralized, boring-tech Bluesky can take this form. Steps are additive, not all of them are needed

1. A single, simple server that can receive and emit RSS feeds. Emission of RSS feeds must be able to include content from received entries. Directly subscribe to the people you want to follow, you're done. Social readers <https://indieweb.org/social_reader> do something like that with indieweb formats.

2. A network of WebSub hubs to more efficiently get and distribute everyone's content. superfeedr.com is one of them, https://switchboard.p3k.io/ is another one, but we need many more. Also RSS feeds need to have a server-side that sends a notification to the hub when something is published. Having hubs make searching and having a general view easier. In fact we already have something like that, it's called Planets <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)>

3. Any filtering can happen on top. "People with blue hair", "Posts without tuna in them", any algorithm is anyone's to build

All the layers already exist, but like any social endeavour it's all about the network effect. Having a simple thing to install where you can post, follow and search will make wonders

For those who find Mastodon's default client a little bloated, please check out https://phanpy.social. It is one of the most thoughtful PWAs and websites I have ever used, and made Mastodon a daily for me now. It's feels like Threads but with deeper functionality.

It can just talk to your Mastodon server, which as the article notes is very easy to set up on Coolify/Digital Ocean, etc

It will never make sense cause Claude Shannon already told us why.

When everyone Broadcasts, info explodes, no one hears anything. And as a reaction, they shout louder and louder or increase the number of times they repeat their message. This compound the absurdity of giving everyone Broadcast capability even further.

When you use the word commons you dont even realize the commons never had Broadcast (1 to All messaging) for Free.

Technically we can give everyone a radio transmitter that support Broadcasting. But no one allows that anywhere on the planet ever since Claude Shannons Theory of Information came out. Because it clearly shows us everyone can not broadcast simultaneously.

Even the human body with more cells and more signalling going on than the entire dumb internet does not give every cell broadcast capability.

> These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

The problem is that it's very hard to justify spending money to accomplish this when Twitter/X/Bluesky/Threads/etc. is offering the service for free.

I think those sorts of publishers should have a script that posts notifications to all sort of places automatically.

RSS in the large is a nightmare. My agent YOShInOn lives on the wrong side of an ADSL connection and has all its RSS fetching done by

https://superfeedr.com/

which I like operationally. I'm following about 110 RSS feeds which cost 10 cents/month each. I like having a simple AWS Lambda that puts the notifications in SQS and then fetching them at my convenience later. It's a steal for a feed from MDPI that has 1000+ papers a day or arXiv or The Guardian but not affordable to follow 2000 independent blogs which I would like to do. The poll and poll and poll some more and poll again and maybe poll too fast and waste resources and other times poll too slow and not only get content late but miss it entirely situation is just not cool. I could write an RSS poller but it would be slowing down my internet connection or adding to my cloud bills and would need maintenance.

Your local TV channels and newspapers aren’t commons either; they’re as privately owned as Twitter or Bluesky. Yet local governments make good use of them too, and have for many decades.

Things do not need to be publicly owned or distributed to be useful to society.

It's federation that is the problem. Federation leads to fragmentation, which ultimately is a headwind to adoption. IMHO you need a single network that allows people to choose the "channels" that you can view/join and then people that join that channel start hosting and replicating the content. Also, great filtering controls are critical to the success of such a platform.

Not sure if there is really anything attempting to implement essentially Twitter with this model or not? I would be interested though if someone has run across or is working on a system like that.

You can get an RSS feed for any user on Bluesky

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 | https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds

My opinion is that their ATProto is better than ActivityPub b/c account migration and global search among other things

The fediverse very much is "the commons", at least it's as close as you can hope to get online.

Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should be able to make their own instance that they can control and plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.

> that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.

Having seen this process of creation sustaining & decaying happen again and again, I totally get why you would feel this.

And I forgive you for applying the thinning broadly like this, casting insidious doubt widely like this.

But that's not what Bluesky is doing. Some links; first their o.g. app-lead (is that still right?),

> The network should outlast the company. Imagine if the Web died when Netscape or Yahoo did! It's strange to even think that. The same should apply to social networks.

https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lau2bgyolc2g

(Or see 18 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012757)

And ((new) board member) Mike Masnick & (founder) Jay Graber on protocols not platforms, 9 months ago (pre Mike on the board),

https://bsky.app/profile/mmasnick.bsky.social/post/3kjtmw4m6...

Steve Klabnik has a post, How Bluesky Works, that talks about what Bluesky is. Yes, right now a variety of the layers of At Protocol are run by BlueSky alone. But the data can retain its integrity even if they fail, the network & data is by design open & transparent to all & transferable, and it's all based on protocols. https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work

This hypothesis that everyone else has been rug pulled & so BlueSky will too defies a ton of very hard careful work that Jay began when she very specifically worked to make sure BlueSky could be independent, to make it based on protocols.

What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess?

It was my understanding that Mastadon has _far less_ javascript than Twitter, not more.

The UI for mastadon always seemed far cleaner, more performant, and importantly - capable of actually loading, compared to twitter

Essentially, anytime something is shared from twitter I simply ignore it, because it may take a good 40 minutes to figure out the workaround to view it, compared to Mastadon which 'just works'.

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

both bluesky and mastodon also emit RSS feeds

Well, Mastodon is not a private business. Government agencies could post on their own instances.

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

To be fair, that is what ActivityPub is - less simple syndication.

What is the commons then? I think it's the internet at large, email, RSS, etc.

I thought you could subscribe to an RSS feed for basically anyone on mastodon?

folks should just go to wholly owned websites like back in the day. on the other hand most major websites are absolutely unreadable with the ads/autoplay videos.

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/)

Mastodon is not a bloated sloppy mess. Have you even used it? I use it every day and it's enjoyable. It felt like 2010s Twitter. It both makes me feel good and is also educational (because I have chosen to follow accounts that provide educational value, not just empty rhetoric).

I agree but I fear it would be used as an excuse to no longer interact with the public and turn off all reply comments by default.

no. i like twitter and think this is good.

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Newspapers filled this role once, and they're privately owned. You have two choices: privately owned or government run. I'll take the private ownership route. Better than prior, now users can openly write back outside of "letters to the editor" and without paying money. People used to complain about Twitter censorship, now they complain about its ownership. One is about free expression. The other is about political tribalism.

It's definitely something that's happened community by community. A lot of space news I care about is still just on Twitter but urbanism stuff has mostly moved to Bluesky, for instance.

The real issue is that none of these alternatives (Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky) offer anything other than "we're not Twitter".

Digg to Reddit was a unique case, because Digg very specifically fucked up their site, badly, with the V4 update. Reddit was in a great spot to pick up users from Digg because of not only having a similar overarching purpose as a link aggregator, but additional features like subreddits which enabled more smaller and casual link sharing and comment sections. It was a clear upgrade from Digg V4. I do think that Reddit would have eventually overtaken Digg anyway, and V4 only sped up the process.

Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now. If you're on there to look at funny memes, cat pictures, celebrity news and pornography -- which encapsulates about 98% of Twitter use cases -- it still functions much better than the alternatives. The migrations are happening for meta reasons, either political or ToS-related (specifically, X claiming they can use images you post for AI training). This isn't a recipe for long-term success, it's a precursor for people making bunch of noise for a month and then heading back to Twitter.

As someone who doesn't really participate in these large social networks -- even modern HN is way too mainstream for me honestly -- I do think it's a good thing people get off them, though. Smaller communities are a good thing. Shouting your loudest, hottest political takes on Twitter so you can pat yourself on the back for 10k likes is a fast track to mental health issues.

Social networks' usefulness is proportional to the size of the network so they are naturally winner takes all markets.

> a Twitter clone

Funny you mentioned it, but the original Twitter was never cloned. It's a messenger program status aggregator.

People used to have GTalk/MSN status bar set to various short, funny and insightful texts and Twitter was the place to have them collected.

Anything web platform has never been a new idea. Only evolutions from web technologies becoming more advanced.

Facebook is MySpace, Tumblr is live journal, reddit are forums and Discord is Skype.

It's all been done. Why create the new when you could recreate the old?

But yes; I to crave something new.

Can you think of anything new?

And Twitter is just a spiritual clone of .plan

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>If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.

Good! Higher barrier to entry is exactly why Neocities, Mastodon and [redacted] are so much higher quality than the NPC internet. We need a couple hurdles to keep out the low effort posters.

> Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists.

by the good grace of Meta Inc. and nothing else. Your account can get purged because:

- they decide to start purging old content

- they comply with a censorship order from the country you live in (or a country you don't live in)

- the CEO decides they don't like you (though that's really only a current issue on Twitter)

> Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism.

Decentralization is the bedrock of all the _most_ pragmatic internet technologies (DNS, HTTP, Email), centralization is a more recent phenomenon driven by a dozen or so very large companies.

I like and use matrix (I'm indeed one of those ideological types), but even their nice webapp is janky in comparison to discord, with fewer features on paper (E2EE is huge, but the median discord user doesn't care). I use it in spite of the jank.

With bluesky on the other hand, there really isn't much jank, certainly not relative to twitter (except right now when it feels like the servers are struggling to scale fast enough...). The average bluesky user doesn't seem to be ideologically motivated (or if they are, their ideology is "I don't like elon musk"). They mostly use bluesky because it works for them, regardless of implementation details.

> I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn.

But people still care about it and that minority can become expensive to fight off. We see this as we speak with games. The (IMO, frivilous) minorities got to a point last week where 2 Californians are trying to sue a 10 year old game for shutting down in 2023 (before this law they are suing under was made).

It'll probably take a few thousand to fight it off, so those two plantiffs are having the effect of maybe 100 gamers in terms of cost. For what I see as a frivilous lawsuit. Imagine one with teeth.

Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need decentralization are people who are being censored but that's very few people. So everyone incurs extra complexity to benefit a small minority.

I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it

This is caused by you writing custom software, not by decentralization. If you were running some off-the-shelf software like WordPress it would probably be updated to keep pace with the world so you wouldn't have to do much.

You ever go through the Reddit blackout of 2015 or the API scandal of 2022? It's a common phenomenon. You move to sites and the people who are the most engaged will be talking about the reason they moved and their dissatisfaction.

It'll calm down in a month. Maybe. The current atmosphere isn't going away in a month like the API protests.

It's a hot topic now because of the presidential election?

Because, politically speaking, things are very far from normal right now.

And it doesn't penalize links off the site.

If you want to run your own social platform, you can do so by running your own Mastodon instance. If you want to do the same with Bluesky, you simply can't at the moment. You'll either need to rely on other parts of the system that you don't control, or you'll need to control the whole system at great expense.

> When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison.

That's the point, though. You don't need (nor, I imagine, would most people want) to mirror the entire network. If not needing to mirror the entire network makes self hosting simpler, then that is an advantage for the people interested in self hosting.

personally do not understand the same, but for a completely another reason.

microblogging, i.e. twitter, succeeded in the first place because people just want to post, and not worry about taking care of technical things.

in the demographics that often forget the password they once set, expecting "one-time setup" and "complete control" when they do not change default settings for most things is very out of touch with reality.

we are still living in the internet that for the most part wants someone else to take care of these things for them. but besides the ownership, there is nothing that is also setting bluesky aside for a regular folk. we ought to do better before celebrating any level of success.

EU should simply buy it.

that's precisely what it is

Just saw a YouTube video from legaleagle, a lawyer and in his videos he usually cites Twitter posts but the recent ones have bluesky posts which made me think bluesky has gone mainstream so I spun up a VM and hosted my PDS for me and a few friends

I like the feeling and style of the app, it's very comfortable coming from Twitter

It came as a bit of surprise this morning when an radio interview with a politician concluded with mentioning her Bluesky account, not Twitter or Facebook.

Still I feel like Facebook/Instagram, and certainly X/Twitter has done a lot of damage, which has cause many of us to be sceptical about ever opening another social media account.

The federation is working for real now. People are using it

That's exactly what Threads seemed like when I dipped in, so many complaints about non-Meta tech companies.

Bluesky has pluggable moderation and users can subscribe to multiple labellers. What they offer with ATProto is competition in moderation, which is not something we've had in a social media app before

https://github.com/bluesky-social/ozone/

Lots of other feeds, though. Which I think is a cool feature. I follow a feed for theme I'm interested in, which is nicer than following people that post about lots of various things, not all which I'm interested in.

Threads seems unusable unless they change the algorithm. It defaults to For You and For You is 50% Instagram-style engagement bait, 50% people you've never heard of complaining about things you've never heard of, and 0% people you're actually following.

If they fix that it could indeed be quite good, but it still feels too much like "broadcasting" vs "conversation", and I'm personally not ready to be popular like that.

Bluesky does have a little toxic positivity but it's much better, and it's possible to chat with friends on it. (When I try enabling the algorithm features they still won't stop showing me gay porn though.)

Threads is unusable. I'm not sure what I expected, but of course it's just the slop-pushing, engagement-farmed, censorship-heavy auto-moderated Instagram algorithm but in a format made to look like Twitter.

The only posts I see on there that look like they're made by humans are jilted twitter refugees trying to convince each other they're having fun by sharing articles about how X is dead. Meanwhile on X nobody has thought about Threads since the day it launched.

I’m tired of threads. In the beginning it was nice but now it just gives me engagement fatigue. So much shallow content provoking replies and adding nothing to your life. It actually makes me feel worse.

And now they will be adding ads. That’s it. I’m out.

For the longest time, I didn't get the appeal of Twitter. I started using it a bit more when I was still in the habit of using social feeds, and Facebook's was getting actively bad.

I haven't used Twitter much lately since it got bought, and I haven't missed it.

A lot of the time when I did use it, it was for customer support. I feel bad for my followers who had to see my gripes about whatever behemoth sold me crap.

Setting up a PDS isn't too hard but still requires a dedicated IT person right now IMO. If you have a lot of customers I think it's worth it (aka you can justify spending budget on keeping the PDS up.) If you're small, it's not worth it yet I don't think.

Censorship/moderation is based on labellers that label posts for content. The default App View has opt-out moderation based on the default Bluesky moderation labelers. You can also opt-into other labellers if you like. You can run your own labeller to get your own moderation. I run my own labeller and my own feeds so I can customize my experience but none of it is in a state that others could really fork the code. It's not too hard to start reading the jetstream (a version of the firehose that's easier to parse/read) though.

Doesn't it make more sense to go for Stack Overflow / Reddit model instead for a support forum ?

The best responses will bubble up and that really the main innovation that makes a forum more practical.

What about hosting a Lemmy instance or and if you have the money, Stack Overflow for Teams ?

It certainly made them feel more human to me. I wish Kamala would have done the same just so people could see her have a real conversation. I have no idea how that would go.

They do. Since July. https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-namecheap

That depends on what you use as criterium to decide which platform is ahead. For me the best criterium is how much diversity of opinion - the only type of diversity which really matters - is allowed on the platform and how much real interaction (i.e. not just shit fights) between those groups occurs. Currently X comes out on top in the former category while none of them scores anything worth mentioning on the latter.

Well, the algorithm only pushes engagement bait so it's selecting for morally flawed takes rather than nuanced takes.

> What's the point? I go online to try to get a general idea of the landscape of views and opinions.

Not everyone uses it solely for political stuff, though. I'd like to just be in a community related to my hobby without death threats and constant abuse. We moved to bsky a year ago, been so nice.

People don't like reading and pretty much all social media responded to that. At least Twitter was like that from the start.

It forces the blogger to get to the point. Even most blog posts shared on HN could have been a tweet or two.

You can already have an ActivityPub server with your static website generator, there are a few examples (one is based on Hugo). https://maho.dev/2024/02/a-guide-to-implementing-activitypub... https://fedipage.com/

Obviously they don't implement every part of the protocol nor every feature Mastodon has.

The X Community Notes feature is open source. That is at least a step in the right direction, even if the feed algorithm is still closed.

https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes

For better or worse, X / Twitter was never really about communities. It has always been focused on allowing individuals to broadcast their thoughts. If you want a moderated community discussion then there are much better platforms for that.

We do have neutral mediums for free speech: HTTP and SMTP.

How does moderation work on Bluesky? If it's not up to individual users to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person, who/what is doing that blocking?

Get real. It's a liberal echo chamber. 90%+ of the posts there are anti-Trump and/or anti-Musk.

Something tells me you tend to attract harsh disagreements that may be interpreted as “toxic”. Maybe do some reflection?

isn't it exclusively inhabited by bitcoiners? and relies on never leaking your private key, with no recourse for key rotation? or am I out of date

That's how it looks like currently. Nostr is the open protocol whereas Bluesky is the more open platform.

Protocols > platforms. Nostr will win long-term because it is a protocol.

> X is paying lots now to content creators

Sure, but most of that seems to be to engagement farmers who provide little to no value to actual humans.

> And it seems their advertisers are coming back.

Anything to back up this claim?

I think the last wave was towards Mastodon but most migrants returned because it was too unfamiliar. On the contrary Bluesky seems to be Twitter but without the enshittification . I can see a future for that. The open protocol/network story being a probably small bonus.

Social networks have been algorithmically deprioritizing long form/well-written content, with Twitter/X being the most egregious offender.

Atleast Bluesky has a chronological feed without shenanigans.

They announced today they are rolling out Lists which will be chronological.

So you would be able to build communities around specific topics.

You might ask the same of Harlem, Jazz, and the Cotton Club: https://press.hulu.com/shows/black-twitter-a-peoples-history...

I like going on Mastodon and seeing other people's indie games. It isn't the same as the potato chip / crack hit vibe of other social media, but it's nice.

I follow a bunch of people on X who seem thoughtful but with whom I typically disagree with. That's useful for self-correction and avoiding group think. I also try very hard not to react negatively or dramatically.

I believe it's a mistake for the owner be so busy with his own platform but I don't follow him or any famous people. That helps too.

Correct.

Essentially you’re switching one filter bubble for another filter bubble that makes it harder for any contrary opinion to pierce it.

Right. My opinion is that following people/accounts shouldn’t be the single approach (and that it may even be the overall more detrimental one), and that it’s generally better to follow communities. Like HN, or subreddits, web forums, formerly Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, or also more chat-like platforms like Discord and IRC.

It would be great if Bluesky could generalize to that. My understanding is that it’s focused on primarily following accounts, and that you don’t independently have communities focused around topics and interests.

HN is also social media…

Thing is, Twitter was, well, not good before Naughty Ol’ Mr Car showed up (there’s a reason it was affectionately known as the hellsite) but often quite enjoyable. Then it was ruined by an idiot, and Mastodon and Bluesky filled the niche. For those of us who liked old!Twitter, Bluesky isn’t a bad option.

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You know this would be a lot more effective of a pitch if you didn't go with the free speech canard. The only change recently (aside from community notes, which is ok) is the notable surge in porn, crypto, and ads and the corresponding drop in quality of advertisers.

The "early adopters" arrived almost 2 years ago ;)

How could you possibly know what a million users are "basically" like?

There is no monopoly on what makes a culture "good".

Every community will have its own strengths and weaknesses.

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no good reason to leave X, just people acting out (current thing ppl)...and they have to either keep reminding us, or keep coming back trying to get ppl to follow them...unsuccessfully no one really cares.

also advertisers like Disney,IBM, comcast, warner bros, discovery, lions gate etc are all coming back to advertising on X now

Which app store?

Is X also in the Social Networking category and Bluesky also in the News category?

If not, why do you assume that which category some intern put the apps in has any evidentiary weight in or relevance to today's conversation?

Twitter is also present way down the list in the social networking category. The ‘news’ category is a much smaller pond in which it can be a big fish, but it is in both.

It doesn't matter how much Musk pays, trying to sell to to the social concious that twitter is a "news app" is a fool's errand.

That said, I do agree that Twitter is a horrible social networking platform. Not even in a snarky way.

- I could never follow conversations on whatever the hell response system it sets up.

- It's focused on short form comments but tons of people use it as a blogging platform (including its new owner).

- The algorithms and filtering are just horrid. It is so bizarre how I can be logged off and not even see user feeds in any meaningful order (ignoring that it filters out NSFW stuff).

- They recently made worse with blocking changes. a social networking tool with bad user filering is failing its most basic task. meanwhile they also recently decided to privatized what people liked, so it's all sorts of backwards in its design.

But despite all that, Bluesky as a "social network" platform solves #3. For now. Wonderful,I can see tweets in reverse chronological order without being logged in (and for now, the curation is... fine). But people still want imageboards with small character limits so I'll just continue to yell at a (literal, not digital) cloud.

Who on earth is "shoving it down your throat"? Calm down.

Whoa stop shoving your posts down my throat!

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It also means they will become increasingly radicalized in their echo chamber.

It's telling that people who are leaving X are doing so not because they are being censored, but because their political opponents are no longer being censored.

People aren't leaving X because of polite disagreement. They're leaving because ideological extremism and hate not only run wild but are actively promoted by the platform.

Here’s how I see it: imagine you like going to a restaurant for dinner fairly often. Recently, a group of rowdy patrons has started coming in, getting drunk, and making all kinds of noise. Strangely, the restaurant seems to encourage their behavior. You don’t love this—you’re just trying to enjoy a nice dinner and some casual conversation. So, you leave and don’t come back.

You can’t force the restaurant to calm down or kick out the rowdy patrons. They should be allowed to serve whomever they want. Luckily, you’re also not forced to endure their actions.

I used to think echo chambers are bad. I realized that when algorithms force me to consume content that I don't agree with, my mood becomes terrible. In order to protect myself, I no longer think echo chambers are pure bad. They are a necessary evil to ensure my own sanity.

In the real world you congregate with like-minded people. The same applies to my social media timeline. And I use Mastodon by the way, which doesn't have an algorithm driven timeline.

Many people hold worldviews which are ontologically incapable of co-existence with other viewpoints. By reducing discourse to intergroup sparring and affinity signaling, the intermingling of various such extremists only solidifies the status quo.

For a nice book on the tech-philosophy of this question (recently endorsed by the Dalai Lama, you might enjoy: https://www.plurality.net/

It is functionally impossible to run an unmoderated message board that doesn't devolve. Holding out hope that "we" learn where "we" is everyone in the world is not going to happen in 1000 years. The only way for a forum to remain civil and useful is for careful moderation to remove troublemakers and it is equally impossible to do that without ever making a mistake.

There's a reason waste management becomes so important when building cities and large communities.

I hope we get a nice distributed protocol, and I'm not completely negative on AT (or nostr) yet. Twitter is a critical chokepoint for independent media right now, and the guy who owns it is in the coming administration.

Shutting down twitter, rumble, and substack would be a massacre for independent media right now. Elon could make an offer that couldn't be refused on the other two, and turn on the censorship harder than Facebook.

The right-wing free speech heel turn is always the same: when you censor, you're trying to prevent the free expression of ideas, when we censor, we're trying to prevent the "support" of terrorism. Lèse-majesté is always around the corner.

I don't think we should, nor do I think it's healthy. Some viewpoints are horrific and should absolutely be suppressed.

Read up on the paradox of tolerance and you may see why this isn't just some "diversity of viewpoints".

- I'd love to hear more points about fiscal and foreign policy.

- I want to hear what people see in country music.

- I want to know about weird bizarre facts that can only be remembered and regurgitated by an obsessed madman. Likewise, I enjoy the occasional, IMO overanalyzed dives into arts from people who are considered auteurs that goes beyond my eye and ear

- I want to attempt to understand the experiences of those in very different socioeconomical environments. immigrants, LGBT, Some dude traveling the country on train cars,

- I want to understand more about the people who represent my country. The mundane dry stuff on the day to day, not just once every 4 years in the big showdown

- I want to hear people's technical approaches to software, hardware, and anything in between

I am open to a lot of viewpoints, I will not agree with all of them. I will find some of them obnoxious and other snooty.

Why is it that when I don't want to hear stuff like "My body your choice" I'm suddenly a coddled prude who is seeking an echo chamber? I did my time shitposting on 4chan when maybe half of it was ironic. I don't want nor need to do that anymore. That well has clearly fallen fully to Poe's law and my one and only real hard line is "don't spread hate".

This line of thought is very simple: you don't get diverse viewpoints when people are scared of being doxxed, harrased, or even murdered. You're making a place less diverse by literally trying to say they are less of a person than you. Stop it.

Not everything that is written on Twitter is a viewpoint and those things became mire and more sind Musk bought it.

Why should a trans person have to put up with hordes of deranged cretins who believe that all trans people are inherently gross sexual predators? Why should people of color have to put up with all the nazis on that site who are gleefully awaiting when Trump will reopen the concentration camps?

Diversity of viewpoints is nonsense.

> coexist with a diversity of viewpoints

Create a new account on X and then come back and talk about this.

You will notice that it is entirely right-wing political content that is being pushed.

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