Highly recommend the starter packs for finding people!

Here is a super useful tool to copy Starter Pack users into a List, combine Lists, and more.

Lists are great because you can use them as feeds that show the posts from only those users.

https://nws-bot.us/bskyStarterPack.php

This is great. Is there something like this for Mastodon as well?

Wow that’s great. Thanks!

This is great!

IMO Bluesky (really atproto) is decentralized along the axes that matter, while Mastodon is decentralized along the axes that don't. It's sort of a figure-ground inversion in thinking about a social media protocol so I think a lot of the criticism is coming from people who haven't taken any time to understand it.

It's an open protocol, but more like the www than email. You can port your identity to another host at any time. You can self host if you want. You have complete control over how your chosen feed algorithm aggregates posts from the firehose. If you want to make a competing service to Bluesky you can even do that, and it will still interoperate with all the Bluesky users.

Whereas with Mastodon, when you pick an instance you're essentially picking which benevolent dictator you want mediating your experience. Mastodon is decentralized in the sense that it breaks the platform up into smaller fiefdoms; Bluesky is decentralized in the sense that you retain control over your own experience.

Some recommended reading on Bluesky/atproto:

https://bsky.app/profile/laurenshof.online/post/3la5j3qgqvo2...

https://fediversereport.com/a-conceptual-model-of-atproto-an...

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

https://atproto.com/guides/faq

Personally I don't really care that Bluesky is centralized, I actually prefer it since it's easier to use and there isn't the risk that my random server admin is going to go rouge or shut down the server like you get with Mastodon.

Twitter was pretty much fine until Musk started shitting it up so something that is pretty much like Twitter pre Musk is all I want. Bluesky fills that position well.

There’s a deep lesson in the victory of Bluesky over Mastodon about the general inability of Open Source projects to provide a simple, intuitive end user experience. It’s unsurprising for those of us who have participated in Open Souce for a while, but Bluesky vs. Mastodon will become the canonical example.

It's the Team Fortress 2 paradox all over again. TF2 famously had a number of games all coming to dismantle its market dominance and each of them failed miserably. This might have seemed puzzling given TF2's somewhat antiquated gameplay and maps. It turns out that the magic sauce of TF2 was never the gameplay but instead the dogged and disciplined developer support from Valve over the years. For the latest example, look no further than Overwatch 2 killing itself with a greedy business model which, again, had nothing to do with the core game.

Likewise, Twitter is a very simple website to clone and compete with. Resisting the temptation to censor, putting in the effort to establish a non-exploitative business model, etc, is something that no one else has been able to do.

If you're worried about your content on Bluesky or whatever getting hijacked, you should consider POSSE: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

(One of the strengths of Bluesky over X is that Bluesky currently doesn't punish people who link away from the site)

Cory Doctorow wrote a piece about this: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02...

I think it’s mistaken. You can run your own bluesky server, I’m meaning to get around to it but seems fairly straight forward:

https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting

When I tried to install mastodon it downloaded literally hundreds of random dependencies, there was no way I could verify the security of it. Real shitshow imho.

I’m open to the possibility that Bluesky will go “bad” in some way.

Still not opposed to trying.

Gave up twitter long ago anyway.

Products go through lifecycles. I don't need to use them for their whole lifetimes, just while they are viable.

Many of us have probably experienced this with at least one major platform: Facebook. A score of years ago, it was considered cool. New platforms have taken their place: in fact, for a certain audience, Twitter was once the cool place they went to after fleeing Facebook.

For certain purposes, FB is dead. Same for Twitter. Now it's Bluesky's turn. It doesn't need to last for a century to be worth it.

Mastodon users are really not happy that there's an alternative that might actually give users data sovereignty, wresting power away from people whose only way of relating to others is by exerting control over them.

Besides everything else, there are only so many insane billionaires of sufficient insanity to buy and ruin a social network. Like, Dorsey was pretty odd, but that wasn't sufficient to totally ruin Twitter. Lightning, one might think, is somewhat unlikely to strike twice, and thus a realistic worst-case future for Bluesky is, more or less, old-Twitter.

Like, would I depend on Bluesky for anything important? No, of course not, that would be silly. But for use as a social network, it's sufficient, for now (I'm splitting my time between it and Mastodon; Bluesky is, generally, more _fun_.)

I kinda agree with that take, I just wanna bet on a new space, reset my algorithmic recommendations, plus find new accounts to read.

I haven't seen those, mostly because finding people on Mastodon is impossible ;)

Maybe it will be different, maybe it won't. But the people moving to bsky care more about usability than they care about federation. They're not saying "this time will be different", they're picking a platform they feel comfortable using and don't care about VC money or not.

If that doesn't align with your values, maybe you don't want to join them. Because, yes, bsky is investor-financed, and at some point they'll need money. You might not agree with how they'll make that money, and it will be indeed no different. Your bubble is right on that.

> "this time it will be different for sure!".

This summer might be nice like last summer, but that doesn't mean that you a) need to believe that summer will last for ever or b) must pretend that it's not summer over there now.

In other words, who knows how long it will be good, enjoy it while it is and then move on.

yeah, they'll be pressed to turn a profit sooner or later. Consequences will flow from that.

Bluesky is not decentralized and the enshittification is very much expected: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42178543

Mastadonians are being total sore losers , they're so proud that they're actually decentralized and self hosted (even tho most users are on mastadon.social)

IMO bluesky being a clone of Twitter in its UX means that you're going to get the same social dynamics, just a different group in charge of moderation decisions.

Bluesky is supposed to offer a different architecture of allowing users to decide what they see via shared blocklists and labeling services, but they still regularly ban right wingers, trolls, and griefers from having an identifier on their servers, and since there's no one hosting an alternate appview, it's Pretty Damned Centralized (tm) for the time being.

Well that Fargate article looks interesting. I had no idea there was a serverless pod management system you can talk to with tools like k9!

Followed!

You just have to ride the wave with social media sites. Same as dating apps. Use them before they rot.

Yes, but asking people not to use social media is not constructive. I don't use any, but I understand why people do, psychologically speaking. It's inevitable. The least they can do is migrate to whichever seems least enshittified at the moment.

Sure, but for those of us who enjoyed old-Twitter, eh, it's better than nothing.

I can’t answer or even evaluate your interpretation.

But let’s assume that the people are there and there’s a lot less posting and more reading.

Maybe that’s ok, or even better?

Not saying it is, but maybe?

Might be a time-of-day thing? Activity generally looks fairly stable with a small down-trend, but nothing on the scale you're suggesting: https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-week.html

They're just dippin their toes in!

Tantrums about X can only last so long.

On the upside we all got the opportunity to just block any accounts announcing their departure from X.