Whenever I point out (in agreement with your statement) that the idea that the left and the right are somehow equally bad is a kind of fantasy on HN I usually get downvoted. People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong. Yeah, often things are more complicated than they appear, but I find it almost hilarious how often you can't do that in American politics. And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines.

Until your thumb slips while trying to hit the dots, the post gets focused, and now you're spending the next three hours telling the algorithm to stop showing you diaper kink artwork because it thinks you must be into that since you looked closer at it.

Almost as bad as tiktok repeatedly showing you promos for the same product because you didn't swipe away in less than five seconds.

Mastodon's is at least just scoped to your own server, so it has a small chance of being relevant (assuming you picked any instance other than m.s)

I don't think it makes sense to think of Mastodon as having a central "discover" tab. Mastodon is much closer to the blogosphere than to Twitter.

Then follow people producing such content?

my tiktok fyp is just that.

My socials (FB(not much)/Insta/TikTok) have fantastic algorithms, I they uplift my mood, have been responsible for positive changes in my mindset and life, etc. When I used X or bluesky or Reddit they have a noticeable negative impact on my mental state. Hackernews is 50/50.

So I think social media which is content/image based can be more positive than the discussion based media.

However we're getting more and more AI slop and AI generated art and reels and while people for the most part destroy it in the comment section, it would be nice for them to never show up in my feeds.

ATProto infrastructure is mostly open and there are folks operating pieces of it independently even if the landscape is dominated by the Bluesky PBC. It's true that Mastodon grew bottom-up without centralized funding so the shuttering of the PBC will be a big deal for the AT ecosystem but it's all independently doable.

We already have others running infrastructure as well so if bsky goes away the platform can survive

I've never been a fan of the "Product driven by desire for profits" line because it simplifies too much into too little imo. The reason people like scale is that it brings a diverse set of interests. For better or for worse, most Mastodon servers I've seen have a pretty similar set of interests. They're really the same constellation of interests I've seen heavily represented on internet forums since the late '90s. There's nothing wrong with that, but between IRC, web blogs, web forums, Reddit, HN, Discords, and conventional social media, I don't think you'll find a shortage of folks interested in those topics.

Meanwhile there's a lot of topics where a critical mass of fans only really exists on Big Tech Social Media and maybe the occasional subject subreddit. The hope of an open platform at scale is to expose those niche interests to open infrastructure.

The only way in which BlueSky is preferentially catering to the left is by existing as an alternative to X and specifically providing tighter control of what is in your feed; and this is only “catering to the Left” because of the groups towards which X either has weakened or stopped enforcing its policies against harassment towards.

(In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)

Edison Research's "currently use Twitter" numbers for people 12+ went from 27% in 2023 to 22% in 2025.

Pew found 16% of U.S. teens used X in 2025, versus 23% in 2022 and 33% in 2014–15.

For reference, pinterest has roughly the same number of monthly active users. [0]

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

80% are bots, 10% trolls, and 5% foreign agents.

I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.

Yeah, but it's behind a cosmic paywall.

Perhaps it's the crowd I've followed and I've fallen down a niche, but I keep getting pushed threads such as this: https://bsky.app/profile/palle.eurosky.social/post/3msirglff...

And a whole bunch of other stuff about whether people should even be on bluesky, or should be instead on other federations, and it all just feels so meaningless to me.

It's as if someone has invented a few different ways to print, and there's a million interesting things to write about, but everyone in my echo chamber is talking about whether we should be using A4 or letter sized paper.

And to be clear, this is the "for you" feed even after some shaping, the official discover feed is so much US politics it's straight unusable. Plenty of politics still leaks through to "for you", but it's a manageable amount.

There's a dotnet feed I follow too, but honestly it's hard to find any real people to follow between the dotnet foundation reposts, the linkedin grade BS, and the lost musicians. ( Not their fault, the feed picks up any mention of F# as being dotnet! )

Like I said, I want to make bluesky work, it ought to have less engagement bait, and less lock out of anonymous users, but there's a still a lack of critical mass of real people.

Sounds fun, sign me up. I want the bad. Moderation is somehow worse. I’m a big boy I can block the spammers myself

Sounds like you are the audience Bluesky caters to.

I think there are two things going on. After launch, there was an exuberant group of users who believed the purpose or aim of Bluesky was to be a recreation of Twitter in terms of user base and impact. They were lead on by the icon a bit and lots of rhetoric. And I think many believed it would destroy X. By their standards, Bluesky is an epic failure.

But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.

This is a very... Hacker News viewpoint that I think is quite popular in tech circles, and literally unheard of for most beyond. I don't think this is a matter of raising awareness either, it's the usual disconnect between people who take pleasure in learning about and using technology, and the average person who wants to minimize friction and inputs between them and tuning out.

I don't think that Bluesky is a success as an app or site, I think it's an example of ideological stagnation and evidence of an online political culture that's come unmoored from reality, which seems to be the trend for social media. It's not a very good place to be, and the most active parts of it are frankly really boring and thoughtless just like the rest of the social media landscape... albeit with a left-of-center flavor. As for the protocol... great? I've been hearing about the next big thing in fighting centralization and corporatization here for a loooong time, and it really feels like Charlie Brown kicking at the spot where a football used to be, over and over.

If the point is to come up with novel solutions to a problem in service of a tiny minority represented here... then great. It's a success. If the point is to ever compete with something on a different scale then this seems like treading water to me.

I think there's some truth there, but the bigger shift IMO has been that companies, politicians and institutions have begun to notice that volume on social media doesn't translate to irl opinions. Left or right, social media is dominated by the loudest, most dedicated extremists with the most insane focus on single issues. You and I have lives, we can't compete with someone who pulls 12 hour days editing Wikipedia, cranking out Tweets, spinning up bots to vote and sock puppets to react.

It's a lesson I think we all need to learn over and over: the loudest are not really the most representative, they're just the loudest. Online I'd add that they're often the craziest and least able to compromise.

Agreed. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49264162>

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