On the topic of Bluesky stats, I just learned that blocks are effectively public via the API, so there's a hall of shame ranking the most blocked users on the site: https://vqv.app/blocks.html
Usually that's the opposite that happen with these kind of people. They are going to look forward on being the at the top of the leaderboard, like a child doing stupid things only to get noticed by its parents.
It has an "Impersonation" tag: "Pretending to be someone else without permission." Dunno if that's accurate though.
But let's be real: Jordan B. Peterson on Bluesky is not going to be a different Jordan B. Peterson than he is anywhere else. If you don't want to interact with Jordan B. Peterson on e.g. Twitter, then you probably don't want to interact with him on Bluesky either.
Probably no fault of the feed, so not really a hall of shame. People you follow repost the feeds because they want to share with the world, and the posts end up in your timeline. You block them if you are not interested or if it is overwhelming, without having to unfollow anyone.
The infrastructure has been rock-solid. I’ve never seen a service grow this fast without any noticeable outages. The architecture and execution are obviously informed by serious experience at Twitter, but it’s also clear that management is giving them everything they need to do the job right.
> The infrastructure has been rock-solid. I’ve never seen a service grow this fast without any noticeable outages. The architecture and execution are obviously informed by serious experience at Twitter, but it’s also clear that management is giving them everything they need to do the job right.
The world has changed quite bit. If you have deep pockets and you can use AWS etc., it isn't a major problem anymore. However, if they indeed run it on their own data centers, that is impressive.
This is not true at all. The hard part isn't cloud vs. on-premise, it's the architecture.
Most sites can either put all their data in a single massive database, or else have an obvious dimension to shard by (e.g. by user ID if users mostly interact with their own data).
But sites where the data is many-to-many and there's a firehose of writes, of which Twitter is a prime example, are a nightmare to scale while remaining performant and reliable. Every single user gets an updated live feed of tweets drawn from every other user -- handling millions of users simultaneously is not easy.
> But sites where the data is many-to-many and there's a firehose of writes, of which Twitter is a prime example, are a nightmare to scale while remaining performant and reliable. Every single user gets an updated live feed of tweets drawn from every other user -- handling millions of users simultaneously is not easy.
It is definitely not easy. But the core problem of this has been discussed since the release of Facebook. There are very obvious architectures which you can follow and then fix the bottlenecks with money. The cost is still the most relevant problem, which I wanted to say. The current cloud enables much higher optimization threshold and error margin.
I'm not so sure about this when not even 24 hours ago Netflix has streaming issues running on AWS infrastructure, and existing social media sites still have outages.
> Netflix has streaming issues running on AWS infrastructure
I think the performance of Netflix is highly dependent of ISP's data centers [1].
But yeah, there are still limits where the cloud won't help you.
If you whole infrastructure is designed to serve "historical" content instead of streaming, some bottlenecks cannot be avoided if you want to server low-latency sports stream. This came by surprise for me, but apparently betting has still significant role for the viewers.
I appreciate Mastodon and wish it were growing steadily. Unfortunately, activity metrics (see the second chart on this page, for example [0]) suggest that it's on a steady, slow decline.
I see a plateau after a bunch of churn from large waves of migrations. Would be surprised if this won't be the case for bsky.
Regardless of MAU count, there's plenty happening there to keep me active, and you get to see Threads users who speak ActivityPub as well as Bsky users via a bridge.
I joined Mastodon in the big post-Elon user exodus. It’s great for geeky stuff, but Bluesky is much better for entertainment and news (i.e. what I mostly used Twitter for, pre-Elon).
If geeky stuff is what you’re interested in, you can build that community on Mastodon easily. But if you want more popular content and users, they’re on Bluesky.
A lot of free services would disappear if they were unable to make some sort of ad-based income. Some people would be unable to do anything except whatever was provided by their government without ad-supported services (thinking Google products, YouTube, etc.) It would eventually go back to the way it was in the old days - a few actually-useful-but-struggling sites, a few paid-for services that might or might not survive, a passel of vanity sites and some incoherent cranks and weirdos (Time Cube, etc.).
Heaven for some, but mostly boring for everyone else after an hour.
I signed up to Fosstodon and then followed a bunch of Python and Django folks. This has been great so far, and my feed is full of relevant, interesting posts. I see a lot of posts complaining about Mastodon and pointing to its decline, but for my use-case, I get a lot of value from it and am pretty happy. I'm not sure what benefits I would get by moving over to Bluesky?
Probably not. Each server has its own moderation, and servers that tolerate bad behavior from their users get blocked by most other servers.
I'm not sure the current model would do well against a large coordinated manipulation campaign, but it handles isolated trolls at least as well as corporate social media.
No corporate control. Server admin block nodes they don't want to see, so it is important to join a server with similar views as your own, or run your own server.
It's probably a bit more work than a lot of trolls are willing to put in. Trolling doesn't require a lot of thought or creativity, but setting up the infrastructure does.
Good solution. Problem is they have chosen a 'default instance' in the app which goes against the idea to encourage federation of the platform and instead accelerates centralization and there was backlash over that change. [0]
mastodon.social will only get more centralized and is the only one that is benefitting from that change.
I consider myself a technical person, perhaps not social media savvy anymore, and Mastodon confused the hell out of me. I don't think it stands a chance with regular Joe.
And beyond that, the federated aspect makes it very different from a global site like twitter. It was aimed at having control but in doing so you feel disconnect IMHO.
Its fundamental design lacks the ability to provide features that many people want, because the developers see those features as anti-features to be avoided.
Bluesky's AT Protocol was developed specifically to address what they saw as shortcomings with the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and other similar services.
It's fundamentally reasonably capable of things like full text search and better discovery, which its lead dev and much of the community see as anti-features. There has been some recent progress on search, but being searchable is opt-in only because many users are opposed to search.
I think decisions like that are an active choice not to become popular.
Good question. When you say Mastodon, my answer is 'which one' or 'which instance'?
That basic hurdle is the reason why it is a barrier to many potential new users and it has traded complexity over ease of onboarding when trying to sign up new users (who are not techies or sys-admins).
One solution is to set a default instance. I.e 'mastodon.social' and tell users to sign up there. Again, that increases the issue of centralization. To prevent that, you close sign ups and tell users to sign up elsewhere. Then the issue continues on other instances.
Along side other issues, that is why new users just went to Bluesky or Threads instead.
It's a worse experience for posters for two major reasons: blocking is not as effective (blocked people can still read and respond), and there are too many weird scolds who yell at people for not adding content warnings for trivial things.
I don't post so it doesn't affect me directly. It affects where the people I follow choose to post.
It's not idiot-proof. Common-denominator platforms where you're expecting the general population need to be intuitive and work like people expect them to. Mastodon doesn't and their federated model is a pain in the behind.
If anybody is wondering what sort of political viewpoints quantadev is talking about, one example is they posted that The Onion and Alex Jones are the same
This site doesn’t have followers but if you see somebody POSTING in the VOICE of a guy wearing a sandwich board that says CHRIST WAS A LIZARD it only takes two clicks to see the other stuff they voluntarily posted publicly here (username -> comments)
It’s definitely a whole different platform now, compared to when the first exodus happened. I’m loving it!
The “starter pack” feature is great. There’s also this website where you can browse created starter packs for groups/interests you care about: https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
As someone who never used Twitter, I made a Bluesy account and it was okay. I learned that I have no idea how to engage with that style of social media.
One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter. I hope they can move past that.
Blue Sky feels like a cocktail party where half the guests are knitting sweaters for their cats, the other half are debating how to save democracy, and I’m just standing there wondering how I got invited.
It’s like scrolling through a group chat where everyone forgot the topic but kept texting anyway.
Honestly, it’s impressive how they’ve managed to create a platform that feels simultaneously too niche and too random.
Idk, I spent a few hours over a few days trying to find something cool about it, and couldn’t.
I hope so too. I had to leave threads because my wall was 90% people talking and complaining about Twitter and Musk and memes about the same stuff. Dude, I was here _precisely_ to avoid this, but it's even worse!
> One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter
That was a huge turnoff with Mastodon for me. Seemed almost everyone was just saying “wow, isnt it so much better here than on Twitter?” over and over and having everyone agree. By comparison Bluesky isn’t so bad, at least right now anyway.
I joined twitter like 3 years ago, so also quite late to this type of game. Compared to forums, hn, reddit etc it's quite difficult to get your voice heard in the beginning. Anything you post is just shown to no one when you have no followers. Takes some time interacting with others and hope they follow or repost to get some traction.
Scrolling through the first couple dozen posts on my following feed, I see a selfies, science educators, artists, makers, a couple naked people, a complaint about days getting shorter, and a few people talking about health conditions they've gotten under control. If you don't want to see people talking about Trump, follow people who don't talk about Trump. Or add "trump" to your list of muted words.
What you see is up to you. If you don't like what you see, there are a ton of levers in your control.
Open https://bsky.app/ in incognito mode and you get to see the front page.
Currently the top post on the latest refresh is:
>I'm honestly surprised he hasn't started selling stool samples. His followers have been buying his BS for years, so it seems like a natural next step...
This is not a network I want to join if this is the popular content. We've been told to curate our own garden for reddit, twitter, mastodon, etc. It never works because people who see that and like it join by the millions and those who don't don't.
Does anyone know any good makers I can follow on there? I'm mostly interested in making stuff, less in monetizing stuff, so I don't want to follow so much entrepreneurs (ie people who like making stuff to make money) as makers (ie people who like making stuff for its own sake). Any good lists?
If anyone wants to follow me on there, I'm @stavros.io.
Back in the news net days, there used to be a parable about a Berkeley hot tub. The owner would give out the code to people, and it would be a good party with a rotating cast of characters for a while, until eventually a few people ruined the party. Then the code would change, and a different crew would start coming through.
Pre-Elon, it seemed that Twitter was doing a pretty good run of keeping a single social network running for a long time. As has Facebook.
But for lots of dedicated communities, the new owner has such direct contempt for them and has focused on ruining the party.
Bluesky will work for now. Already science Twitter is having a huge renaissance now that links are no longer suppressed and discussion has lower noise:
Aha, so it was real too? For the past few years I have not been able to find the old text that I used to, and I'm sure my memory has shifted a bit over time too.
These starter packs sound like a good idea, but I have a hard time using them to find interesting people to follow.
When I look at at the "People" tab, they look like pretty impressive people (academics, etc), and then I look at the "Posts" tab and it's the usual noise: cat pictures, politics, etc. Not a lot of signal.
Maybe I've just been starved on Twitter/C for so long, but the signal was real for me, but in science there's been a sudden exodus to Bsky and an outpouring of joy that people are able to find new papers again and discuss conference talks live and post whatever they're cooking in their kitchen or lab. It's like the old days of Twitter are back, but it does take a lot of work to find that corner.
Gratz to the blue sky team, it’s very hard getting a social media app to gain traction.
However, after messing around with twitter and mastodon, I really do not get the appeal. All the incentives are not to have meaningful conversation, rather it is all about engagement.
Because there was a certain geopolitical event about two weeks ago that was a primary reason many still used Twitter/X and now that said event is over (and whose outcome will likely cause Twitter/X to further degrade) there is no reason to stay.
The exodus is not happening randomly or in a vacuum.
All posts on bsky are public and subject to use for training machine learning models. So a lot of people either don't care or are going to be very disappointed.
Or possibly, once the event was over, the users in question had the idea that Twitter/X affected the outcome in the way they didn't like and they decided to boycott Twitter/X?
Agreed. I was on twitter to discover, share, discuss articles and talks in my field of research. A couple months ago I had trouble finding good accounts and content; but now I am starting to find some of the PIs I was following over on twitter.
My niche moved there summer of 2023, took some time to get going, some cross posting for a while etc, but by the end of the year it was almost exclusively on bsky.
But have noticed the uptick, gained like 400 followers the last week. But it's a bit weird, as it's a Norwegian community, no relation to American politics.
I guess it also can feel dead because it doesn't have a viral algorithmic feed like Twitter. But for me that's not an issue, ad even on Twitter I followed few enough people that I always used the chronological view.
But I do like the custom feeds of bsky. Like a search/hashtag on steroids, making it easy to discover others discussing the same theme I'm there for.
Am I missing something, or is the heading misleading. Where is the 1M gained users a day?
I see statistics on likes, followers etc. Nothing here shows gain in 1M user accounts a day.
I joined yesterday. And I was never an enthusiastic Twitter user. I did have an account, however. One by one my followers (admittedly, just a few people, and all friends) were sending me a note to say they were dropping Xitter and not just unfollowing me.
Why isn’t there an app that just posts to blue sky mastodon and twitter? I find it annoying that companies and some gov depts post on twitter only and for some reason I keep needing to verify my account so I can’t ever see a chronological timeline
I was skeptical but I just opened it and the UI does look cleaner and less bloated than X. However, UI is fixable and what matters more is content. There needs to be a compelling reason to switch, and I don't see one yet.
That, and the TOS update which now requires users to give X blanket permission to use their posts for AI training (previously you could opt-out). Not that AI companies really care whether they have permission right now, but if legal precedent doesn't go their way then coercing users into "giving permission" by burying it within 50 pages of TOS legalese will be the fallback plan.
A bigger jump seemed to be Aug 28 - Sept 7 (daily likers 200k => 1M+). I wonder why. (also some days are missing there, so maybe something changed in the data collection).
No surprise as to why Bluesky is taking off, despite calling it years ago. [0] Now it has 18M+ users with 9M MAUs and 3.3M DAUs [1] after removing the invite system.
The familiarity is easily transferable for a migration from Twitter / X. If you know how to use Twitter / X then you know how to use 90% of Bluesky.
No need to 'choose an instance' or some admin shutting a server down due to 'other reasons' unlike with Mastodon or an arbitrary blackbox algorithm that limits / hides your posts found in Threads or needing a Meta account.
Bluesky has learned from the mistakes of others to start first with a default server approach, you choose your own feed + algorithm and a search functionality that (works) can find accounts across the platform.
I'm a 100% lurker and it's such a nicer experience before any enshitification.
It probably won't last forever, but no ads or spam, and simply seeing a feed of accounts I follow is all I want.
No one has called me a shitlord, cuck, idiot, or otherwise implied I’m stupid for the entire time I’ve used it. It’s great. The tech community on there is really solid, at least insofar as my interests go.
Isn't that the implication? If you're on a platform with a lot of low quality bitterness and another one pops up with less of that, just move. If it happens again, move again. It's not team sports, you shouldn't feel loyalty. The only problems are practical, rather than psychological.
I’ll have to complain about it and have a big cry first, but yeah.
I’m not actually opposed to people disagreeing with me or thinking my ideas are bad. It’s just pointless chaos and no functional or constructive discourse. That’s more so what bothers me about it.
Even in relatively tame topics there tends to be some devaluing interjection of some sort. It gets tiring trying to find interesting content but only finding that, over and over.
The entire data stream is public. Personally, I've encountered zero bots or spam so far and am finding hoards of real people in my field joining so it seems real from my tiny tiny corner of the data stream.
Threads is seeing similar growth. So it stands to reason that we are seeing a large exodus of users from X and people are trying out both platforms to see which one suits them best.
I'm so happy for all the left-leaning folks getting off X. They can easily find a new home that does lots of censorship for them, since that's what they like.
Also the fact that they're really only comfortable with people who think like them, means that for them to have their own safe space to hang out in will be especially cathartic for them, without endless numbers of conservatives constantly reminding them of various facts that are unpleasant, unwanted, and better to be forgotten.
It will never stop being funny to me how you can take an argument in American politics, directly apply it to the opposite side, and it will still be mostly true.
but i'm already on X, I just can't make a move just because of decentralization or "toxic" environment everyone talks about. It has a lot more content and the people I follow are all here.
Threads was the fastest growing app of all time and now has ~300m MAU, 1m new users a day and is on track to being larger than X in about a year. And then once they switch on advertising will be printing tens of billions a year.
Hard to see how they've dropped the ball on this one.
> And then once they switch on advertising will be printing tens of billions a year.
I’ve seen this said before, and I guess it might be true, but I don’t really get why people would use Threads once there’s advertising on it — isn’t it being a better experience their main value proposition? And they’ve just spent the last few years teaching people how easy it is to migrate between these basically-interchangeable services…
I can’t find it now, but in one of the other HN threads, someone had shared a link to some lawyer defending women’s rights for sex-segregated things (like who gets to play in women’s sports). That profile had a label of “Intolerant” at the top, and nearly every post of theirs also had that same word “Intolerant” in a box in the body of each post, in place of the actual content that would be there. A little informational message indicated these labels were applied by an automated system. You would have to click the button to uncensor and view the message anyways, but it makes it much harder to consume their feed since you have to do that for each individual post, every single time you view the page. Someone else pointed out that you can opt out of the default moderation/censorship scheme that applies this labeling but the fact that it is on by default is problematic in terms of offering a politically neutral platform, since that is what most people will get.
False dichotomy doesn’t bring anything to the conversation. However it it true that the far left is the main motivated to quit X, and the progressive views Silicon Valley were also dominant on HN.
Just something to accept and think about. Do not blame the messenger.
What's preventing everyone from putting their faith in another broadcast medium just to have it sold to Elon again? It's hard to trust social media these days. They have 0 incentive to be "good" from a variety of perspectives not just political.
> X has shown the more trusted and safe your platform is the better it is for advertisers and your bottom line
“Advertisers” largely means a few firms that represented an aggregate purchaser on behalf of many clients. Those few ad firms were politically captured. They tried to hide it by outsourcing their censorship regime to GARM, and folded quickly when GARM was challenged. The departure of advertisers just showed that a few ad companies happen to have decision makers who exhibit severe political bias. But let’s be honest - it doesn’t matter one bit it if some brand’s product shows up next to centrist or conservative content. That only is a problem to the permanently online and the activists who used their position to attack Twitter/X.
Assume you're right and advertising companies outsourced responsibility to GARM.
Then since GARM was discontinued in August shouldn't all of the advertisers be suddenly flocking back to X. Because ad spend for X continues to be anaemic.
And I assure that advertisers very much do care if their ads appears next to neo-nazi, racist and misogynistic content.
I don't like Bluesky because I feel it's a whole lot of pointless Not Invented Here vs. improving on ActivityPub, but it is still far more resistant to that than X/Twitter because people can migrate more easily.
On the topic of Bluesky stats, I just learned that blocks are effectively public via the API, so there's a hall of shame ranking the most blocked users on the site: https://vqv.app/blocks.html
> a hall of shame
Usually that's the opposite that happen with these kind of people. They are going to look forward on being the at the top of the leaderboard, like a child doing stupid things only to get noticed by its parents.
Assuming blocks themselves are never childish. Jordan Peterson is on the list and he doesn't even use the site: https://bsky.app/profile/jordanbpeterson.bsky.social
It has an "Impersonation" tag: "Pretending to be someone else without permission." Dunno if that's accurate though.
But let's be real: Jordan B. Peterson on Bluesky is not going to be a different Jordan B. Peterson than he is anywhere else. If you don't want to interact with Jordan B. Peterson on e.g. Twitter, then you probably don't want to interact with him on Bluesky either.
There was a script I once saw for Twitter where it blocked all users within some follower/followee radius of a set group of people.
For public discourse, I wonder what the right level of agreeable "echo-chambering" is.
Seems odd to be one of the most blocked with zero posts
It's not even the real Jordan Peterson apparently.
Top 100 BlueSky accounts Hall of fame https://www.graphtracks.com/1h
A lot of Brazilians there. I guess it makes sense that they are a large portion of the user-base after Twitter got banned.
I wonder what the backstory to two different Brazilian Taylor Swift fan accounts getting onto the most blocked list is...
Probably no fault of the feed, so not really a hall of shame. People you follow repost the feeds because they want to share with the world, and the posts end up in your timeline. You block them if you are not interested or if it is overwhelming, without having to unfollow anyone.
also https://clearsky.app/
Kind of shows the echo chamber. Looks like the Jordan Peterson account, which has never posted anything, is around number 14.
i have a feeling by being on the list, it fuels more blocks, the rich get richer
The infrastructure has been rock-solid. I’ve never seen a service grow this fast without any noticeable outages. The architecture and execution are obviously informed by serious experience at Twitter, but it’s also clear that management is giving them everything they need to do the job right.
> The infrastructure has been rock-solid. I’ve never seen a service grow this fast without any noticeable outages. The architecture and execution are obviously informed by serious experience at Twitter, but it’s also clear that management is giving them everything they need to do the job right.
The world has changed quite bit. If you have deep pockets and you can use AWS etc., it isn't a major problem anymore. However, if they indeed run it on their own data centers, that is impressive.
> it isn't a major problem anymore
This is not true at all. The hard part isn't cloud vs. on-premise, it's the architecture.
Most sites can either put all their data in a single massive database, or else have an obvious dimension to shard by (e.g. by user ID if users mostly interact with their own data).
But sites where the data is many-to-many and there's a firehose of writes, of which Twitter is a prime example, are a nightmare to scale while remaining performant and reliable. Every single user gets an updated live feed of tweets drawn from every other user -- handling millions of users simultaneously is not easy.
> But sites where the data is many-to-many and there's a firehose of writes, of which Twitter is a prime example, are a nightmare to scale while remaining performant and reliable. Every single user gets an updated live feed of tweets drawn from every other user -- handling millions of users simultaneously is not easy.
It is definitely not easy. But the core problem of this has been discussed since the release of Facebook. There are very obvious architectures which you can follow and then fix the bottlenecks with money. The cost is still the most relevant problem, which I wanted to say. The current cloud enables much higher optimization threshold and error margin.
They moved from AWS to on-prem sometime in the last year or two: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/bluesky
And I don't care how many resources you have available to throw at it, plenty of sites would still fall over with the kind of growth they're having.
I'm not so sure about this when not even 24 hours ago Netflix has streaming issues running on AWS infrastructure, and existing social media sites still have outages.
> Netflix has streaming issues running on AWS infrastructure
I think the performance of Netflix is highly dependent of ISP's data centers [1].
But yeah, there are still limits where the cloud won't help you.
If you whole infrastructure is designed to serve "historical" content instead of streaming, some bottlenecks cannot be avoided if you want to server low-latency sports stream. This came by surprise for me, but apparently betting has still significant role for the viewers.
[1]: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
Deciding to use a cloud provider or not has very little do to with the quality of the application and infrastructure architecture.
You can make an app that scales beautifully on AWS or you can make one that chokes.
The performance is really good. Searches and general navigation.
Highly recommend folks check out Mastodon as well - fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.
It is continuing to grow steadily and has tons of activity compared to a few years ago.
https://joinmastodon.org/
I appreciate Mastodon and wish it were growing steadily. Unfortunately, activity metrics (see the second chart on this page, for example [0]) suggest that it's on a steady, slow decline.
[0] https://mastodon-analytics.com/
I see a plateau after a bunch of churn from large waves of migrations. Would be surprised if this won't be the case for bsky.
Regardless of MAU count, there's plenty happening there to keep me active, and you get to see Threads users who speak ActivityPub as well as Bsky users via a bridge.
I joined Mastodon in the big post-Elon user exodus. It’s great for geeky stuff, but Bluesky is much better for entertainment and news (i.e. what I mostly used Twitter for, pre-Elon).
If geeky stuff is what you’re interested in, you can build that community on Mastodon easily. But if you want more popular content and users, they’re on Bluesky.
I wonder how the world would change if ads just disappeared
I get things have to be sold but damn it's out of control
Life without Pihole and a blocker is just grim.
Every so often I get exposed to that world. It’s awful.
A lot of free services would disappear if they were unable to make some sort of ad-based income. Some people would be unable to do anything except whatever was provided by their government without ad-supported services (thinking Google products, YouTube, etc.) It would eventually go back to the way it was in the old days - a few actually-useful-but-struggling sites, a few paid-for services that might or might not survive, a passel of vanity sites and some incoherent cranks and weirdos (Time Cube, etc.).
Heaven for some, but mostly boring for everyone else after an hour.
I signed up to Fosstodon and then followed a bunch of Python and Django folks. This has been great so far, and my feed is full of relevant, interesting posts. I see a lot of posts complaining about Mastodon and pointing to its decline, but for my use-case, I get a lot of value from it and am pretty happy. I'm not sure what benefits I would get by moving over to Bluesky?
mastodon is federated, not decentralized
federation is a form of decentralization
Don’t forget nostr!
Federated and no control just means it’s going to be overrun by trolls at some point?
Probably not. Each server has its own moderation, and servers that tolerate bad behavior from their users get blocked by most other servers.
I'm not sure the current model would do well against a large coordinated manipulation campaign, but it handles isolated trolls at least as well as corporate social media.
No corporate control. Server admin block nodes they don't want to see, so it is important to join a server with similar views as your own, or run your own server.
They already had 8 years to overrun it.
It's probably a bit more work than a lot of trolls are willing to put in. Trolling doesn't require a lot of thought or creativity, but setting up the infrastructure does.
You don’t get trolls unless you have a lot of people on there already.
why isn't mastodon one of the winners like bluesky?
Because you can go to Bluesky and click “Sign Up” without a confusing explanation about instances.
Mastodon has a big honkin' "Join mastodon.social" button both on joinmastodon.org and in the mobile apps to solve this exact problem.
But the fact they still have this perception of confusing sign-up means they were too late.
Good solution. Problem is they have chosen a 'default instance' in the app which goes against the idea to encourage federation of the platform and instead accelerates centralization and there was backlash over that change. [0]
mastodon.social will only get more centralized and is the only one that is benefitting from that change.
[0] https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110233282251253677
This. Nostr could learn from this too.
Mastodon is confusing for non-technical users, while Bluesky is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Twitter.
I consider myself a technical person, perhaps not social media savvy anymore, and Mastodon confused the hell out of me. I don't think it stands a chance with regular Joe.
And beyond that, the federated aspect makes it very different from a global site like twitter. It was aimed at having control but in doing so you feel disconnect IMHO.
This isn't the most important reason, but compared to similar web sites, Mastodon's user experience is awkward.
Its fundamental design lacks the ability to provide features that many people want, because the developers see those features as anti-features to be avoided.
Bluesky's AT Protocol was developed specifically to address what they saw as shortcomings with the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and other similar services.
It's fundamentally reasonably capable of things like full text search and better discovery, which its lead dev and much of the community see as anti-features. There has been some recent progress on search, but being searchable is opt-in only because many users are opposed to search.
I think decisions like that are an active choice not to become popular.
Try using it, it has extra steps and decisions that add friction and are annoying / challenging for end-users.
It did see a big surge in popularity when Musk bought Twitter, but user numbers right now are not growing significantly.
They probably are, but they don’t have a marketing team like BlueSky does
Good question. When you say Mastodon, my answer is 'which one' or 'which instance'?
That basic hurdle is the reason why it is a barrier to many potential new users and it has traded complexity over ease of onboarding when trying to sign up new users (who are not techies or sys-admins).
One solution is to set a default instance. I.e 'mastodon.social' and tell users to sign up there. Again, that increases the issue of centralization. To prevent that, you close sign ups and tell users to sign up elsewhere. Then the issue continues on other instances.
Along side other issues, that is why new users just went to Bluesky or Threads instead.
> fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.
No one owns it so there’s no team of well paid professionals trying to make it grow.
It's a worse experience for posters for two major reasons: blocking is not as effective (blocked people can still read and respond), and there are too many weird scolds who yell at people for not adding content warnings for trivial things.
I don't post so it doesn't affect me directly. It affects where the people I follow choose to post.
It's not idiot-proof. Common-denominator platforms where you're expecting the general population need to be intuitive and work like people expect them to. Mastodon doesn't and their federated model is a pain in the behind.
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If anybody is wondering what sort of political viewpoints quantadev is talking about, one example is they posted that The Onion and Alex Jones are the same
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42138285
I love having "followers" like you, jrflowers. Did you ever figure out how to setup that URL that pulls up just my posts?
This site doesn’t have followers but if you see somebody POSTING in the VOICE of a guy wearing a sandwich board that says CHRIST WAS A LIZARD it only takes two clicks to see the other stuff they voluntarily posted publicly here (username -> comments)
That's very nice. Being from the Conservative-run city of Dallas, I've personally never seen a sandwich-board in real life.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2112840-rent-free
I don't click random, likely dangerous links, but it's good to see you've been rendered speechless. I like that.
Nobody take the bait
Yeah, boring old trope.
Most people haven't heard of Fediverse, so it's a New Trope to them.
that's a yikes from me
It’s definitely a whole different platform now, compared to when the first exodus happened. I’m loving it!
The “starter pack” feature is great. There’s also this website where you can browse created starter packs for groups/interests you care about: https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
As someone who never used Twitter, I made a Bluesy account and it was okay. I learned that I have no idea how to engage with that style of social media.
One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter. I hope they can move past that.
Blue Sky feels like a cocktail party where half the guests are knitting sweaters for their cats, the other half are debating how to save democracy, and I’m just standing there wondering how I got invited.
It’s like scrolling through a group chat where everyone forgot the topic but kept texting anyway.
Honestly, it’s impressive how they’ve managed to create a platform that feels simultaneously too niche and too random.
Idk, I spent a few hours over a few days trying to find something cool about it, and couldn’t.
The astro pictures are neat. Everything else ... less so.
Lol, I got curious about nostr, and it's the same thing, with an extra layer of "crypto currency will save the world"
> One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter. I hope they can move past that.
Judiciously using the muting features is required to have a good time in social media. Add "Twitter" to muted words to move past that on your own.
I hope so too. I had to leave threads because my wall was 90% people talking and complaining about Twitter and Musk and memes about the same stuff. Dude, I was here _precisely_ to avoid this, but it's even worse!
> One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter
That was a huge turnoff with Mastodon for me. Seemed almost everyone was just saying “wow, isnt it so much better here than on Twitter?” over and over and having everyone agree. By comparison Bluesky isn’t so bad, at least right now anyway.
I joined twitter like 3 years ago, so also quite late to this type of game. Compared to forums, hn, reddit etc it's quite difficult to get your voice heard in the beginning. Anything you post is just shown to no one when you have no followers. Takes some time interacting with others and hope they follow or repost to get some traction.
Yeah, I followed a bunch of game dev "starter pack" account collections and 90% of it was screenshots of tweets from Elon.
That's still 80% of Mastodon's content so I don't expect much from Bluesky.
People talk about what’s on their minds. Most of the users just moved in the past week or two so that’s the hot topic. But it’ll change soon enough.
This, it happens for a while after every big exodus moment and chills out after.
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They have, the front page is all about how terrible Trump is right now.
What is "the front page"?
Scrolling through the first couple dozen posts on my following feed, I see a selfies, science educators, artists, makers, a couple naked people, a complaint about days getting shorter, and a few people talking about health conditions they've gotten under control. If you don't want to see people talking about Trump, follow people who don't talk about Trump. Or add "trump" to your list of muted words.
What you see is up to you. If you don't like what you see, there are a ton of levers in your control.
Open https://bsky.app/ in incognito mode and you get to see the front page.
Currently the top post on the latest refresh is:
>I'm honestly surprised he hasn't started selling stool samples. His followers have been buying his BS for years, so it seems like a natural next step...
https://bsky.app/profile/calltoactivism.bsky.social/post/3lb...
This is not a network I want to join if this is the popular content. We've been told to curate our own garden for reddit, twitter, mastodon, etc. It never works because people who see that and like it join by the millions and those who don't don't.
You can quite literally write your own algorithm for Bluesky.
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds
That's nice. It doesn't change the fact the default feed is amplifying the same posts that made twitter a toxic wasteland.
Does anyone know any good makers I can follow on there? I'm mostly interested in making stuff, less in monetizing stuff, so I don't want to follow so much entrepreneurs (ie people who like making stuff to make money) as makers (ie people who like making stuff for its own sake). Any good lists?
If anyone wants to follow me on there, I'm @stavros.io.
I have a Ruby hackers starter pack at https://bsky.app/starter-pack/bradgessler.com/3laa47lbuwb2r
—
Edit: replaced cable modem link with starter pack link
You might've pasted the wrong link! Although damn, this modem looks good too, worth thinking about.
Do I have to buy this modem to view the Ruby hackers starter pack??
Here's the actual link to the starter pack: https://bsky.app/starter-pack/bradgessler.com/3laa47lbuwb2r
hahaha.... oops, I had to send that to Comcast because they're now thinking if I restart my modem for the third time, it will fix the problem.
This looks like a really nice modem, but I have fiber :(
Do...do I open the modem and read the link off a piece of paper inside, kinda like a fortune cookie?
Back in the news net days, there used to be a parable about a Berkeley hot tub. The owner would give out the code to people, and it would be a good party with a rotating cast of characters for a while, until eventually a few people ruined the party. Then the code would change, and a different crew would start coming through.
Pre-Elon, it seemed that Twitter was doing a pretty good run of keeping a single social network running for a long time. As has Facebook.
But for lots of dedicated communities, the new owner has such direct contempt for them and has focused on ruining the party.
Bluesky will work for now. Already science Twitter is having a huge renaissance now that links are no longer suppressed and discussion has lower noise:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151688877
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/09/28/berkeley-hot-tub-guy...
Aha, so it was real too? For the past few years I have not been able to find the old text that I used to, and I'm sure my memory has shifted a bit over time too.
These starter packs sound like a good idea, but I have a hard time using them to find interesting people to follow.
When I look at at the "People" tab, they look like pretty impressive people (academics, etc), and then I look at the "Posts" tab and it's the usual noise: cat pictures, politics, etc. Not a lot of signal.
Maybe I've just been starved on Twitter/C for so long, but the signal was real for me, but in science there's been a sudden exodus to Bsky and an outpouring of joy that people are able to find new papers again and discuss conference talks live and post whatever they're cooking in their kitchen or lab. It's like the old days of Twitter are back, but it does take a lot of work to find that corner.
Gratz to the blue sky team, it’s very hard getting a social media app to gain traction.
However, after messing around with twitter and mastodon, I really do not get the appeal. All the incentives are not to have meaningful conversation, rather it is all about engagement.
It’s way too much noise and not for me.
It strictly depends on who you follow. Follow people who have something to say, and you'll have meaningful conversation.
You could be right but these platforms have not historically been about long form discussions, rather quips and glib remarks to drive clicks.
Follow serious people and you can have serious conversations.
If I follow only serious people, can I see their posts in chronological order (aka algorithm free), and without anything extra "recommended"?
Yes (Following tab)
Yep!
I've had an account for a few months now, it always felt very dead, but something feels like it's shifted.
Because there was a certain geopolitical event about two weeks ago that was a primary reason many still used Twitter/X and now that said event is over (and whose outcome will likely cause Twitter/X to further degrade) there is no reason to stay.
The exodus is not happening randomly or in a vacuum.
This plus the fact that starting Nov 15 tweets become by default training material for their language models: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/x-is-using-y...
All posts on bsky are public and subject to use for training machine learning models. So a lot of people either don't care or are going to be very disappointed.
In view of this news, the story becomes even funnier: https://fortune.com/2024/11/14/grok-musk-misinformation-spre...
Or possibly, once the event was over, the users in question had the idea that Twitter/X affected the outcome in the way they didn't like and they decided to boycott Twitter/X?
Agreed. I was on twitter to discover, share, discuss articles and talks in my field of research. A couple months ago I had trouble finding good accounts and content; but now I am starting to find some of the PIs I was following over on twitter.
Biosci twitter -> BioSky?
My niche moved there summer of 2023, took some time to get going, some cross posting for a while etc, but by the end of the year it was almost exclusively on bsky.
But have noticed the uptick, gained like 400 followers the last week. But it's a bit weird, as it's a Norwegian community, no relation to American politics.
I guess it also can feel dead because it doesn't have a viral algorithmic feed like Twitter. But for me that's not an issue, ad even on Twitter I followed few enough people that I always used the chronological view.
But I do like the custom feeds of bsky. Like a search/hashtag on steroids, making it easy to discover others discussing the same theme I'm there for.
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Am I missing something, or is the heading misleading. Where is the 1M gained users a day? I see statistics on likes, followers etc. Nothing here shows gain in 1M user accounts a day.
I was confused on that, too. At the top, says 18m users total. So, for how many days did the headline mean? Was it <10 recently?
I joined yesterday. And I was never an enthusiastic Twitter user. I did have an account, however. One by one my followers (admittedly, just a few people, and all friends) were sending me a note to say they were dropping Xitter and not just unfollowing me.
Related ongoing thread:
We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159454 - Nov 2024 (62 comments)
Also:
Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159713 - Nov 2024 (153 comments)
The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156907 - Nov 2024 (48 comments)
Consuming the Bluesky firehose for less than $2.50/mo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42152362 - Nov 2024 (58 comments)
Maybe Bluesky has "won" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42150278 - Nov 2024 (743 comments)
Watch Bluesky's explosive user growth in real time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147497 - Nov 2024 (11 comments)
How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147430 - Nov 2024 (50 comments)
1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144340 - Nov 2024 (124 comments)
Ask HN: Bluesky is #1 in the U.S. App Store. Is this a first for open source? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129768 - Nov 2024 (44 comments)
Ask HN: Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129171 - Nov 2024 (13 comments)
Visualizing 13M Bluesky users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118180 - Nov 2024 (236 comments)
Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42112432 - Nov 2024 (168 comments)
How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086596 - Nov 2024 (79 comments)
Bluesky's AT Protocol: Pros and Cons for Developers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080326 - Nov 2024 (60 comments)
Bluesky Is Not Decentralized - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952994 - Oct 2024 (194 comments)
Bluesky Reaches 10M Accounts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550053 - Sept 2024 (115 comments)
Hard not to think this is a lot of bots, though? I had an account, but didn't make the jump from Twitter. May succeed next try, though.
I suspect the same.
Why isn’t there an app that just posts to blue sky mastodon and twitter? I find it annoying that companies and some gov depts post on twitter only and for some reason I keep needing to verify my account so I can’t ever see a chronological timeline
I was skeptical but I just opened it and the UI does look cleaner and less bloated than X. However, UI is fixable and what matters more is content. There needs to be a compelling reason to switch, and I don't see one yet.
What happened on Oct 17? I can't really find anything that would cause such a dramatic uptick on that day specifically.
that was the day they officially announced the change to how blocking worked, notifying all users (the owner had mused about it a month earlier)
That was the time we learned about the changes to the block feature.
That, and the TOS update which now requires users to give X blanket permission to use their posts for AI training (previously you could opt-out). Not that AI companies really care whether they have permission right now, but if legal precedent doesn't go their way then coercing users into "giving permission" by burying it within 50 pages of TOS legalese will be the fallback plan.
A bigger jump seemed to be Aug 28 - Sept 7 (daily likers 200k => 1M+). I wonder why. (also some days are missing there, so maybe something changed in the data collection).
Brazil banned twitter
Got to be a podcast or something popular that Donald Trump appeared on
Does anyone else have issues with the data privacy side of things? I'm not really feeling the "everything is public" aspect of the AT protocol.
No surprise as to why Bluesky is taking off, despite calling it years ago. [0] Now it has 18M+ users with 9M MAUs and 3.3M DAUs [1] after removing the invite system.
The familiarity is easily transferable for a migration from Twitter / X. If you know how to use Twitter / X then you know how to use 90% of Bluesky.
No need to 'choose an instance' or some admin shutting a server down due to 'other reasons' unlike with Mastodon or an arbitrary blackbox algorithm that limits / hides your posts found in Threads or needing a Meta account.
Bluesky has learned from the mistakes of others to start first with a default server approach, you choose your own feed + algorithm and a search functionality that (works) can find accounts across the platform.
Simple.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185
[1] https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
And I’ll call it right now back to you now. It will go the way less than mediocrity of threads and mastodon.
I'm a 100% lurker and it's such a nicer experience before any enshitification. It probably won't last forever, but no ads or spam, and simply seeing a feed of accounts I follow is all I want.
What is the alternative to AI twitter? Is there some incumbent where it moves?
It depends on if you define AI Twitter as AI researchers or AI hypesters.
Many of the former have indeed migrated.
One million accounts per day, and all of them making posts about their X.
So odd that a pseudo-decentralized centralized company gets so much attention when Nostr is actually decentralized but never gets mentioned.
I think most people wouldn’t care plus most who know wouldn’t make the mistake of trusting jack again.
Because people don't care about decentralization, they care about vibes and the vibes of Nostr are "right wing grifters and crypto scammers"
No one has called me a shitlord, cuck, idiot, or otherwise implied I’m stupid for the entire time I’ve used it. It’s great. The tech community on there is really solid, at least insofar as my interests go.
What happens when they do, are you going to leave?
Isn't that the implication? If you're on a platform with a lot of low quality bitterness and another one pops up with less of that, just move. If it happens again, move again. It's not team sports, you shouldn't feel loyalty. The only problems are practical, rather than psychological.
I’ll have to complain about it and have a big cry first, but yeah.
I’m not actually opposed to people disagreeing with me or thinking my ideas are bad. It’s just pointless chaos and no functional or constructive discourse. That’s more so what bothers me about it.
Even in relatively tame topics there tends to be some devaluing interjection of some sort. It gets tiring trying to find interesting content but only finding that, over and over.
How do we know the stats are real?
The entire data stream is public. Personally, I've encountered zero bots or spam so far and am finding hoards of real people in my field joining so it seems real from my tiny tiny corner of the data stream.
Threads is seeing similar growth. So it stands to reason that we are seeing a large exodus of users from X and people are trying out both platforms to see which one suits them best.
finding the same ppl on bluesky needs work, and it's not a job i'm going to do. if twitter decays, good; i will get rid of my last social media app.
Not all that much work: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...
I found most of my twitter sports follows pretty easily.
before elon banned the api, there were tools to automate this
I'm so happy for all the left-leaning folks getting off X. They can easily find a new home that does lots of censorship for them, since that's what they like.
Also the fact that they're really only comfortable with people who think like them, means that for them to have their own safe space to hang out in will be especially cathartic for them, without endless numbers of conservatives constantly reminding them of various facts that are unpleasant, unwanted, and better to be forgotten.
It will never stop being funny to me how you can take an argument in American politics, directly apply it to the opposite side, and it will still be mostly true.
Which would imply conservatives are big censorship advocates? Maybe rethink that.
but i'm already on X, I just can't make a move just because of decentralization or "toxic" environment everyone talks about. It has a lot more content and the people I follow are all here.
What happened to Threads ?
It's about ~300m MAU and also hitting 1m users a day:
https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/DCWz7LSvA36
Zuck dropped the ball bad.
I wouldn't count out Threads yet. But, in my limited use, something seemed off with Theads, but am liking Bluesky. YMMV.
By building a service that went from 0 to 275 million active users in a year (compared to Bluesky's 18 million)?
He’s not the right person for the job of democratizing the interchange of information without bias.
Threads was the fastest growing app of all time and now has ~300m MAU, 1m new users a day and is on track to being larger than X in about a year. And then once they switch on advertising will be printing tens of billions a year.
Hard to see how they've dropped the ball on this one.
> And then once they switch on advertising will be printing tens of billions a year.
I’ve seen this said before, and I guess it might be true, but I don’t really get why people would use Threads once there’s advertising on it — isn’t it being a better experience their main value proposition? And they’ve just spent the last few years teaching people how easy it is to migrate between these basically-interchangeable services…
X has ads. Bluesky will inevitably have ads.
So which platform do you see them moving to ?
heavily censored
People blocking jerks isn’t censorship. Do you have a source that there’s any kind of censorship going on stronger than other social media networks?
They removed a bunch of Palestinian journalists
evidence?
I can’t find it now, but in one of the other HN threads, someone had shared a link to some lawyer defending women’s rights for sex-segregated things (like who gets to play in women’s sports). That profile had a label of “Intolerant” at the top, and nearly every post of theirs also had that same word “Intolerant” in a box in the body of each post, in place of the actual content that would be there. A little informational message indicated these labels were applied by an automated system. You would have to click the button to uncensor and view the message anyways, but it makes it much harder to consume their feed since you have to do that for each individual post, every single time you view the page. Someone else pointed out that you can opt out of the default moderation/censorship scheme that applies this labeling but the fact that it is on by default is problematic in terms of offering a politically neutral platform, since that is what most people will get.
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As opposed to extremely dishonest far-right grifters like Twitter is now?
No worries friend, many of these signups are us on the right going to troll. We don’t plan to support it for long.
Both extremes on the left and right have their own 'extremely dishonest grifters' and that issue is not exclusive to Twitter / X.
False dichotomy doesn’t bring anything to the conversation. However it it true that the far left is the main motivated to quit X, and the progressive views Silicon Valley were also dominant on HN.
Just something to accept and think about. Do not blame the messenger.
The far-right thinks the far-left is dishonest and vice versa. They're both correct. It's all so tiresome.
With the Dang moderation? And PGs vision?
Can't wait to join!
And what is PG’s vision?
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What's preventing everyone from putting their faith in another broadcast medium just to have it sold to Elon again? It's hard to trust social media these days. They have 0 incentive to be "good" from a variety of perspectives not just political.
because it's not centralized and you can self host it.
if everyone is in practice using the same instance, they can just un-decentralize it at any moment they want, though
> They have 0 incentive to be "good"
Yes they do.
X has shown the more trusted and safe your platform is the better it is for advertisers and your bottom line.
Why would I want to be on a platform that is friendly to advertisers?
> X has shown the more trusted and safe your platform is the better it is for advertisers and your bottom line
“Advertisers” largely means a few firms that represented an aggregate purchaser on behalf of many clients. Those few ad firms were politically captured. They tried to hide it by outsourcing their censorship regime to GARM, and folded quickly when GARM was challenged. The departure of advertisers just showed that a few ad companies happen to have decision makers who exhibit severe political bias. But let’s be honest - it doesn’t matter one bit it if some brand’s product shows up next to centrist or conservative content. That only is a problem to the permanently online and the activists who used their position to attack Twitter/X.
Assume you're right and advertising companies outsourced responsibility to GARM.
Then since GARM was discontinued in August shouldn't all of the advertisers be suddenly flocking back to X. Because ad spend for X continues to be anaemic.
And I assure that advertisers very much do care if their ads appears next to neo-nazi, racist and misogynistic content.
I don't like Bluesky because I feel it's a whole lot of pointless Not Invented Here vs. improving on ActivityPub, but it is still far more resistant to that than X/Twitter because people can migrate more easily.
Is it better than Mastodon? I signed up for that then gave up quickly.