It reminds me of google plus. Technically better than the existing top dog, but the forced migration and trying to bootstrap with a huge but only semi involved userbase let it fizzle soon after the start.
Has there ever been a successful case of bootstrapping a new social media product with an existing userbase? Like not just added features or merging two together.
You know, they stopped Amazon from buying iRobot because of I guess unfair robot vacuum competition (why does that sound hilarious?). It's almost luck that Threads isn't that successful, because then they'd have to deal with monopoly concerns. At least now they can just say it's a shitty twitter knock off, don't bother us.
> but now the Bluesky app has exploded to 3.5 million daily active users, putting it just 1.5 times behind Meta’s Threads
Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it hard to believe. Realistically he is off by at least an order of magnitude.
Mashable used to be one of my go-to blogs, but I haven't been there in a while. Has it really fallen this far?
It does. If all you do is tap on a post then immediately hit back you’re not really engaging with the platform. But I’m sure they’ll still count you as an active user.
The meaningful stats would be number of posts seen, engaged with, and number of posts the user made themselves.
Be interesting to see if they count people with the app or not. As far as I’m aware you need the app to view threads in their entirety. I tried it but uninstalled shortly after
It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes.
All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else.
That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare. Over time, this has polarized people to ever further extremes and normalized disrespect and bickering (as opposed to discussion).
It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
> It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians.
Presumably, normal people who want to interact with people they already know? interaction with journalists and politicians is valuable in an entirely different manner.
Added to that is user choice over moderation and algorithms.
That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life.
Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.
On “safe spaces”, as you hint at I think many of us don’t want to be shielded entirely from opposing or otherwise differing lines of thought. Speaking personally, I welcome it if there’s actual discussion to be had. Good faith discussions and exchange of perspectives is great, but I have no patience for trolls, circular logic, insults, “debate” that wouldn’t even pass for high school level, etc.
> Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.
No, leftists aren't, hence the move to Bluesky. People with right-wing opinions get harassed and cancelled all day long (in most Western countries) on social media, by the traditional media, by the institutions (including justice which should be neutral). It's very tiring but we have no choice but to endure.
I've just started using Bluesky. How does it compare to Reddit? There are dedicated subreddits for the conservatives and the liberals, and every subreddit has moderation rules. I use the right and left-focused subreddits to keep track of what's going on in different universes. However, I must mention that you won't find a reasonable discussion of left vs right ideologies on the main sub-reddits, as Reddit users are predominantly left-leaning. But at least there are smaller forums where these two groups meet and interact, and there is some debate.
It shouldn't be any surprise: it's not like the internet's userbase of 1990 represented a broad cross-section of American society, let alone western or global societies. It was mainly a bunch of academics and college students and government users. It's just gotten more and more fragmented as more people have been added.
In most ways they were far more social than modern social media, in that they were about socializing. The distinguishing characteristic that sets modern social media apart from the old school stuff is the performative aspect of it—where everyone is now encouraged to behave as a content producer optimizing for engagement—which is hardly social.
Those mediums do not have algorithms, feeds, followers, profiles, influencers, likes, or any features that many people point to as the toxic aspects of pretty much every commercial social media site of the last decade.
I’d say livejournal was the tipping point where the internet became very self-centered and your value in the platform was measured by how much engagement you were able to get.
Up until that point, in a world before blogs, social sites were mostly centered around shared interests and communities would aggressively police off topic content
Real names were absolutely used on Usenet especially in the early days, ditto for mailing lists (and still are for that matter), even though technically they are pseudonymous. In any case pseudonymity doesn't seem like it's relevant for whether something is a social medium or not – many social media are pseudonymous (or even anonymous, like the chans). HN is pseudonymous. Reddit. Tumblr. The various Fediverse services.
I disagree somewhat. Social media apps are powered by feed algorithms that fall into two camps:
The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model.
The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well.
The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.
There’s multiple feeds, which is one of its main features. There’s user created feeds, which are just aggregates of tags and keywords. These are alright, but prone to issues with cross domain terminology. ie, say you want a football/soccer feed and use the word “spurs”, you’ll end up having it filled with basketball and rodeo posts.
The two default feeds are your followed accounts in chronological order, the other is an algorithmic feed. The algorithmic feed is pretty good to be honest. I “disliked” around 20 political posts the first day, and it has seemed to responded fairly quick to that feedback.
The "echo chamber" argument really doesn't speak to me because all I want is a place where I can get timely updates about: people in my research field, pictures of cute dogs, and municipal government activities. The more a website stays laser-focused on my interests, the better.
I think those things you’ve mentioned are what most people came to social media for originally, but it’s gotten lost in all the noise. The original point of social networks was to be social and connect with people in your industry or who share your interests or share a locality in common, and X especially has drifted far from that ideal — lots of users now log onto it to find something/somebody to be angry at and to argue/troll.
I’m still using an RSS reader for that very purpose. I want my trusted content displayed chronologically; miss me with the algorithm and the recommended influencers. I’ve been on the internet long enough to know what I want and how to find it.
That makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of the content provided by the recommendation algorithms, as well as human nature. A good recommendation engine, for example, would recognize when someone either likes a broad range of sources politically speaking, or likes a neutral region.
Conversely, it's unclear that a recommendation engine would be able to predict what would be best at "disrupting an echo chamber", and more importantly, when that is desirable, and what "desirable" even means. It's also unclear that the first model is successful at all in disrupting echo chambers, as opposed to exacerbating or amplifying existing positions. I think there's good reasons to think that provocative can be less effective if anything.
I disagree with this: if the only thing you allow to pierce the veil is selected based on engagement metrics you just walk away with a shallow view of your opposition. If anything this may entrench your existing views and give you a false sense of intellectual and/or moral superiority.
You need to “meet people where they are” and the first type of algorithm just doesn’t do that. It just says “conservatives/liberals really like this, so you’re going to be forced to see this too because you show interest in politics”
To give an example: let’s say I’m a small business owner who voted Trump but has some lingering concerns around how tariffs might impact my business. Am I going to be better informed reading some engagement-bait post from liberals talking about how I’m going to get “deservedly” crushed by tariffs or a post from a conservative economist laying out the cold hard facts (both good and bad)?
Your argument is in support of mine. Separate networks are an interesting legal and software engineering detail, but from the POV of the user, as long as they see what they want to see, they will stay with the network.
I think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups.
Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel").
This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.
I don't know, the entire point of the "algorithmic bubble" was to keep the tribes separate but happy, no? And the value of the network still increases with more people on it. Maybe some future social media will figure out how to keep everyone happy at the same time. For example, I think everyone but a couple of hardcore FOSS advocates and the far-right are still using Youtube.
It does seem natural to happen. But there are loads of "neutral" accounts: gov agencies, businesses, etc that use social media for announcements and simple broadcast communication. Most are on Twitter now. I think I big question is will they add bluesky, or move (probably not, because of inertia), or something else.
The issue is that social media sites produce feeds and content matching, forcing alternative views in your face.
Its like, they have decided to push metcalfes law as far as possible, to see when the breaking point is. Like a giant social experiment.
But if everyone is in one place thats still the most desirable network to be on. Just dont push Joe Blo's dumbest political opinions in my face as sponsored content.
Is it all the ways that matter? The author mentions one way, DAU. Sure, that is important but I can think of other things that matter. The number of “creator” accounts matters just as much as the number of lurkers.
From my experience Bluesky is way better and has respect for the user’s choice front and center. Lists of users to follow is a first-class citizen feature. Their algorithm is a chronological feed, not boosting engagement bait.
Here's one metric that matters – revenue per user. Bluesky's is, I assume, zero, and soon that will have to change. Threads meanwhile has the largest social media ads and monetization platform in the world behind it ready to make the dollars flow at the push of a button.
Well, they’re not doing the same thing aren’t they?
I’m cautiously optimistic that the open/decentralised nature of these sites can act as a powerful forcing function to keep them in check, keeping their incentives more inline with their users compared to traditional commercial social media sites.
Mastodon’s financial (and so far technical) structure seems more inline with this compared to taking on investment, so we’ll see how it goes.
I just want a network that’s not going to juice engagement to optimise for page views for ad revenue. I want a reverse chronological feed. I want third party clients that might have different UX ideas
Not necessarily. There could be different types of content that requires different types of creators, like imagine professional video producers vs your friends posting about their day.
There could also be a different algorithm/network that allows for a few creators to feed a large number of consumers.
It absolutely is. Sure it's the default, but it's the default to measure against and beat. It's like comparing ML algos against the average prediction, or forecasts against the previous known value.
The head of instagram/threads (Mosseri) appears to have no idea how the algorithm on these platforms work. He is shocked to see how many people are talking about threads in his feed. It may explain how threads has managed to waste such a large captured audience.
Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them).
That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.
Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.
And you say this to people you label not like you. You probably have more in common than you think. You both agree to label the other and you decided to fight a proxy battle from the agreed among identities. Do you want the other side not to exist as well? If yes let them know.
People defending themselves from bigotry, and bigots themselves, are not equivalent. Black people not wanting racists to exist, and racists not wanting black people to exist, do you see a distinction?
There has been such a consistent attempt at ramming square pegs into round holes online in trying to “both sides” a bunch of these issues.
One trait is immutable and the other is not.
One trait is entirely internally focused and is not defined by a rejection of anyone external to the subject, the other's trait is entirely defined by such an external focus on the rejection of another person's immutable identity.
Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.
'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.
Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.
But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.
There is more momentum against Musk now than when threads launched. Not sure it is enough to overcome the network effect - but there is a lot of illwill towards his projects.
I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.
Free speech is the upside of X. People leaving to join the echo chambers of Bluesky or Threads, only serves to turn X into the echo chamber they claim it is.
I don’t know what you are referring to. I’ve never seen someone self-censor Bluesky. I see people talking about it on X all the time. Mainly to highlight some of the worst content they find there but that’s another subject…
I tried checking out Bluesky the other day. The feed was mainly unhinged political rants of a very particular flavor.
A feature of Bluesky is the ability to change your feed algorithm (or code your own - yes I wrote ‘code’). You can easily filter all political (labeled) content. To say that BS is an echo chamber is untrue, though I do not disbelieve that you observed that algorithmic choice when you first tried the app. There are many echo chambers for sure, but the protocol is designed to permit you to exclude or join them. Unlike competitor systems (which I also use, and dislike more and more due to the lack of ability to choose what I see - despite trying).
Right, and what's more the charge of echo chamber has always been intellectually lazy.
You can have a fruitful exchanges of ideas and information and debates on a foundation of similar values in a way that amounts to more than just repeating ideas back and forth. Using the term as a catch-all for a shared desire for conversations to have certain ground rules or certain community values, or subjects that spark your intellectual curiosity, calling those echo chambers is shallow and is not going to inform you about the real cultural dynamics that drive those kinds of communities.
It's just a lazy way to try absence of critical thought by looking for the wrong thing. If people labeling things as echo chambers cared about the things they said they cared about, they would look at entirely different criteria, such as epistemic closure, the quality of relationships, propensity for trolling, and so on.
Some people tested that if you say there are two genders in BlueSky your account will be blocked right away. These kind of things never happens on X. I see lot of right wing posts but also left wing post.
Right, this is one of the games that trolls play which is kind of to search for normalizing language, create a provocation, and then relish in the attention derived from the provocation.
As someone (who likes to think) is pretty unbiased politically, I can say I’ll go wherever the people I’m interested post. I have been somewhat surprised that pretty non political accounts have moved to Bluesky which I have interpreted as both political and motivated by the loads of political bs that are posted on x that normal people simply get tired of. I think Bluesky will gain more traction than threads but will end up being a more successful mastodon. A place where people with massive followings who simply don’t like x will post and there will be two competing apps.
It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not, it's that it's flavor of politics is increasingly resembling that of 4chan. I just skimmed though the auto-play videos on my account and the algorithm decided to show me this for some reason: https://x.com/AlaskanTom/status/1860339990992925170
That's far from the worst I've seen on there either, evidently you can just post about how Hitler was right and it won't affect your visibility at all now, nevermind get you banned.
> It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not
But this is not true. I always use my "following" feed and not my "for you" feed. Other than sponsored ads the only thing I see are posts from people I follow. I don't understand why people persist with the narrative that Twitter forces people into "the algorithm".
I've been splitting time between Twitter & Bluesky for the last year or so. The only real difference i notice is the set of people I follow as until recently most of my Twitter follows weren't on Bluesky
I also only use the following feed, but a fairly recent change to the video player means it now immediately cuts to the next video in the auto-play queue (or an ad) when it finishes, and that's always algorithmically driven regardless of which feed you were using.
Fair. I almost always refuse to click on videos in twitter-like sites, so wouldn't have noticed this. I (usually) hate video content, especially the massive shift towards video content in our media sources.
I'm not sure Threads ever had that much of a spike in usage beyond the first day of new accounts. Got the impression a huge number of people curious about it signed up due to the very easy onboarding if you already had an instagram, looked around a little and then never went back.
Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.
I have given Threads a good try, and recently when Bluesky activity started up I restarted using Bluesky (it didn't stick for me the first time). The technology doesn't really matter that much, as long as it's basically competent. It's only the social network itself.
I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't.
Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us.
X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two.
Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.
> Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same.
Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads.
I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.
It would be the worst thing for Bluesky if the eternal September came over from Twitter. I think that population is too passive to make the move and will put up with any level of advertising etc.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation
Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there!
It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in.
There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss.
The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to.
There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on.
Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping.
The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049
I made a Bluesky account long ago and started cross-posting my tiktoks, often on the popular and titillating topic of project management. For a long time it was sleepy as I would have expected. I got a sudden uptick recently, which prompted me to figure out how to port my follows from X, which I did with "sky follower bridge." Bluesky has been a lively, friendly place.
Sky follower bridge was able to scrape my X blocklist, but could not turn it into a Bluesky block list. No troll problems yet so that's OK for now. I still have to host my videos on titok because some are too long for Bluesky.
My tiktok "for you page" has turned to sludge and my followers are not getting my posts without setting notification options. I wonder if the magical algorithm was sequestered in China to hide it from inquiries. Hopefully a Bluesky presence helps.
I've fallen for the Threads-links shown in Instagram. Obviously the instagram connection is what gave them a great start at a user-base. But, everytime I try to use Threads, something seems off (mainly see lame, boring, engagement-bait). Bluesky seems different and better. Also a much better story in-terms of open data, open protocol, etc.
I think the factor which will determine which networks survive is the ability to handle bots driven by modern AI agents. I’m not sure how even the best moderation features can detect and mitigate these.
It’s gonna be incredibly interesting to see what happens concerning this. I suspect that bots will probably thrive in feeds where ‘the algorithm’ is responsible for recommending most content. However, bots probably won’t do as well with vanilla follower feeds.
Gotta ask, am I missing something with how bluesky is supposed to be used? Every time I open something from there it takes over 30 seconds to load on my phone
> Meta-owned Threads started November with 5 times the daily app users of Bluesky. That number is now down to just 1.5.
Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Today are either within an order of magnitude of X?
> Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Looks like no, threads is pretty flat and bluesky is hockey stick-ing
Social media was doomed the moment its users were demoted from customers to exploitable sources of data. Bluesky will inevitably follow the same path of enshittification as every other social network before it. Its current success hinges solely on the nostalgic desire for a single platform where people can gather in peace. The real question is: How many cycles of doom will people endure before they finally stop jumping from one sinking ship to another?
There are no ads so that is one aspect that could prevent enshitification. Businesses can't just spend money to force their way into peoples feeds. At least not in a traditional advertising kind of way.
For me it's a very easy choice to go with Bluesky over Threads.
With Threads you can already see that Facebook/Instagram is in it's DNA. There's no pure "following" feed. It's instead an algorithmic feed that mixes people you follow with people Threads decides to push. So it's going down the enshittification path from day one.
With Bluesky there's at least some hope that it will not end up as the algorithmic time sinks all other social media has slowly become. I'm all for discoverability, but allow me to decide when and how I discover new people to follow. Never touch my "following" feed, and I'll be happy.
Threads has a massive problem in that it recruits its users from Instagram (there are others but primarily its still a branch of Instagram) which is the domain of AI generated slop and people I actually know in real life.
The whole point of the twitter style firehose is to be not be either of those things. Bluesky honestly probably has a decent shot but I think its still attracting some hyper-orthodox, censorious, thinkers. Musk has gone too far with X[0] but I don't think his vision in the abstract is wrong.
[0] Every accusation is a confession - X is now near-directly attached to the US Gov!
I think the Bluesky crowd will probably chill out with time, but right now if you don’t readily use the block feature there you’re going to have your feed and notifications peppered with the same trolls that are currently making X inhospitable. The majority of users getting blocked aren’t interested in actual discourse, they’re just there to get a rise out of people.
It’s difficult to envision any social network staying healthy in the long term without either decent moderation or robust tools to help users manage harassment and the like. There’s just too many bad actors who will take advantage of low-control environments.
I don’t get much trouble myself personally either, but it shows up in the replies to the posts in my feed which isn’t great and why a good block feature is necessary.
I find it's interesting that React which Bluesky was built on, was originally license with BSD + patents, which disallow building Facebook competing products.
Another day, another advert for Bluesky. There've been 70 stories with "bluesky" in the title submitted to HN this week alone, compared with 130 in the past month.
threads federates with mastodon, what stops threads getting on the AT protocol? is it just their assumed desire to not share data? they could be a mastodon / AT bridge
People keep missing the point of Threads. It isn't designed to be a pure Twitter clone and doesn't want to become the public square for news, politics etc.
It wants to be a text-centric network that helps release Instagram to be more video-centric to compete with TikTok. And so it wants content that is fun, interesting and light. And of course easily monetisable.
So I know people like having a fight but I see the two sites as being complimentary and both needing to thrive in order to relegate X to the dust bin.
I see the Fediverse as pretty left-wing, but Bluesky seems unlikely to stay that way because moderation works differently. (No admins blocking each other over policy.)
Threads is a good product. My twitter feed is dumpster fire of right wing politics and rage baity post. Threads has been much more balance. Open the app and have a good time.
People have been trying to make Bluesky happen for years. It won't. I believe moderation is fundamental to any social network, otherwise the bad actors always take over. Meta has been content moderation for years and understands the nuances.
People seek "Political discourse", but they will quickly realize our politics are too much of shit-show to have any kind of intellectual conversation. The rage bait and culture wars have taken over. Important discussions of policy, small vs big govt, taxes have taken the backseat. Our "politics" are no longer politics, and won't be for at least the next 4-8 years.
Big names like Lichtman announced he was leaving X for Bluesky and came back on X in less than 24 hours.
What makes social media work is the echo effect, you just won't be able to get it on a heavily censored platform like Bluesky and Reddit and a big reason why X is overtaking even mainstream media as much as people who lean left.
Its a huge problem to be imposing political leanings of the moderator on a public square because you end up creating an echo chamber which people inevitably abandon because you just won't reach enough people.
I've tried both Threads and Bluesky and I like Bluesky much better, I mean both UI & UX.
One issue I have with Threads is that I stumble upon many users that came from Instagram automatically that are not used to post in this format. So the content is mostly a mirror of IG which makes it pointless. In Bluesky I feel like the posts come from people that fleed X and it's just more interesting somehow.
How is Threads? I keep getting ads to push me to join it on Instagram, but whatever they recommend me via those ads is usually vapid Linkedin-type drivel. And I can’t see it on phone without the app.
I open it up once in a while but it mainly seems to be ranked by predicted CTR/engagement. For example, out of the first 20 posts in my feed I got a ton of travel/finance guru garbage and multiple posts with some variant of “Do not buy a Tesla, plenty of better EV choices.” And random memes stolen from other sites.
Tons of posts trying to get me to click on them to read more.
None of the accounts in my feed are ones I follow. It’s basically algorithmically driven slop.
I have gotten lured by engage-bait from Instagram. IMHO there is something off about Threads. It surely depends on who you follow and how you use it, but I find it totally un-engaging. Bluesky recently, seems better.
I'm moderately active on X, and helped build an early version of what became Threads (on which I am almost entirely inactive these days). I'm not surprised Bluesky's been more successful than Threads as the X-alternative:
* A lot of the popular content on X is political; Threads' decision to downrank or ban political content makes the posts less engaging. It's understandable from a certain perspective — a lot of the political content is just dishonest ragebait (and I learned to unfollow most political X accounts as a result). However, one of the most interesting things about X is that it's where news travels fastest, and it's significantly less-filtered than traditional journalist editorialization. It's hard to compete with X if you don't allow it, or downrank it.
* Obviously Elon's massive political spending will have an impact on the userbase of the product, since the spending is so one-sided. X has become dramatically more right-wing since he took over, and even more so after Trump's campaign, so there was pent-up demand for something else... Especially something else that allows left-wing political content (i.e. not Threads). There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Elon changing the X ranking algorithm to favor right-wing content, but TBH I think it's simpler than that: more left-wing people left the site (or used it less) due to distaste for Elon, and Elon unbanned hordes of right-wing accounts, who are very enthusiastic about supporting it.
* There's also one way in which X is (openly) biased in its ranking: paid accounts have their posts ranked higher than free accounts... And paying for X is public: you have a blue check next to your name if you pay. In right-wing spaces, having a paid bluecheck account is a badge of honor, in part due to it supporting Elon; in left-wing spaces, it's a badge of shame for the same reason. Although from a technical standpoint the ranking change isn't specifically political, in practice it's very political: many more right-wingers are bluechecks, so in practice you see more of their content and less left-wing content. Bluesky doesn't have paid accounts, and even if it did, it wouldn't organically result in right-wing content being prioritized to the same extent, so for left-wing users it's a much friendlier place.
* This is perhaps more of a personal gripe, but Elon Musk's decision to downrank external links has been pretty bad for the quality of X content. I understand the reasoning: he's trying to keep people engaged in-app, and external links make you leave. But plenty of interesting people use X as a promotional channel for their (interesting) content, which I want to see, and which often doesn't suit tweet formats. So by downranking posts with external links, I see less of the things I actually am interested in. I don't think I'm alone in this, and Bluesky doesn't do it — and I've heard (anecdotal) reports of people really enjoying being able to more reliably engage with that kind of stuff again on Bluesky.
Mastodon is too complicated and segmented to take off. But Bluesky isn't, so I can see why it's having a zeitgeist post-Trump's-election, which Elon helped fund. I'm not sure how much Bluesky will manage to retain its current spike in users: Threads at one point had a similar spike, and most users churned back to X. But it makes sense to me that Bluesky is a more natural home for the ex-X diaspora than Threads, given the reasons many of them left X.
All politics aside (not a minor point for many), Twitter has been made much worse IMHO in the Musk era.
They de-prioritize links, prevent 3rd party apps, closed the API, and blocked access for non-logged-in viewing.
And a smaller meta-point: changed from an iconic name to a simple non-informative letter (Besides Google and maybe Uber, who have added a popular verb to the lexicon?)
I feel this is a downside only to a particular bunch. For most people, Twitter is doing better than ever. Community notes are amazing and innovative and should be adopted by every social media platform. X feels legitimately more fun than most other apps. Plus, at this point, I think a solid portion of people have been banned from social media apps. You can't exile your way towards whatever ideal society you want. The barbarians are always at the gates.
I especially feel this sort of enforced community separation is so prevalent among those who are so reticent to build a border wall, but I'm sure psychology has an explanation somewhere.
Certain groups are trying to will bluesky into being successful. From my personal experience, X/Twitter is still killing it.
I'd imagine Threads will be successful unless Zuckerberg kills it to focus on other things. It's integrated with Instagram and could potentially be integrated into Facebook and WhatsApp too.
I still feel that an enormous amount of why threads shows up in data analytics is because Instagram just added it on and made an account for everyone.
It wasn't adopted, it was falsely created.
I'd go even further to say that it isn't a social network, it's an add-on to another social network.
It reminds me of google plus. Technically better than the existing top dog, but the forced migration and trying to bootstrap with a huge but only semi involved userbase let it fizzle soon after the start.
Has there ever been a successful case of bootstrapping a new social media product with an existing userbase? Like not just added features or merging two together.
Google+ was wildly successful in certain circles. Tabletop RPG design still hasn’t entirely recovered from its loss.
Google+ was successful from any real metric but it didn’t replace Facebook so it was axed.
Yes. WeChat bootstrapped off of QQ accounts, which were basically like Yahoo or MSN messenger + pages for desktop users.
You know, they stopped Amazon from buying iRobot because of I guess unfair robot vacuum competition (why does that sound hilarious?). It's almost luck that Threads isn't that successful, because then they'd have to deal with monopoly concerns. At least now they can just say it's a shitty twitter knock off, don't bother us.
Same thing happened to TikTok and Lemon8 recently, though the move had to do more with US banning.
> but now the Bluesky app has exploded to 3.5 million daily active users, putting it just 1.5 times behind Meta’s Threads
Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it hard to believe. Realistically he is off by at least an order of magnitude.
Mashable used to be one of my go-to blogs, but I haven't been there in a while. Has it really fallen this far?
I’d bet Meta is counting all the random Instagram users that accidentally interact with the forced threads clickbait posts in their feed.
But that doesn't really matter right? They got tricked into using it but they're still using it
It does. If all you do is tap on a post then immediately hit back you’re not really engaging with the platform. But I’m sure they’ll still count you as an active user.
The meaningful stats would be number of posts seen, engaged with, and number of posts the user made themselves.
It certainly matters as a bellwether for future traction.
Be interesting to see if they count people with the app or not. As far as I’m aware you need the app to view threads in their entirety. I tried it but uninstalled shortly after
Treads is accesible via the browser now too
This seems to be where they are getting the data from (as they get their data from FinancialTimes who get it from SimilarWeb)
https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/b...
It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes.
All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
I don’t think it’s inevitable at all.
In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else.
That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare. Over time, this has polarized people to ever further extremes and normalized disrespect and bickering (as opposed to discussion).
It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
> It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians.
> Who would read it?
Presumably, normal people who want to interact with people they already know? interaction with journalists and politicians is valuable in an entirely different manner.
Added to that is user choice over moderation and algorithms.
That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life.
Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.
I like that aspect about Bluesky too.
On “safe spaces”, as you hint at I think many of us don’t want to be shielded entirely from opposing or otherwise differing lines of thought. Speaking personally, I welcome it if there’s actual discussion to be had. Good faith discussions and exchange of perspectives is great, but I have no patience for trolls, circular logic, insults, “debate” that wouldn’t even pass for high school level, etc.
> Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.
No, leftists aren't, hence the move to Bluesky. People with right-wing opinions get harassed and cancelled all day long (in most Western countries) on social media, by the traditional media, by the institutions (including justice which should be neutral). It's very tiring but we have no choice but to endure.
I've just started using Bluesky. How does it compare to Reddit? There are dedicated subreddits for the conservatives and the liberals, and every subreddit has moderation rules. I use the right and left-focused subreddits to keep track of what's going on in different universes. However, I must mention that you won't find a reasonable discussion of left vs right ideologies on the main sub-reddits, as Reddit users are predominantly left-leaning. But at least there are smaller forums where these two groups meet and interact, and there is some debate.
It shouldn't be any surprise: it's not like the internet's userbase of 1990 represented a broad cross-section of American society, let alone western or global societies. It was mainly a bunch of academics and college students and government users. It's just gotten more and more fragmented as more people have been added.
And even then we were segregated by usenet, mailing lists, etc.
And social media didn't exist
Usenet, BBSs, mailing lists etc. are social media
In most ways they were far more social than modern social media, in that they were about socializing. The distinguishing characteristic that sets modern social media apart from the old school stuff is the performative aspect of it—where everyone is now encouraged to behave as a content producer optimizing for engagement—which is hardly social.
Not in the modern sense.
Those mediums do not have algorithms, feeds, followers, profiles, influencers, likes, or any features that many people point to as the toxic aspects of pretty much every commercial social media site of the last decade.
I’d say livejournal was the tipping point where the internet became very self-centered and your value in the platform was measured by how much engagement you were able to get.
Up until that point, in a world before blogs, social sites were mostly centered around shared interests and communities would aggressively police off topic content
> Not in the modern sense.
Yes, no one was making that comparison.
Those are very social places but I would classify them as not social media because real names / identities weren't attached.
Real names were absolutely used on Usenet especially in the early days, ditto for mailing lists (and still are for that matter), even though technically they are pseudonymous. In any case pseudonymity doesn't seem like it's relevant for whether something is a social medium or not – many social media are pseudonymous (or even anonymous, like the chans). HN is pseudonymous. Reddit. Tumblr. The various Fediverse services.
They are social networks not social media, social media is when you scream in a void and the void screams back.
The latrinalia of our age if you will.
I disagree somewhat. Social media apps are powered by feed algorithms that fall into two camps:
The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model.
The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well.
The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.
As far as I understand it, Bluesky's default feed is chronologically sorted posts from who you follow. It is as a dumb pipe as it gets.
There’s multiple feeds, which is one of its main features. There’s user created feeds, which are just aggregates of tags and keywords. These are alright, but prone to issues with cross domain terminology. ie, say you want a football/soccer feed and use the word “spurs”, you’ll end up having it filled with basketball and rodeo posts.
The two default feeds are your followed accounts in chronological order, the other is an algorithmic feed. The algorithmic feed is pretty good to be honest. I “disliked” around 20 political posts the first day, and it has seemed to responded fairly quick to that feedback.
The second camp is just artificially creating echo chambers, a virtual "separate and distinct network" for the parts that matter.
The "echo chamber" argument really doesn't speak to me because all I want is a place where I can get timely updates about: people in my research field, pictures of cute dogs, and municipal government activities. The more a website stays laser-focused on my interests, the better.
I think those things you’ve mentioned are what most people came to social media for originally, but it’s gotten lost in all the noise. The original point of social networks was to be social and connect with people in your industry or who share your interests or share a locality in common, and X especially has drifted far from that ideal — lots of users now log onto it to find something/somebody to be angry at and to argue/troll.
I’m still using an RSS reader for that very purpose. I want my trusted content displayed chronologically; miss me with the algorithm and the recommended influencers. I’ve been on the internet long enough to know what I want and how to find it.
That makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of the content provided by the recommendation algorithms, as well as human nature. A good recommendation engine, for example, would recognize when someone either likes a broad range of sources politically speaking, or likes a neutral region.
Conversely, it's unclear that a recommendation engine would be able to predict what would be best at "disrupting an echo chamber", and more importantly, when that is desirable, and what "desirable" even means. It's also unclear that the first model is successful at all in disrupting echo chambers, as opposed to exacerbating or amplifying existing positions. I think there's good reasons to think that provocative can be less effective if anything.
I disagree with this: if the only thing you allow to pierce the veil is selected based on engagement metrics you just walk away with a shallow view of your opposition. If anything this may entrench your existing views and give you a false sense of intellectual and/or moral superiority.
You need to “meet people where they are” and the first type of algorithm just doesn’t do that. It just says “conservatives/liberals really like this, so you’re going to be forced to see this too because you show interest in politics”
To give an example: let’s say I’m a small business owner who voted Trump but has some lingering concerns around how tariffs might impact my business. Am I going to be better informed reading some engagement-bait post from liberals talking about how I’m going to get “deservedly” crushed by tariffs or a post from a conservative economist laying out the cold hard facts (both good and bad)?
Your argument is in support of mine. Separate networks are an interesting legal and software engineering detail, but from the POV of the user, as long as they see what they want to see, they will stay with the network.
Ah you’re right.
Is it inevitable? I am not sure either way.
I think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups.
Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel").
This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.
I'm not convinced everyone sharing a singular global network was ever a good idea in the first place.
I don't know, the entire point of the "algorithmic bubble" was to keep the tribes separate but happy, no? And the value of the network still increases with more people on it. Maybe some future social media will figure out how to keep everyone happy at the same time. For example, I think everyone but a couple of hardcore FOSS advocates and the far-right are still using Youtube.
It does seem natural to happen. But there are loads of "neutral" accounts: gov agencies, businesses, etc that use social media for announcements and simple broadcast communication. Most are on Twitter now. I think I big question is will they add bluesky, or move (probably not, because of inertia), or something else.
> All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
Did this happen at all? Social networks have always been balkanized by culture.
If the algorithm doesn't make the filter bubble, people will make it on their own.
Not really.
The issue is that social media sites produce feeds and content matching, forcing alternative views in your face.
Its like, they have decided to push metcalfes law as far as possible, to see when the breaking point is. Like a giant social experiment.
But if everyone is in one place thats still the most desirable network to be on. Just dont push Joe Blo's dumbest political opinions in my face as sponsored content.
Is it all the ways that matter? The author mentions one way, DAU. Sure, that is important but I can think of other things that matter. The number of “creator” accounts matters just as much as the number of lurkers.
From my experience Bluesky is way better and has respect for the user’s choice front and center. Lists of users to follow is a first-class citizen feature. Their algorithm is a chronological feed, not boosting engagement bait.
Here's one metric that matters – revenue per user. Bluesky's is, I assume, zero, and soon that will have to change. Threads meanwhile has the largest social media ads and monetization platform in the world behind it ready to make the dollars flow at the push of a button.
> largest social media ads and monetization platform in the world behind it ready to make the dollars flow at the push of a button
At the direct cost of making a worse product for users.
I remain hopeful that Bluesky is able to monetise/fund development without succumbing to working against its users.
Hoping that the people who made twitter what it is will somehow create a different outcome when doing the same thing is ... something.
Well, they’re not doing the same thing aren’t they?
I’m cautiously optimistic that the open/decentralised nature of these sites can act as a powerful forcing function to keep them in check, keeping their incentives more inline with their users compared to traditional commercial social media sites.
Mastodon’s financial (and so far technical) structure seems more inline with this compared to taking on investment, so we’ll see how it goes.
I just want a network that’s not going to juice engagement to optimise for page views for ad revenue. I want a reverse chronological feed. I want third party clients that might have different UX ideas
It’s free to hope :)
wouldn't things like creator-lurker ratio be captured within DAU? as in, poor ratio leads to poor DAU?
Not necessarily. There could be different types of content that requires different types of creators, like imagine professional video producers vs your friends posting about their day. There could also be a different algorithm/network that allows for a few creators to feed a large number of consumers.
> Their algorithm is a chronological feed
Why does a chronological feed get considered and algo? Do we consider SQL queries with WHERE and ORDER BY clauses an algo now?
What else could it possibly be?
fun sum(x, y) { return x + y }
Congratulations, you have yourself an algorithm.
It absolutely is. Sure it's the default, but it's the default to measure against and beat. It's like comparing ML algos against the average prediction, or forecasts against the previous known value.
The head of instagram/threads (Mosseri) appears to have no idea how the algorithm on these platforms work. He is shocked to see how many people are talking about threads in his feed. It may explain how threads has managed to waste such a large captured audience.
Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
The difference in moderation is night and day.
Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them).
That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.
Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.
Man, I wish I could be even a hundredth as effective at pissing people off online. I only piss off boring people I guess.
A lot of the hate you get depends not on what you say, but what you are.
What the hell are you doing or saying to warrant that kind of negative attention?
That kind of attention is never warranted.
It's pretty easy to get that kind of vitriol if you say that you want people like you to continue existing.
And you say this to people you label not like you. You probably have more in common than you think. You both agree to label the other and you decided to fight a proxy battle from the agreed among identities. Do you want the other side not to exist as well? If yes let them know.
People defending themselves from bigotry, and bigots themselves, are not equivalent. Black people not wanting racists to exist, and racists not wanting black people to exist, do you see a distinction?
There has been such a consistent attempt at ramming square pegs into round holes online in trying to “both sides” a bunch of these issues.
One trait is immutable and the other is not.
One trait is entirely internally focused and is not defined by a rejection of anyone external to the subject, the other's trait is entirely defined by such an external focus on the rejection of another person's immutable identity.
Let’s not pretend the disagreement is about fiscal policy.
lol I don’t want the bigots and people sending death threats to exist, I’ll stand on a soapbox and say that
> They don’t seem to offer anything new
Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.
'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.
Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.
But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.
There is more momentum against Musk now than when threads launched. Not sure it is enough to overcome the network effect - but there is a lot of illwill towards his projects.
I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.
Free speech is the upside of X. People leaving to join the echo chambers of Bluesky or Threads, only serves to turn X into the echo chamber they claim it is.
I know I'm falling for the bait, but saying X is some last bastion of free speech is baffling, considering it's actual actions.
Why do the remaining posters keep self-censoring "Blues*y"?
I don’t know what you are referring to. I’ve never seen someone self-censor Bluesky. I see people talking about it on X all the time. Mainly to highlight some of the worst content they find there but that’s another subject…
I tried checking out Bluesky the other day. The feed was mainly unhinged political rants of a very particular flavor.
A feature of Bluesky is the ability to change your feed algorithm (or code your own - yes I wrote ‘code’). You can easily filter all political (labeled) content. To say that BS is an echo chamber is untrue, though I do not disbelieve that you observed that algorithmic choice when you first tried the app. There are many echo chambers for sure, but the protocol is designed to permit you to exclude or join them. Unlike competitor systems (which I also use, and dislike more and more due to the lack of ability to choose what I see - despite trying).
Right, and what's more the charge of echo chamber has always been intellectually lazy.
You can have a fruitful exchanges of ideas and information and debates on a foundation of similar values in a way that amounts to more than just repeating ideas back and forth. Using the term as a catch-all for a shared desire for conversations to have certain ground rules or certain community values, or subjects that spark your intellectual curiosity, calling those echo chambers is shallow and is not going to inform you about the real cultural dynamics that drive those kinds of communities.
It's just a lazy way to try absence of critical thought by looking for the wrong thing. If people labeling things as echo chambers cared about the things they said they cared about, they would look at entirely different criteria, such as epistemic closure, the quality of relationships, propensity for trolling, and so on.
Some people tested that if you say there are two genders in BlueSky your account will be blocked right away. These kind of things never happens on X. I see lot of right wing posts but also left wing post.
Cause it is trolling, pure hatred. Hermaphroditism exists, simple scientifically backed up fact.
Right, this is one of the games that trolls play which is kind of to search for normalizing language, create a provocation, and then relish in the attention derived from the provocation.
> Free speech is the upside of X.
You can’t possibly believe that, can you? Have you not noticed the vast gulf between what Musk says and what Musk does?
As someone (who likes to think) is pretty unbiased politically, I can say I’ll go wherever the people I’m interested post. I have been somewhat surprised that pretty non political accounts have moved to Bluesky which I have interpreted as both political and motivated by the loads of political bs that are posted on x that normal people simply get tired of. I think Bluesky will gain more traction than threads but will end up being a more successful mastodon. A place where people with massive followings who simply don’t like x will post and there will be two competing apps.
It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not, it's that it's flavor of politics is increasingly resembling that of 4chan. I just skimmed though the auto-play videos on my account and the algorithm decided to show me this for some reason: https://x.com/AlaskanTom/status/1860339990992925170
That's far from the worst I've seen on there either, evidently you can just post about how Hitler was right and it won't affect your visibility at all now, nevermind get you banned.
> It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not
But this is not true. I always use my "following" feed and not my "for you" feed. Other than sponsored ads the only thing I see are posts from people I follow. I don't understand why people persist with the narrative that Twitter forces people into "the algorithm".
I've been splitting time between Twitter & Bluesky for the last year or so. The only real difference i notice is the set of people I follow as until recently most of my Twitter follows weren't on Bluesky
I also only use the following feed, but a fairly recent change to the video player means it now immediately cuts to the next video in the auto-play queue (or an ad) when it finishes, and that's always algorithmically driven regardless of which feed you were using.
Fair. I almost always refuse to click on videos in twitter-like sites, so wouldn't have noticed this. I (usually) hate video content, especially the massive shift towards video content in our media sources.
>but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same
I disagree. Bluesky will grow further and then be like a "Coke or Pepsi" to Twitter. (Albeit, it will stay smaller than Twitter.)
I have 2 threads accounts and never created a single one. That's because I had 2 Instagram accounts.
The difference is people chose to go to Bluesky, Threads accounts were just added on to your Insta account by Meta.
Bluesky's custom labels, algorithm choice, client choice, and starter packs seem like legitimately cool features.
I'm not sure Threads ever had that much of a spike in usage beyond the first day of new accounts. Got the impression a huge number of people curious about it signed up due to the very easy onboarding if you already had an instagram, looked around a little and then never went back.
Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.
For social media, moderation makes the product
I’m going to guess you don’t use the service much… You’d likely have a very different opinion otherwise
I have given Threads a good try, and recently when Bluesky activity started up I restarted using Bluesky (it didn't stick for me the first time). The technology doesn't really matter that much, as long as it's basically competent. It's only the social network itself.
I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't.
Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us.
X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two.
Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.
> Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same.
Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads.
I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.
It would be the worst thing for Bluesky if the eternal September came over from Twitter. I think that population is too passive to make the move and will put up with any level of advertising etc.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation
Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there!
It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in.
There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss.
The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to.
There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on.
Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping.
The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049
X is pretty great now. Once the politics dies down a little it'll be the best place to be for the next 4+ years
I made a Bluesky account long ago and started cross-posting my tiktoks, often on the popular and titillating topic of project management. For a long time it was sleepy as I would have expected. I got a sudden uptick recently, which prompted me to figure out how to port my follows from X, which I did with "sky follower bridge." Bluesky has been a lively, friendly place.
Sky follower bridge was able to scrape my X blocklist, but could not turn it into a Bluesky block list. No troll problems yet so that's OK for now. I still have to host my videos on titok because some are too long for Bluesky.
My tiktok "for you page" has turned to sludge and my followers are not getting my posts without setting notification options. I wonder if the magical algorithm was sequestered in China to hide it from inquiries. Hopefully a Bluesky presence helps.
> overtaking Threads
So the lowest bar possibly imaginable?
I don't think it's that low of a bar. Threads benefited from easy account creation and promotion from Instagram (2b MAU?)
Bluesky started from word of mouth invite only
I've fallen for the Threads-links shown in Instagram. Obviously the instagram connection is what gave them a great start at a user-base. But, everytime I try to use Threads, something seems off (mainly see lame, boring, engagement-bait). Bluesky seems different and better. Also a much better story in-terms of open data, open protocol, etc.
I can think of a "Truthier" "social network/platform" that is lower than Threads...
Really ? Right in front of my lemmy username ?
I downloaded threads when it came out, but I only used it once.
I think the factor which will determine which networks survive is the ability to handle bots driven by modern AI agents. I’m not sure how even the best moderation features can detect and mitigate these.
It’s gonna be incredibly interesting to see what happens concerning this. I suspect that bots will probably thrive in feeds where ‘the algorithm’ is responsible for recommending most content. However, bots probably won’t do as well with vanilla follower feeds.
AI doesn't matter. Moderation should apply to humans and AIs equally.
AI has the ability to overwhelm systems of moderation at a much greater scale than humans. That's the issue.
> Moderation should apply to humans and AIs equally.
Unless you’re trying to create a social network to promote human voices and not bots.
Gotta ask, am I missing something with how bluesky is supposed to be used? Every time I open something from there it takes over 30 seconds to load on my phone
For all the ways that matter, find a more meaningful bar.
I predict Bluesky will go the way of Threads and Mastodon.
Did thread have significant traffic to begin with? The last four to six times I logged on it was a ghost town.
> Meta-owned Threads started November with 5 times the daily app users of Bluesky. That number is now down to just 1.5.
Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Today are either within an order of magnitude of X?
Blusky started at 0. Threads started with existing meta users. That seems like a big difference to me.
> Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity
Threads has ~300m MAU and will be on track to being larger than X in a year.
In fact X is struggling so much they now provide the option to hide engagement metrics: https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-hides-x-engagement-figure...
> Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Looks like no, threads is pretty flat and bluesky is hockey stick-ing
from this graph: https://bsky.app/profile/jburnmurdoch.bsky.social/post/3lbmp...
not sure what x data looks like
Social media was doomed the moment its users were demoted from customers to exploitable sources of data. Bluesky will inevitably follow the same path of enshittification as every other social network before it. Its current success hinges solely on the nostalgic desire for a single platform where people can gather in peace. The real question is: How many cycles of doom will people endure before they finally stop jumping from one sinking ship to another?
There are no ads so that is one aspect that could prevent enshitification. Businesses can't just spend money to force their way into peoples feeds. At least not in a traditional advertising kind of way.
For me it's a very easy choice to go with Bluesky over Threads.
With Threads you can already see that Facebook/Instagram is in it's DNA. There's no pure "following" feed. It's instead an algorithmic feed that mixes people you follow with people Threads decides to push. So it's going down the enshittification path from day one.
With Bluesky there's at least some hope that it will not end up as the algorithmic time sinks all other social media has slowly become. I'm all for discoverability, but allow me to decide when and how I discover new people to follow. Never touch my "following" feed, and I'll be happy.
Threads has a massive problem in that it recruits its users from Instagram (there are others but primarily its still a branch of Instagram) which is the domain of AI generated slop and people I actually know in real life.
The whole point of the twitter style firehose is to be not be either of those things. Bluesky honestly probably has a decent shot but I think its still attracting some hyper-orthodox, censorious, thinkers. Musk has gone too far with X[0] but I don't think his vision in the abstract is wrong.
[0] Every accusation is a confession - X is now near-directly attached to the US Gov!
I think the Bluesky crowd will probably chill out with time, but right now if you don’t readily use the block feature there you’re going to have your feed and notifications peppered with the same trolls that are currently making X inhospitable. The majority of users getting blocked aren’t interested in actual discourse, they’re just there to get a rise out of people.
It’s difficult to envision any social network staying healthy in the long term without either decent moderation or robust tools to help users manage harassment and the like. There’s just too many bad actors who will take advantage of low-control environments.
> inevitable
I don't get any trolls on either platform. I guess I'm too boring :)
I don’t get much trouble myself personally either, but it shows up in the replies to the posts in my feed which isn’t great and why a good block feature is necessary.
I find it's interesting that React which Bluesky was built on, was originally license with BSD + patents, which disallow building Facebook competing products.
Another day, another advert for Bluesky. There've been 70 stories with "bluesky" in the title submitted to HN this week alone, compared with 130 in the past month.
For all the talk of leaving Twitter, Twitter has 30x the daily visits of its rivals: https://www.axios.com/2024/11/14/elon-musk-x-attention-war-s...
My personal view is if you're on Twitter, leave it and don't replace it with anything. Find peace and tranquility in your life.
> For all the talk of leaving Twitter, Twitter has 30x the daily visits of its rivals.
Over the whole world maybe, but perhaps not among the HN crowd.
threads federates with mastodon, what stops threads getting on the AT protocol? is it just their assumed desire to not share data? they could be a mastodon / AT bridge
People keep missing the point of Threads. It isn't designed to be a pure Twitter clone and doesn't want to become the public square for news, politics etc.
It wants to be a text-centric network that helps release Instagram to be more video-centric to compete with TikTok. And so it wants content that is fun, interesting and light. And of course easily monetisable.
So I know people like having a fight but I see the two sites as being complimentary and both needing to thrive in order to relegate X to the dust bin.
I see the Fediverse as pretty left-wing, but Bluesky seems unlikely to stay that way because moderation works differently. (No admins blocking each other over policy.)
Threads is a good product. My twitter feed is dumpster fire of right wing politics and rage baity post. Threads has been much more balance. Open the app and have a good time.
People have been trying to make Bluesky happen for years. It won't. I believe moderation is fundamental to any social network, otherwise the bad actors always take over. Meta has been content moderation for years and understands the nuances.
People seek "Political discourse", but they will quickly realize our politics are too much of shit-show to have any kind of intellectual conversation. The rage bait and culture wars have taken over. Important discussions of policy, small vs big govt, taxes have taken the backseat. Our "politics" are no longer politics, and won't be for at least the next 4-8 years.
Big names like Lichtman announced he was leaving X for Bluesky and came back on X in less than 24 hours.
What makes social media work is the echo effect, you just won't be able to get it on a heavily censored platform like Bluesky and Reddit and a big reason why X is overtaking even mainstream media as much as people who lean left.
Its a huge problem to be imposing political leanings of the moderator on a public square because you end up creating an echo chamber which people inevitably abandon because you just won't reach enough people.
I've tried both Threads and Bluesky and I like Bluesky much better, I mean both UI & UX. One issue I have with Threads is that I stumble upon many users that came from Instagram automatically that are not used to post in this format. So the content is mostly a mirror of IG which makes it pointless. In Bluesky I feel like the posts come from people that fleed X and it's just more interesting somehow.
How is Threads? I keep getting ads to push me to join it on Instagram, but whatever they recommend me via those ads is usually vapid Linkedin-type drivel. And I can’t see it on phone without the app.
I open it up once in a while but it mainly seems to be ranked by predicted CTR/engagement. For example, out of the first 20 posts in my feed I got a ton of travel/finance guru garbage and multiple posts with some variant of “Do not buy a Tesla, plenty of better EV choices.” And random memes stolen from other sites.
Tons of posts trying to get me to click on them to read more.
None of the accounts in my feed are ones I follow. It’s basically algorithmically driven slop.
I have gotten lured by engage-bait from Instagram. IMHO there is something off about Threads. It surely depends on who you follow and how you use it, but I find it totally un-engaging. Bluesky recently, seems better.
ICYMI, Actor/director/activist Rob Reiner just proclaimed Bluesky to be a racist platform full of evil.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/rob-reiner-says-maga-scum-...
Whats the point? bluesky, threads, mastodon, we have x.com works just fine.
I'm moderately active on X, and helped build an early version of what became Threads (on which I am almost entirely inactive these days). I'm not surprised Bluesky's been more successful than Threads as the X-alternative:
* A lot of the popular content on X is political; Threads' decision to downrank or ban political content makes the posts less engaging. It's understandable from a certain perspective — a lot of the political content is just dishonest ragebait (and I learned to unfollow most political X accounts as a result). However, one of the most interesting things about X is that it's where news travels fastest, and it's significantly less-filtered than traditional journalist editorialization. It's hard to compete with X if you don't allow it, or downrank it.
* Obviously Elon's massive political spending will have an impact on the userbase of the product, since the spending is so one-sided. X has become dramatically more right-wing since he took over, and even more so after Trump's campaign, so there was pent-up demand for something else... Especially something else that allows left-wing political content (i.e. not Threads). There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Elon changing the X ranking algorithm to favor right-wing content, but TBH I think it's simpler than that: more left-wing people left the site (or used it less) due to distaste for Elon, and Elon unbanned hordes of right-wing accounts, who are very enthusiastic about supporting it.
* There's also one way in which X is (openly) biased in its ranking: paid accounts have their posts ranked higher than free accounts... And paying for X is public: you have a blue check next to your name if you pay. In right-wing spaces, having a paid bluecheck account is a badge of honor, in part due to it supporting Elon; in left-wing spaces, it's a badge of shame for the same reason. Although from a technical standpoint the ranking change isn't specifically political, in practice it's very political: many more right-wingers are bluechecks, so in practice you see more of their content and less left-wing content. Bluesky doesn't have paid accounts, and even if it did, it wouldn't organically result in right-wing content being prioritized to the same extent, so for left-wing users it's a much friendlier place.
* This is perhaps more of a personal gripe, but Elon Musk's decision to downrank external links has been pretty bad for the quality of X content. I understand the reasoning: he's trying to keep people engaged in-app, and external links make you leave. But plenty of interesting people use X as a promotional channel for their (interesting) content, which I want to see, and which often doesn't suit tweet formats. So by downranking posts with external links, I see less of the things I actually am interested in. I don't think I'm alone in this, and Bluesky doesn't do it — and I've heard (anecdotal) reports of people really enjoying being able to more reliably engage with that kind of stuff again on Bluesky.
Mastodon is too complicated and segmented to take off. But Bluesky isn't, so I can see why it's having a zeitgeist post-Trump's-election, which Elon helped fund. I'm not sure how much Bluesky will manage to retain its current spike in users: Threads at one point had a similar spike, and most users churned back to X. But it makes sense to me that Bluesky is a more natural home for the ex-X diaspora than Threads, given the reasons many of them left X.
Twitter does not need a replacement. There seem to be a popular opinion that it does, but it's not something people are willing to act on.
It's a better app than it used to be, overall.
All politics aside (not a minor point for many), Twitter has been made much worse IMHO in the Musk era.
They de-prioritize links, prevent 3rd party apps, closed the API, and blocked access for non-logged-in viewing.
And a smaller meta-point: changed from an iconic name to a simple non-informative letter (Besides Google and maybe Uber, who have added a popular verb to the lexicon?)
I feel this is a downside only to a particular bunch. For most people, Twitter is doing better than ever. Community notes are amazing and innovative and should be adopted by every social media platform. X feels legitimately more fun than most other apps. Plus, at this point, I think a solid portion of people have been banned from social media apps. You can't exile your way towards whatever ideal society you want. The barbarians are always at the gates.
I especially feel this sort of enforced community separation is so prevalent among those who are so reticent to build a border wall, but I'm sure psychology has an explanation somewhere.
Community notes was designed, implemented and released before the acquisition. Only the name is new. Previously it was called birdwatch.
> but it's not something people are willing to act on.
Sure looks like they are.
You can't view Tweets without being signed in.
API access is banned. Third party apps are banned.
A verification badge used to signal trustworthiness, now it can be bought.
All your posts are being used to train an AI model without the ability to opt out.
Every second Tweet is a crypto scam.
How exactly is the experience better than before?
Certain groups are trying to will bluesky into being successful. From my personal experience, X/Twitter is still killing it.
I'd imagine Threads will be successful unless Zuckerberg kills it to focus on other things. It's integrated with Instagram and could potentially be integrated into Facebook and WhatsApp too.