Bluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen. Hands down. I can't imagine anyone enjoying it unless they're 1) super into the US politics/domestic issues AND 2) politically aligned with the main user base of Bluesky.
But somehow the devs of Bluesky never thought of making it the default tab. They should be making a better Twitter but what they're actually building is just Truth Social for the left.
If you are careful about who you follow and you click on “less like this” whenever you see hysterical stuff about politics the “discover” feed is pretty good, in fact back when I was concerned about this I found it has 30% as much hysterical stuff about politics as my “following” feed.
Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
The distinction is that Mastodon doesn't have to grow, and Bluesky does. There's an extent to which Bluesky is viable because its venture-funded owner pays for the infrastructure it operates on (Mastodon communities generally have to stand on their own two feet). If there's no path for Bluesky to grow into a viable business on its current financial runway, the funding for the infrastructure will end.
I am on several socials, personally I like the crowd on Mastodon the best but they all have their charms. I mean friends, furs, family, people I take street photos of, local radio personalities and people who look up to my character can be found in many places.
Mastodon isn't trying to compete anyway, it's not a Product(tm) driven by desire for profits, so the people who use it don't care if it "wins" or becomes more popular than whatever other platform. We're all just hanging out socializing and stuff, sharing neat things and discussing things like communities do. It's not easy to accurately estimate active Mastodon/Fediverse users, but then again, I'm not sure anyone really cares either way? lol
I wanted to like bluesky, I really tried, but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself, it's off-putting.
I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things.
If Meta had put Threads on the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub, things could have been so different... maybe there's still time. The engineering philosophy for AT / Bluesky is incredible, being able to develop your own timeline algorithms, distributed moderation agencies, etc. But whenever I give Bluesky a try unfortunately I just can't find people talking about my interests. This seems like a scale problem, which Threads solves.
Nothing is stopping you from building your own AP algorithm either though, right? An "algorithm" is, ultimately, a ranking model that ranks a set of incoming posts based on some criteria no? Nothing stops someone from building their own ranking model for themselves.
I agree that the Bluesky userbase doesn't really talk about the topics I care about and I think the audience is a big factor.
We have ample evidence that platforms whose goal is to shove everyone you've ever met into the same room isn't a good thing. Modest growth and a healthy community that doesn't have to include everyone to succeed seems like a good thing.
Sure, but not if you've taken venture funding. We already have a public, community platform for building slow-growing tight-knit communities: Mastodon/ActivityPub.
As an anecdote, I switched a year or two ago along with most everyone I followed on X.
It’s nothing like the vibe on old Twitter. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ideologically siloed. I’m quite left of center, but everyone on bluesky seems to be a caricature; the blue-haired loonies the right memes about. People there are seriously intolerant of anything other than their perceived orthodoxy. I don’t know what made it this way but it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
A lot of people on Bluesky are pretty normal and if you make a point to block on the first bit of political NPC behavior you can find people that are interested in cat pictures and software and such.
The only way in which BlueSky is preferentially catering to the left is by existing as an alternative to X and specifically providing tighter control of what is in your feed; and this is only “catering to the Left” because of the groups towards which X either has weakened or stopped enforcing its policies against harassment towards.
(In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)
Why would bots be limited to twitter? Wouldn't Bluesky be just as susceptiblle.
I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me.
I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 50.
Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
Bluesky and Threads both have a fundamental issue in that their entire pitch is "We are like Twitter, but we are not run by Elon Musk, a Republican." Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones that were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place. When you whole pitch has zero appeal to 95% of people, its dead.
Not sure what to say about Threads. I mean, if you have an Instagram account they’ll try to give you a Threads account and photos I post to Insta automatically go to Threads so I am probably in the top 5% of Threads posters though I hardly ever log in. I am happy if people see my photos on Insta or Threads or LinkedIn or Nextdoor or wherever.
Thread’s notifications are just plain weird like it is usually clickbait where you can’t tell if they love Trump or hate Trump and if the one sexy cosplayer/alt fashion model I follow because I know her in IRL did something provocative with her friend who has tattoos from head to toe, Threads thinks this is front page news.
Yeah, I agree. It's the inverse of the problem Scott Alexander has observed in the past: when you make an alternative platform based on the premise of "we won't ban people based on having unpopular views", you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views. It turns your platform into an awful place that nobody wants to associate with, even if they agree that it's bad to ban people for having unpopular views.
The only promising social network to me was that browser extension that let you comment on every single page, but it was shut down when people freaked out that it (obviously) sent the URL of every page you visited to their servers. I've wanted something like that for so long. There just isn't enough thread-based discussion happening online. It's all buried in what are essentially darkweb chatrooms (unindexed Discord chats)
I hope against hope that people started to realize that the problem isn't the platform, it's the entire approach.
Who am I kidding, people just realized that Bluesky wasn't going to be the next big thing and so it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
What does success look like? I get what I want from Twitter/X through a pull through cache. I get to read the folks I follow on Bluesky. Works for me? My feed as a utility is working as expected. I keep what I want to read, and mute and block that which I do not. I remain in control of my data and experience of the firehose. If someone I'd like to see on Bluesky is not yet there, I ask them to be. If there is data on Bluesky not yet there but that might have value to others, I pipe it in via a PDS and pub sub automation.
How would email and RSS be the next big thing? Because that is what https://atproto.com/ is, and to some extent, here. A private entity or individual cannot capture the AT Protocol network as happened to Twitter/X, it has already succeeded.
Certainly, this is a different perspective than "What metrics can we use to value this entity we're going to attempt to flip to someone else?" Worst case, the public benefit corp is converted to a non profit and tax deductible donations are used (potentially with a foundational fund built to operate in perpetuity, think Wikipedia) to fund the underlying storage and distribution infrastructure and labor costs for operations, similar to Signal and many other tech non profits.
I think there are two things going on. After launch, there was an exuberant group of users who believed the purpose or aim of Bluesky was to be a recreation of Twitter in terms of user base and impact. They were lead on by the icon a bit and lots of rhetoric. And I think many believed it would destroy X. By their standards, Bluesky is an epic failure.
But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.
Given what Musk did back at the time - member him carrying a sink? Randomly unplugging servers? - it was not that much of a stretch to assume the BS would eventually catch up with him and Twitter would enter the FO phase of FAFO.
Unfortunately, for unfathomable reasons Twitter is still alive somehow, despite being a cesspit of Russian propaganda, far-right propaganda, general trolls and a ton of porn sellers... I frankly assume the porn is what keeps a lot of people on there instead of Truth Social or one of the countless other attempts.
"For Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities."
Bluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen. Hands down. I can't imagine anyone enjoying it unless they're 1) super into the US politics/domestic issues AND 2) politically aligned with the main user base of Bluesky.
The funniest part is that there is a better algorithm. It's right here: https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/feed/for-...
But somehow the devs of Bluesky never thought of making it the default tab. They should be making a better Twitter but what they're actually building is just Truth Social for the left.
If you are careful about who you follow and you click on “less like this” whenever you see hysterical stuff about politics the “discover” feed is pretty good, in fact back when I was concerned about this I found it has 30% as much hysterical stuff about politics as my “following” feed.
The fact that Bluesky has first class support for me to choose my own feed algorithm is proof it’s NOTHING like truth social.
I don't want to see politics, rage bait, sexism, hate, performative superiority, whining, or negativity.
Who invented all of these algorithms? I want none of this.
I want good news, awesome things, uplifting stories, cool hacks. That's it. That's literally it.
Then follow people producing such content?
my tiktok fyp is just that.
Maybe Bluesky is not quite the Twitter rival it set out to be, but it's got a better shot than Mastodon, according to the user count graphs here:
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
https://mastodon-analytics.com/
Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
The distinction is that Mastodon doesn't have to grow, and Bluesky does. There's an extent to which Bluesky is viable because its venture-funded owner pays for the infrastructure it operates on (Mastodon communities generally have to stand on their own two feet). If there's no path for Bluesky to grow into a viable business on its current financial runway, the funding for the infrastructure will end.
We already have others running infrastructure as well so if bsky goes away the platform can survive
I am on several socials, personally I like the crowd on Mastodon the best but they all have their charms. I mean friends, furs, family, people I take street photos of, local radio personalities and people who look up to my character can be found in many places.
Mastodon isn't trying to compete anyway, it's not a Product(tm) driven by desire for profits, so the people who use it don't care if it "wins" or becomes more popular than whatever other platform. We're all just hanging out socializing and stuff, sharing neat things and discussing things like communities do. It's not easy to accurately estimate active Mastodon/Fediverse users, but then again, I'm not sure anyone really cares either way? lol
I wanted to like bluesky, I really tried, but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself, it's off-putting.
I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things.
If Meta had put Threads on the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub, things could have been so different... maybe there's still time. The engineering philosophy for AT / Bluesky is incredible, being able to develop your own timeline algorithms, distributed moderation agencies, etc. But whenever I give Bluesky a try unfortunately I just can't find people talking about my interests. This seems like a scale problem, which Threads solves.
Nothing is stopping you from building your own AP algorithm either though, right? An "algorithm" is, ultimately, a ranking model that ranks a set of incoming posts based on some criteria no? Nothing stops someone from building their own ranking model for themselves.
I agree that the Bluesky userbase doesn't really talk about the topics I care about and I think the audience is a big factor.
Anything on AP or AT can bridge both ways anyway
Meta's ActivityPub is very fake, it's not only off by default and functionally limited, but also has a dark pattern to get you turn it off.
It would be the same if they do ATP.
We have ample evidence that platforms whose goal is to shove everyone you've ever met into the same room isn't a good thing. Modest growth and a healthy community that doesn't have to include everyone to succeed seems like a good thing.
Sure, but not if you've taken venture funding. We already have a public, community platform for building slow-growing tight-knit communities: Mastodon/ActivityPub.
Toni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...
Can someone pretty please create a decent alternative to X?
As an anecdote, I switched a year or two ago along with most everyone I followed on X.
It’s nothing like the vibe on old Twitter. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ideologically siloed. I’m quite left of center, but everyone on bluesky seems to be a caricature; the blue-haired loonies the right memes about. People there are seriously intolerant of anything other than their perceived orthodoxy. I don’t know what made it this way but it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
A lot of people on Bluesky are pretty normal and if you make a point to block on the first bit of political NPC behavior you can find people that are interested in cat pictures and software and such.
there's nothing you can do technically to fix bluesky.
people just hate social networks at this point in this timeline.
Twitter's not doing too bad: 550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates
So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
The only way in which BlueSky is preferentially catering to the left is by existing as an alternative to X and specifically providing tighter control of what is in your feed; and this is only “catering to the Left” because of the groups towards which X either has weakened or stopped enforcing its policies against harassment towards.
(In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)
Edison Research's "currently use Twitter" numbers for people 12+ went from 27% in 2023 to 22% in 2025.
Pew found 16% of U.S. teens used X in 2025, versus 23% in 2022 and 33% in 2014–15.
For reference, pinterest has roughly the same number of monthly active users. [0]
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
80% are bots, 10% trolls, and 5% foreign agents.
I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.
Why would bots be limited to twitter? Wouldn't Bluesky be just as susceptiblle.
I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me.
I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 50.
The real percentage of bots on X is a baseline of 10% and can quadruple around contentious topics; see: https://www.clickguard.com/blog/twitter-spam-bots/
Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
We get to block them. They may exist but they’re invisible.
The bots and trolls and agents on X are always on your front porch.
Is there a different timeline?
Yeah, but it's behind a cosmic paywall.
Bluesky and Threads both have a fundamental issue in that their entire pitch is "We are like Twitter, but we are not run by Elon Musk, a Republican." Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones that were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place. When you whole pitch has zero appeal to 95% of people, its dead.
Not sure what to say about Threads. I mean, if you have an Instagram account they’ll try to give you a Threads account and photos I post to Insta automatically go to Threads so I am probably in the top 5% of Threads posters though I hardly ever log in. I am happy if people see my photos on Insta or Threads or LinkedIn or Nextdoor or wherever.
Thread’s notifications are just plain weird like it is usually clickbait where you can’t tell if they love Trump or hate Trump and if the one sexy cosplayer/alt fashion model I follow because I know her in IRL did something provocative with her friend who has tattoos from head to toe, Threads thinks this is front page news.
Yeah, I agree. It's the inverse of the problem Scott Alexander has observed in the past: when you make an alternative platform based on the premise of "we won't ban people based on having unpopular views", you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views. It turns your platform into an awful place that nobody wants to associate with, even if they agree that it's bad to ban people for having unpopular views.
calling elon musk "a Republican" is such a wild understatement
The only promising social network to me was that browser extension that let you comment on every single page, but it was shut down when people freaked out that it (obviously) sent the URL of every page you visited to their servers. I've wanted something like that for so long. There just isn't enough thread-based discussion happening online. It's all buried in what are essentially darkweb chatrooms (unindexed Discord chats)
[flagged]
I hope against hope that people started to realize that the problem isn't the platform, it's the entire approach.
Who am I kidding, people just realized that Bluesky wasn't going to be the next big thing and so it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
What does success look like? I get what I want from Twitter/X through a pull through cache. I get to read the folks I follow on Bluesky. Works for me? My feed as a utility is working as expected. I keep what I want to read, and mute and block that which I do not. I remain in control of my data and experience of the firehose. If someone I'd like to see on Bluesky is not yet there, I ask them to be. If there is data on Bluesky not yet there but that might have value to others, I pipe it in via a PDS and pub sub automation.
How would email and RSS be the next big thing? Because that is what https://atproto.com/ is, and to some extent, here. A private entity or individual cannot capture the AT Protocol network as happened to Twitter/X, it has already succeeded.
Certainly, this is a different perspective than "What metrics can we use to value this entity we're going to attempt to flip to someone else?" Worst case, the public benefit corp is converted to a non profit and tax deductible donations are used (potentially with a foundational fund built to operate in perpetuity, think Wikipedia) to fund the underlying storage and distribution infrastructure and labor costs for operations, similar to Signal and many other tech non profits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo (nsfw)
(Threads is always there for the normies until it enshittifies and Meta chases whatever catches Mark's eye next)
I think there are two things going on. After launch, there was an exuberant group of users who believed the purpose or aim of Bluesky was to be a recreation of Twitter in terms of user base and impact. They were lead on by the icon a bit and lots of rhetoric. And I think many believed it would destroy X. By their standards, Bluesky is an epic failure.
But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.
> And I think many believed it would destroy X.
Given what Musk did back at the time - member him carrying a sink? Randomly unplugging servers? - it was not that much of a stretch to assume the BS would eventually catch up with him and Twitter would enter the FO phase of FAFO.
Unfortunately, for unfathomable reasons Twitter is still alive somehow, despite being a cesspit of Russian propaganda, far-right propaganda, general trolls and a ton of porn sellers... I frankly assume the porn is what keeps a lot of people on there instead of Truth Social or one of the countless other attempts.
> it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
I liked Josh Barro's take: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...
Agreed. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49264162>
Interesting quote:
"For Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities."
Code: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
Website: https://atproto.com/