I will say as someone has an invite: you're not missing out on anything. It definitely has far less activity than either Twitter or Threads, but somehow it also just has worse content. You would think they were invite-only to keep the quality high, but everything is either furry porn or hate-filled rage bait, neither of which I am personally a fan of at all. I keep telling trying to tell it as much, but I honestly don't think I've seen one post I truly wanted to see. I tried to do it for like a week hoping it would get better, but honestly it seems like there's just nothing worthwhile on the whole site. Personally, the only way I can see me ever using Bluesky is if they manage to totally invert their userbase. You need to just start over when you somehow get a crowd worse than either version of Twitter, in my opinion.
As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that. It’s a move that reeks of desperation and makes me not want to sign up. I should feel compelled to make an account if I want to follow someone or post something, not just to read a single post. I’m not sure how they expect to grow when they hide what’s inside and word of mouth is largely negative. Walled gardens have their place, but it’s not the “town square” Elon has been taking about. In the town square I can walk through and overhear conversations without identifying myself or joining in.
This has been a real irritant since Elon Musk took it over and started making a lot of terrible decisions. Depending on what platform you’re on, you could rewrite the Twitter link to nitter.net (just replace, manually or through an extension, twitter.com with nitter.net) and you’ll not only avoid those signup/login prompts but also be able to see the complete thread instead of just a single tweet.
I was never into Twitter because of the noise and extreme levels of anger, but this has allowed me to view the minority of tweets and tweet threads that could be interesting and/or useful.
Depending on how you build your social graph, your experience can run the gamut of anything from peak political Twitter to peak pedantic Mastodon. It's up to you.
There is one at https://firesky.tv/
I think it exists as a proof that there is activity on Bluesky. If you were looking for a feed that highlights trending posts, this is not it.
Optimizing for engagement is not inherently bad, nor does it necessarily result in socially suboptimal outcomes. My TikTok feed is very engaging without having to resort to triggering my anger.
A recommendation algorithm that only sticks to a handful of given topics (rage bait and furry porn?) is not a very good one.
For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for. A few never came back to twitter, but most did mostly for social reasons. But twitter as a platform gets worse each day, and if it ever truly breaks or dies, bsky will be the schelling point for a whole bunch of people
For the average twitter user this is probably the exact opposite of a compelling position. Tech people want more control and less abstraction. Everyone else is happy with their walled gardens and ten layers of separation from the machine code. Its why things are the way they are and not some technopunk utopia that we all want.
I think you're under-estimating what's happening with 3rd-party feeds. That's a core pattern where independent services can integrate into the UX as if they're native to the product. This means turning the client into an open platform for third-party applications.
That's been a success with feeds. They're actively adopted and created by users. Most of the feeds are hosted by skyfeed, a 3P app which gives users a GUI to create them. The author of skyfeed submitted this actually. Talented dev afaict but I've not met them, which is kind of the point. (Looking forward to it though, redsolver!)
3P integration operates by a thick client model. We exchange typed JSON that describes content and interfaces. This lets services drive the client through request/response flows. We can bounce out to webviews when we need, but not executing code means better integration into the app, which means users get access to new experiences within the client and providers get users more easily. This being social protocol means that auth and high level verbs (following, liking, commenting) also come along. The Web 1.0 did quite a bit without client scripting, and I suspect this client can too.
I also want to mention: the product experience right now is establishing a UX on a protocol-driven network that feels good to consumers. Our metric for success wasn't whether it was novel; it was whether we could meet consumer expectations. If we can prove out scaling -- which I'm now confident we will -- then we've established the core of the network. After that we use that core as a backbone for 3P devs to build integrated experiences, and it should lead to a notably diverse product, and I think that's the compelling position for us to offer.
Imagine a sort of plug in ecosystem with sane defaults
I do like the technical vision, a lot. But I haven't been able to try it out because any time I felt the desire to look, nobody could actually link me to a post or a feed. So I never achieved the required activation energy to even look at it, nevermind adding it to my doomscrolling repertoire or signing up to the thing.
Opening up the posts is a good first step to sustainable adoption. Now next time people are mad at Twitter they'll have an outlet instead of being met with a brick wall when they finally get the urge to try something new.
Compelling for whom? For developers? I’m not sure anyone else will care.
Most of the biggest complaints people have about twitter are client-side problems. So just having an ecosystem of clients (and the competitive pressure that puts on the official client) makes the experience way better
The big corporate accounts may have immediately fled for the safety and features of Threads, but I've noticed more and more journalists, radio personalities, columnists etc creating Bluesky accounts as they scale back on their Twitter use.
Seems like Bluesky is the grassroots favourite.
I don't know how you can expect people to make the move when they're not even able to sign in
For devs that want to experiment, we've had a special waitlist for a while: https://atproto.com/blog/call-for-developers
Obviously they need to drop the invite system at some point (and I am surprised it's been this long), but it's not the reason a given subcommunity didn't make the jump
Can it get worse? Right now I get ads every 3-4 tweets, and several of them are porn ads.
I also noticed ads that are not marked with the [Ad]-icon.
Can't see how it could get lower than this :(
Twitter was like that once. Just people flocking into the next walled garden...
Mastodon puts too much onus on the user to pick a home server
Bluesky got it right by saying "we're going to be exactly familiar to people who like twitter, just open and better". The concepts are an almost exact drop-in replacement, for practical purposes, other than which one your friends are active on
I don't use it much right now because most of my people did switch back for now. But I check in periodically, and I'm rooting for it to succeed
Well that's just an opinion. I feel that it's better than it ever was. Sorry.
Okay, but I never even signed up for Twitter.
I guess I should have expected it, but I hoped that somewhere a different network would have a different style or flavor. However, the content patterns that get engagement and etc seem ingrained in the participants no matter where you go.
Personally I can't help but feel both left out, and not wanting to be a part of whatever these style of social media apps are.
Having said that there's a lot of talk about twitter clones missing features, but for me I wonder if the content is the same, why would a significant number of people move anyway?
It's like, these social media companies wrote a SINGLE outrage-farming algorithm that they push on everyone's feeds without regard for whether it works on individuals or not.
This all is why, despite it getting worse, I use FB more than the other platforms. Actual content posted by actual humans I actually know with their actual names under them. Not some pseudonym where I can't remember if it's an IRL friend or some internet rando I follow (or why I follow them), a bunch of emojis, contextless junk, and clickbait outrage farming.
Even on Twitter I never saw that junk. I followed almost exclusively tech folk, AWS community heros, NodeJS developers, Architects and Platform Engineers.
I’m not even a developer, but I followed them to be exposed more to that topic.
As a result, my feed was 99.9% technical content and product management content.
I got the same result in under an hour with Threads too - just mute every. Single. Thing. That you don’t want to see for an hour and then kill and re-launch the app. You’ll never see politics again.
They kind of did. The optimal solution of 'just show rage bait' can't take all that long to discover.
I haven't seen much in the way of innovation on the UX itself, which is what I'm really interested in. I guess its a mix of a) why mess with success, twitter-like design is proven to work, b) a lack of experimental startup product culture that's willing to try new things, c) not having good ideas, and d) just not enough time because they're focused on basics.
Part of the problem is a lot of us don't want "innovation" here. The limitation for the Twitter clones that I've found is none of them (including Twitter these days) have the critical mass of people it used to have.
Fundamentally the issue with Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. is that they don't offer anything different to most users. Yes, they run off decentralized protocols, but most people don't care. Yes, there's no Elon, but most people don't care.
So I'd put it firmly in (c). Bluesky and Threads both tried to recapture the lightning in the bottle which is 2008 Twitter by copying it (Bluesky going so far as to copy the early 00s invite-only model!). Both are either failures or marginally successful, depending on who you ask. Certainly neither are a home run.
If you want to get people off Twitter, don't build Twitter-but-different. Build something better.
Whenever I see comments like these, my immediate thought is "How interested are you, if you had to put a dollar figure on it?"
Also, you are missing alternative (e): availability bias. Maybe you haven't seen a lot of innovation around UX not because people are not trying, but because those who tried to experiment with different UX were aiming at such a niche that completely failed as social network?
I think tech companies' lack of interest in experimenting with UX might have something to do with that...
I'm hoping some easily-supported competition for timeline algorithms helps people figure out how to make ones that show content we really want instead of click bait and outrage bait.
In early 2024, when the production network is federated, it will be possible to build new social apps on atproto that the millions of existing Bluesky users will be able to use (if they choose) without having to create a new account.
I'm lucky enough to have found a site like this and it's epic. Better than any social media I've ever experienced. People actually care about each other. We have a community.
The reality is it was only a significant minority.
Most people don't care that they /communicate on Mysterious Twitter X/, they just care about communicating and Mysterious Twitter X is just the dominant one of all the social media networks.
Then there's people like me who use Mysterious Twitter X for a very specific purpose. In my case, I use it to follow announcements from my favorite games (FGO, Priconne, etc.) and join their repost campaigns, get info from some game guide makers, follow some Japanese illustrators, and follow a small handful of Japanese celebrities I'm actually interested in. Exactly none of them left Mysterious Twitter X.
For my use case, Musk's takeover was actually amazing because he killed off the political manipulations that Twitter Japan was spewing behind the scenes. Ain't nobody got time for politics when I'm there to be a man of culture.
If anybody wants a Bluesky invite code, I have a handful available. DM me at @edavis@hachyderm.io or at https://t.me/ejd215. First come, first served!
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-ac...
Though, the whole blue sky stack is significantly more complicated than ActivityPub so I’m doubtful as many would actually set up “instances”.
We have 10 servers federating in production, each housing around 270,000 users, and it all runs on disk and sqlite, quite affordable! We migrated 2 million users off a single large host onto these 10 smaller ones transparently and without need for much fanfare. We're dedicated to the tech and seeing it work in production has been super heartening.
Someone else was already first to market. Launching as an alternative that is half baked seems like really strange idea to me. Maybe they were trying to gain traction during the surge in Twitter hate, but if the thing you are asking them to jump ship to is a lesser product, only a tiny minority of them are going to stay. Half baked launches into a very well established market just seems like you'd be better off taking your investor's money and having grand ol' time in Vegas.
ActivityPub has some big flaws. We need something better, but I don't think I trust the Bluesky team to deliver that anymore.
One step at a time.
I suppose time will tell.
I do like how usernames are domain names, which gives them a portability similar to email.
But whenever I try Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads as a brand new account without anyone to follow it’s just same US politics shit. Trump, Trump bad, nazis, AOC, Trump, gender, trans rights, nazis, republicans, Trump, gender etc. This is what I see right now on Bluesky What’s Hot, this is what I see right now on Mastodon Explore.
The fact that even Mastodon pushing the rage bait (“ These are posts from across the social web that are gaining traction today”) which is supposed to be the ‘healthy’ and ‘better’ social media site shows how deep problems we have.
If really that’s what an average Joe and Jane sees when they just want to try out these services then no one wonder the world is going worse by each passing day.
I remember in the days of instant messaging, I had a single client (Adium for Mac OS X) which could talk to AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, etc. It gave me a unified buddy list, and a unified interface for messaging any of my friends, regardless of the underlying instant messaging provider.
Is anyone working on a similar omniclient for Mastodon/Threads/Bluesky/XTwitter?
If we get to the point where most users are using omniclients of this kind, that helps reduce network effects and lock-in. Seems like the Mastodon/Threads/Bluesky teams would have a strong incentive to collaborate on such a client, in order to reduce XTwitter network effects, essentially joining forces in their own unified network. (I imagine that XTwitter will block API access, at least in the short term.)
For Mastodon in particular, people are always talking about the difficulty of getting started. Is there a way to put a porcelain experience on that? Imagine I just enter my credit card info and I have my own instance without having to worry about any sysadmin details. You could monetize the client by charging a small premium above and beyond the baseline server costs.
I want an experience so porcelain that in order to create a new account, I enter my username and it automatically checks its availability across dozens of social sites, then registers me in as seamless a manner as possible. Then when I click post, it by default broadcasts that post across all the accounts I registered.
I suppose this is probably similar to the existing interface for a product such as Hootsuite, no? Maybe the best starting point is check if there's an open-source Hootsuite competitor, then optimize the interface for end users.
Is it basically an X clone that will be an alternative Twitter/X?
Or is there a lot more magic going on? Why are people excited?
(Mind you I dont spend much time on X either, so this is purely from looking at the two and comparing. )
Meanwhile, here are some invite codes (I’ll update this list if they’re used within HN’s edit window):
bsky-social-xueut-35ahm
bsky-social-25tsd-crmqc
~~~bsky-social-xxxxx-xxxxx~~~ (used)
~~~bsky-social-xxxxx-xxxxx~~~ (used)
Edit: This is my first time handing out invites. I don’t like how the invite system shows me which account on Bluesky was created using my invite code. I’d rather this be hidden from the person sending the invite or at least provide an option to the person signing up if they want their account to be disclosed to the person who invited them. In real life there are usually personal or professional connections with such events, but online these could be (and are) totally random strangers.
Yup. Bluesky is trash.
I have also decided to give up all social media like this until at least February, and the past week has been a big improvement for me
Per our favorite chatcompletion model, Boas festas / Feliz Navidad!!!
New social media profile, new me: https://bsky.app/profile/arthurcolle.bsky.social
bsky-social-wvq77-dxsur
bsky-social-jb2xl-7pqzg
bsky-social-6hxxo-3ccaw
bsky-social-mnbtp-xctsx
bsky-social-g3nsc-vnqji
bsky-social-wdtib-h2pny
bsky-social-dx6u7-gpr7d
bsky-social-xwzs7-mwxuf
bsky-social-bsfz6-mf3lg
bsky-social-pnhfr-cejvd
bsky-social-qzt6i-jhtwo
bsky-social-r2iwy-m7fk7
bsky-social-cd3fm-4j6hg
bsky-social-jgzjd-x7fn3
bsky-social-wfiqb-wdcej
bsky-social-y4x6q-55aiv
Merry Christmas (or happy holidays)
It’s still got centralized censorship, same as Twitter or Facebook.
I think Bluesky would clean up if it could also interop with Mastodon - people want to leave Twitter but it sucks having to choose between Mastodon and Bluesky and so I think some folks are just in a holding pattern waiting to see what wins. Bluesky feels more like Twitter so I think it would get a lot of folks, but I think people hesitate to bet on it just yet.
[1] - https://ibb.co/km5nGDW
[2] - https://ibb.co/Xpp7t05
[3] - https://ibb.co/QcG1G4d
[4] - https://ibb.co/K2WPvfW
[5] - https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice
Im amazed at how fast and pretty Bluesky is compared to other web applications, especially Twitter's.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/what-is-bluesky-everything...
It is not a dominant player that wants to protect its contents.
They have nothing to protect.
Someone please explain how a social network is supposed to succeed when it's invite-only? Hype alone won't carry it.
IMO, being invite-only is THE reason Google+ failed. There were so many memes about people getting excited for an invite, getting on, and then finding only a couple people they knew were on it, if any at all.
For a social network to work, it needs to be a network. Limiting on-boarding eliminates the network, and so people lose interest fast.
It may be that the industry has evolved to a degree that this is no longer viable (I also don’t know if I believe this…), but invite-only or otherwise limited launches formed the backbone of the current web.
Facebook was only available if you had a school address. Gmail was only available via invite. Obviously a service can’t stay in a limited state forever and the hype will run out, but it’s not exactly a new approach to limiting access early in the life of a service.
Google+ failed because Google killed it. I never experienced what you describe, but admittedly got an invite very early, and interacted with people who had also gotten the same thing.
Limiting onboarding does not eliminate the network. It just limits it. Again, to your point, this can’t last forever, but is not by itself the issue as long as they continue to scale up access. There are plenty of other issues that will make or break a network.
Bsky is the same; there's unexplainable pressure I feel in there to keep it to an in-group of nicest of people, but fine. It's not derailing into a Mastodon.
IMO Twitter was a very compelling place to be during a breaking news event (and I don’t just mean political news, could be cultural, sports etc) and none of the alternatives have replicated that yet. Mastodon is maybe not even technically capable of it (because federation introduces a delay in message delivery).
I do enjoy niche discussions on Mastodon but once you’ve removed time as an influential factor for importance the default chronological view doesn’t feel anywhere near as to me.
The man has enough access to capital and can easily hire folks with the know-how to make a service that can scale. That fact that this hasn't happened says something.
So if you believe that it's fair to say that "people actually use Mastodon" (which has 1.5 million MAUs), then yes — people actually use Threads.
I felt like I had discoverability issues with Mastodon, and the culture I kept running into there was abrasive. It's all around much better now than it was years ago, and I do seem to get more engagement from strangers than on any of the other networks, but I struggled to stay interested.
Bluesky reminded me of the kind of slower organic growth that you'd typically find in earlier internet communities. The absence of videos and GIFs is, for me, an enormous positive point that I know will eventually give way to popular demand. I like that it's more text-and-images focused, and it seems to be in my sweet spot in terms of... most of what I see feel like thoughtful posts and replies, and not people nakedly building their personal brand.
None of them are going to have the same social cachet as Twitter. It's pretty incredible to see someone spend billions of dollars to completely squander an ecosystem an internationally recognizable brand like that. A fairly unique resource, obliterated by a man-baby with absolutely no concept of the value of the people on the platform he bought.
For now, it's the most viable alternative for Twitter - for now.
But this is in part because Mastodon UX is very complicated for beginners, and BlueSky is slow as hell to make improvements. It still doesn't support sending videos...
And it has reached the #1 position in most of the App Stores around the world.
You still can't send videos and gifs. That's just, so basic for a social network.
Let alone all the other missing things, and how awful the apps are. They are basically the worst example to show React Native. The app here on Android takes 15 seconds to open (an improvement, it took 30 seconds before). It's sluggy, no animations, etc. Feels like Alpha.
Yeah, I'd agree if you're looking for a more polished social media client then Twitter, Threads, and even some Mastodon clients will probably better serve you. But the official client primarily exists as a means to an end (building atproto) rather than an end in itself. Those features are still on the roadmap, I believe, but just not a priority at the moment. There are alternative clients (a bunch for web, at least one for iOS) you may have better luck with.
> Let alone all the other missing things, and how awful the apps are. They are basically the worst example to show React Native.
Bluesky has a pretty small team, all things considered. I think they've said in the past it would have been impossible for them to do apps for iOS, Android, and web without React Native. FWIW, Dan Abramov joined them a few months ago and has been working in public on tackling some of the more tricky RN bugs.
I believe the new Discord client is RN and works fine for me.
One of the alternative clients (Graysky) supports GIFs through some integration tenor.com, I believe.
I blocked close to 500 people & `not interested` their posts until I just gave up and stopped using the app.
Mine is mostly about tech, I believe.
Which is a problem for me because I like political things, so I still use X, don't judge me.
But there's a chronological-following timeline on Threads anyway.
The problem is that there's no way to really control the algo timeline. You can't say you don't want these type of posts, or add topics you are interested - like Twitter.
All it cares it's the posts you like. As I like my friends (tech) posts, that's all I get. Plus some cats.
My feed is almost pure politics because I engaged with some
My SO’s in the other hand is all wholesome sunshine and rainbows, I’m trying to protect that by just showing the occasional thing in my screen instead of sending it to her
For better or worse, when management changed, the narratives and atmosphere in Twitter changed. Its content changed. This would be absurd if social media communities were organic or independent in how they spread ideas, but they are very much not. Either before or after the acquisition (I have no dog in this race, really) the platform controlled its content, and as such it ought to be responsible for it. If Twitter decides which among the millions of messages it decides to publish they are as responsible for that as I am when I choose which among the combinations of characters I output from my keyboard.
Any corporation that pretends they are only doing the proper thing by controlling speech within its platform should be called out for what they are doing: media manipulation.
Agreed. He showed that they were engaging in widespread editorializing of conservative content while lying about being neutral. They should never have been allowed to do that, even under the existing laws at the time. Reddit is even worse.
A 2021 study¹ found the opposite, which is that Twitter algorithms amplified right-wing posts more than left-wing posts. You're parroting Musk's claims, which are feelings-based. Now, of course, X is basically Parler.
¹ https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/blog-twitter...
But it seems to work fine for a particular brand of extremely online people.
Also every platform will get a burst of extremely online people trying to build an audience at the initial stages of its lifecycle. Discord seems to be the only place that doesn't fall into this trap because it's basically private clubs, and not about seeking attention at all times.
Social Media Companies that can't get their sign-up funnel in order have already failed.
Would it be possible for you to highlight this to the right people in the team?
Without federation it's basically Twitter with less users. And even after federation it might be Mastodon/ActivityPub with less users.
Very disappointed in the direction they took to launch. Exclusive beta, no focus on decentralization despite that being the major selling point.
Quite a bit of the app itself is also federated: custom algorithms (feeds) are being operated by many third-party devs on their own servers, domain handles have been in use for a long time, and the API is completely open (all posts/likes, etc can be streamed from `wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos` in a permissionless way, see atproto.com[1] for details)
It's possible to run a PDS (Personal Data Server)[2] in the dev sandbox. Federation for the production network is planned for early 2024. ASAP.
2. https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/SANDBOX.md
Not for me I guess. When there's a nitter for bluesky (nuesky?) maybe I'll check that out.
It looks like at least some of the text from the post is still visible maybe
> ( 1.60 is rolling out now (2/5) Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login! You can finally share your quality posts with the group chat or in articles. If you don’t want the Bluesky app to show your posts to logged-out users, opt out in the Moderation tab. 2023-12-22T18:59:01.633Z)
Often this all gets framed as a "freedom of speech" issue. But I know first hand of women who in recent months on X have been harassed with death threats. When they've reported it has been ignored because the company simply lacks the resources/will to enforce those policies.
And so even if Threads is nothing more than a better-staffed clone that is enough for them.
We don’t vilify the phone company when someone uses a phone to make a bomb threat. Why is this different?
You don’t report crime to the communications service provider. If someone makes a bomb threat you aren’t dialing 0 to tell the phone company.
No one can squat on your handle and, even though you don't technically own a domain, you get a lot more protections with a domain name than you do with a platform based handle. It's much harder to revoke a domain than it is for someone to kick you off their platform.
