Contrast this with early Twitter where everyone was just super excited, and eager to follow new people. I don't get it, shouldn't a new social network be full of people looking to create new... social networks?
It’s very off-putting and alienating for normal people.
Yeah, I know, I'm supposed to register on another instance, but AFAICT there's no way to link the accounts?
Someone in the community recently built a searchable directory of Bluesky "Starter Packs" (which are a way for a user to publish a set of interesting people & feeds to follow, primarily to help newcomers bootstrap their experience):
https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
Dan Abramov posted about it earlier today, saying he liked it and:
"the fact that it can be done in the ecosystem is awesome. let the ecosystem cook" [1]
And maybe more poignantly:
"seeing random projects pop up in the atproto ecosystem reminds me just how much public web common were stifled by social companies closing down their APIs. an entire landscape of tools given up on and abandoned" [2]
I think one of the fatal flaws tech companies have been making is locking things in. But what made the computer so great, what made the smartphone so great, was to make them hackable. You build environments, you build ecosystems. Lockin only slows you down. I mean how long would it have taken for smartphones to have a flashlight if it weren’t for apps? A stopwatch? These were apps before they were built into the operating systems.
> The Iconfactory was developing a Twitter application in 2006 called "Twitterrific" and developer Craig Hockenberry began a search for a shorter way to refer to "Post a Twitter Update."
Evidently the people running the bots don't really care whether or not you give them an API to work with.
As an example my feed is completely free of US politics, allowing me to curate an experience where I can go to enjoy myself instead of constantly being exposed to ragebait.
I'd been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now there's some real heat to it as things pick up.
Hopefully this surge is real, has certianly gotten me to be much more active.
I also run my own Bluesky labeler and Firehose ingester so I've been following as event throughput has roughly doubled over the last 3-4 months.
Threads is a half Twitter, half Instagram hybrid strong in creative, travel, social etc type content. Bluesky is original Twitter with strengths in news, politics, science etc. These days not sure it will ever be possible to have one app that does it all.
Which leaves X as the new 4chan.
Honestly, I've had more positive interactions and learned more on 4chan than I ever have on Twitter. I wish the few tech people I care about who are still on there would just move (to clarify, move anywhere, not to 4chan obviously).
I check time to time but basically it's 0/50
https://bsky.app/profile/nasa.extwitter.link
Also, some game companies do maintain a presence on bluesky:
Since it leverages Instagram and has pretty fantastic photo features.
Are there easy tools that allow you to post on multiple platforms from the same content, that also supports replies?
I don't know why, but I always felt like the hype went over me head, and it was a bit boring.
Though I'm tempted to check out Bluesky, the AT protocol seems really interesting.
Mastodon is cool, but it's hard to consistently find that local info. Bluesky seems like it has a chance of supplanting Twitter in this way, but it's not there yet. Some of the accounts I used to follow on Twitter are on Bluesky, but they don't post. If they started, I think they'd get tons of followers now.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...
There is an obvious need for Twitter-like platforms, but Twitter/X has become too right-wing for many users. The left needs a place to talk and vent about the election, and Twitter is no longer friendly to that. Therefore, Bluesky is taking off due to that event.
And the world is sick of Elon Musk and US politics.
For those (like me) who don't know what bluesky is, it's basically a carbon copy of twitter circa 2015, down to an almost identical UI. Except that there's no monetization, no ads, no growth hacking, which means that in the main features are there to serve the user. My favorite example is the simple expo/react native based mobile app, which lets you open links in safari rather than a useless in-app browser.
Not sure how that interacts with the fact that the company raised a substantial amount recently https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a
The world is much larger than American or Western internet drama, and there seems to be no way to escape it. As a European reading any mainstream social media, BlueSky included, makes me roll my eyes out of their orbit.
I do not care about politics or gender identity or keyboard activism. Can we please have something else on the menu? Literally anything else. I wonder if I should learn Russian or Chinese to be exposed to something new which isn't US politics or which gender people are most attracted to in their private lives. Who gives a damn. /rant
(I enjoyed Nostr tech-wise, but it never broke past the cryptobro phase and that saddens me)
That said this is definitely not the week to try to calibrate that, since everyone currently has Big Feelings even if they're normally not overtly political.
Wow, that's just like Mastodon.
1) Better (optional) algorithmic feeds. Mastodon's "explore" is weaker than Bluesky's "popular with friends" and "discover"
2) Quote-tweets.
3) Easier onboarding. Mastodon forces you to care about which server you're on and it does matter and migrating later is hard. Meanwhile, BSky has "starter packs" that people can produce for each other with lists of users to follow to easily jump into a community.
4) Username-as-domain is better than the Mastodon "confirmed links in profile" thing for self-verified accounts.
I wish the properly-federated OSS community-funded one had won but I'll take either to be done with Twitter.
edit: my big worry about BSky is the lack of any coherent monetization plan. This isn't community-funded stuff like Mastodon, it's VC-funded software - there will be a need for revenue at some point and then what happens?
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/even.westvang.com/post/3laob7tefxk2...
If I ever get blocked, banned, deplatformed, whatever—people would see my domain and be able to go there to determine what's going on. In a sense it's "censorship-evident".
I think this will be great for businesses—it's so much more less ambiguous if I can @example.com a business and get a response. I put a starter pack together of SaaS built on Rails that's already doing this at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u
I really like what BlueSky is doing and hope it doesn't get enshitified as the future plays out. Even if it does, it seems like now is a goldilocks moment where things are feeling really good there.
I highly recommend spending the 5 minutes it takes to setup an account and point it at your domain.
Also I took a look at https://mastodonapp.uk/@stephenfry as an example of a verified profile and the UX is quite bad. Green check in a green box with a green border. The title tag just says "Website" and there's no indication of what it means.
I’m @bradgessler@ruby.social, but I’m more than a Ruby dev.
I could run a Mastadon instance for bradgessler.com, but I have no desire to spend even 3 minutes figuring out how to set all that up. Maintaining my own instance sounds even worse.
Bluesky gets the ergonomics of this right: the usernames feel like they occupy a global namespace and I can point the aliases at my domains in a few minutes without having to worry about a bunch of standards that I don’t really care about.
For some reason I can’t explain, it also really bothers me that I have to @ people on Mastadon via @brad@bradgessler.com. I don’t want to say “@“ twice if I’m verbally telling somebody where to find me when presenting and “@me@bradgessler” is weird too. Much easier to say “Follow me @bradgessler.com”
Am I lazy? Yes, but most people are. Bluesky strikes a nice balance of control and identity that I’m comfortable with for the amount of time and effort I’m willing to put into it.
How, exactly, are the embeddings derived?
Glad to see I am not the only one having problems with hierarchy.
Interesting work at many levels (no, no pun): starting with the bluesky data availability, the processing and the visualization algorithms.
But its not quite clear where to place these visualizations in the data science spectrum. Conventional numerical graphics have (over time) developed a sophisticated grammar that allows fairly precise reasoning and inference. So they are heavily used in scientific publications, in the financial sector etc. for real information transmission (People might even reverse engineer a plot to recover data!).
With networks and graphs, besides a general feel for the topology / connectivity or clustering its kinda hard to pin down what is the transmitted information. Not clear if useful grammars covering such large graphs are yet to be invented or if this is the nature of the beast.
Threads has extreme normies, bluesky has the nerds, and twitter seems to have just the right mixture of both.
I open it, get a few random engagement bait posts, maybe reply to some and then close it. No meaningful discussion will happen.
i find this very surprising. i don't see a lot of technical people out there, except for the bsky devs or devs who are building apps on top of atproto.
i've visited bluesky enough over the months, and to me, there's 3 types of users you will always see on the Discover or What's Hot timeline - journalists, furries, and people who post nudity.
tech people are still on twitter. i feel like the "exodus" of tech people following the election are just them making an account, and then returning to X after some time. it happened then during the private beta, and i feel like the same is happening now
Also, this may seem silly, but I like the butterfly logo.
I can see some amount of protest, people who are anti-AI/pro-copyright might find a better niche on bsky, but everything you post there is public so it's legal for anyone to scrape and train with
The other thing is reach. Twitter, Fb, Instagram are global brands. It'll be really, and I mean difficult to move the rest of the world to other platforms (TikTok is the exception because they went ahead with video from the get-go).
It's inevitable that left-leaning people will increasingly leave Twitter, as long as it is run by Musk
It changed to require opting in to bridging because many mastodon users got very mad about it.
So not quite 13M but almost half of them, pretty cool nonetheless
Another thought since Bluesky is a pretty inclusive place, are the LGBTQIA+ folks clustering into their own respective labels, or is everyone mixing together? Is any of this behavior similar or different to what we see on other social networks?
Social media is dead
What makes scraping illegal?
X is turning out to be where Conservatives are going to be living, Bluesky, Reddit and Treads will be for Liberals. These platform don't outright ban opposing views but I think moderation policies and the users will shift these groups into one or the other.
I'm not sure if one can have a platform where respectful discourse can take place. The only site I've seen so far is HN and its due to its small community and the relentless effort by Dan.
The days of having everyone connected on the same platform is now dead, which might ironically usher a revival of the old, non-centralized web.
Any barriers, legal or otherwise, that existed between twitter and the state should be assumed gone once the new administration transitions in, especially considering it's an administration that has promised to abuse state power to target it's opposition.
I like the sound of that. Surely there's usefulness in that observation.
Does anyone know if it is the first time that a truly open source app has hit that top spot?
no, but nothing can stop you & a bunch of people from exporting your tweet archive and visualizing that!
brew install websocat
websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos
websocat wss://jetstream2.us-west.bsky.network/subscribe
With luck bsky keeps growing and researchers invest effort in studying a more open-by-design platform.
It's pretty similar to a project I've been working on for the past year, scraping Facebook instead of BlueSky (which is a bit harder since FB doesn't expose an API for that). I currently have about 140 million nodes on my scraped graph and a GUI with pathfinding and stuff like that.
It's a shame though because as nice as the thing is, I'm not sure I can publish it online, given it contains names of people. I don't think the GDPR would be very happy.
Which is why I'm a bit surprised you published this, aren't you afraid of people, uh, disliking the fact that they're present in your dataset?
I'll just share some irony. They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X/Twitter.
That discourse comes in waves each time a major migration happens from twitter to bluesky but it settles down fairly soon after each time. Give it a few days and people will have moved on to the new topic of the day.
Also it's worth noting that the "Discover" feed is trained specifically per person so while the defaults aren't great, if you use the "show more like this" and "show less like this" options on posts (under the triple dot) then pretty quickly it tunes in towards content you care about vs content you don't.
> Also it's worth noting that the "Discover" feed is trained specifically per person so while the defaults aren't great, if you use the "show more like this" and "show less like this" options on posts (under the triple dot) then pretty quickly it tunes in towards content you care about vs content you don't.
This is the first time I clicked "Discover". I haven't logged into BlueSky for almost two years.
The only reason Hacker News avoided that fate is due to downvote/flag mechanisms.
I've recently created a brand new account on X for a project. Looking at what was being recommended to the brand-new account with no interactions or likes or anything, they are not wrong.