Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day (opens in new tab)

Assuming blocks themselves are never childish. Jordan Peterson is on the list and he doesn't even use the site: https://bsky.app/profile/jordanbpeterson.bsky.social

I wonder what the backstory to two different Brazilian Taylor Swift fan accounts getting onto the most blocked list is...

I see a plateau after a bunch of churn from large waves of migrations. Would be surprised if this won't be the case for bsky.

Regardless of MAU count, there's plenty happening there to keep me active, and you get to see Threads users who speak ActivityPub as well as Bsky users via a bridge.

Life without Pihole and a blocker is just grim.

Every so often I get exposed to that world. It’s awful.

A lot of free services would disappear if they were unable to make some sort of ad-based income. Some people would be unable to do anything except whatever was provided by their government without ad-supported services (thinking Google products, YouTube, etc.) It would eventually go back to the way it was in the old days - a few actually-useful-but-struggling sites, a few paid-for services that might or might not survive, a passel of vanity sites and some incoherent cranks and weirdos (Time Cube, etc.).

Heaven for some, but mostly boring for everyone else after an hour.

Probably not. Each server has its own moderation, and servers that tolerate bad behavior from their users get blocked by most other servers.

I'm not sure the current model would do well against a large coordinated manipulation campaign, but it handles isolated trolls at least as well as corporate social media.

No corporate control. Server admin block nodes they don't want to see, so it is important to join a server with similar views as your own, or run your own server.

They already had 8 years to overrun it.

Because you can go to Bluesky and click “Sign Up” without a confusing explanation about instances.

Mastodon is confusing for non-technical users, while Bluesky is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Twitter.

Good question. When you say Mastodon, my answer is 'which one' or 'which instance'?

That basic hurdle is the reason why it is a barrier to many potential new users and it has traded complexity over ease of onboarding when trying to sign up new users (who are not techies or sys-admins).

One solution is to set a default instance. I.e 'mastodon.social' and tell users to sign up there. Again, that increases the issue of centralization. To prevent that, you close sign ups and tell users to sign up elsewhere. Then the issue continues on other instances.

Along side other issues, that is why new users just went to Bluesky or Threads instead.

Its fundamental design lacks the ability to provide features that many people want, because the developers see those features as anti-features to be avoided.

Bluesky's AT Protocol was developed specifically to address what they saw as shortcomings with the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and other similar services.

> fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.

No one owns it so there’s no team of well paid professionals trying to make it grow.

This isn't the most important reason, but compared to similar web sites, Mastodon's user experience is awkward.

Try using it, it has extra steps and decisions that add friction and are annoying / challenging for end-users.

It's not idiot-proof. Common-denominator platforms where you're expecting the general population need to be intuitive and work like people expect them to. Mastodon doesn't and their federated model is a pain in the behind.

It did see a big surge in popularity when Musk bought Twitter, but user numbers right now are not growing significantly.

They probably are, but they don’t have a marketing team like BlueSky does

It's a worse experience for posters for two major reasons: blocking is not as effective (blocked people can still read and respond), and there are too many weird scolds who yell at people for not adding content warnings for trivial things.

I don't post so it doesn't affect me directly. It affects where the people I follow choose to post.

federation is a form of decentralization

> it isn't a major problem anymore

This is not true at all. The hard part isn't cloud vs. on-premise, it's the architecture.

Most sites can either put all their data in a single massive database, or else have an obvious dimension to shard by (e.g. by user ID if users mostly interact with their own data).

But sites where the data is many-to-many and there's a firehose of writes, of which Twitter is a prime example, are a nightmare to scale while remaining performant and reliable. Every single user gets an updated live feed of tweets drawn from every other user -- handling millions of users simultaneously is not easy.

I'm not so sure about this when not even 24 hours ago Netflix has streaming issues running on AWS infrastructure, and existing social media sites still have outages.

They moved from AWS to on-prem sometime in the last year or two: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/bluesky

And I don't care how many resources you have available to throw at it, plenty of sites would still fall over with the kind of growth they're having.

Deciding to use a cloud provider or not has very little do to with the quality of the application and infrastructure architecture.

You can make an app that scales beautifully on AWS or you can make one that chokes.

The astro pictures are neat. Everything else ... less so.

Same - it was actually technically impressive how fast I got crypto spam upon joining nostr.

This, it happens for a while after every big exodus moment and chills out after.

What is "the front page"?

Scrolling through the first couple dozen posts on my following feed, I see a selfies, science educators, artists, makers, a couple naked people, a complaint about days getting shorter, and a few people talking about health conditions they've gotten under control. If you don't want to see people talking about Trump, follow people who don't talk about Trump. Or add "trump" to your list of muted words.

What you see is up to you. If you don't like what you see, there are a ton of levers in your control.

You could be right but these platforms have not historically been about long form discussions, rather quips and glib remarks to drive clicks.

You might've pasted the wrong link! Although damn, this modem looks good too, worth thinking about.

Do I have to buy this modem to view the Ruby hackers starter pack??

Here's the actual link to the starter pack: https://bsky.app/starter-pack/bradgessler.com/3laa47lbuwb2r

This looks like a really nice modem, but I have fiber :(

Do...do I open the modem and read the link off a piece of paper inside, kinda like a fortune cookie?

hahaha.... oops, I had to send that to Comcast because they're now thinking if I restart my modem for the third time, it will fix the problem.

Aha, so it was real too? For the past few years I have not been able to find the old text that I used to, and I'm sure my memory has shifted a bit over time too.

Maybe I've just been starved on Twitter/C for so long, but the signal was real for me, but in science there's been a sudden exodus to Bsky and an outpouring of joy that people are able to find new papers again and discuss conference talks live and post whatever they're cooking in their kitchen or lab. It's like the old days of Twitter are back, but it does take a lot of work to find that corner.

I mean, academics are allowed have cats, too.

This plus the fact that starting Nov 15 tweets become by default training material for their language models: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/x-is-using-y...

Or possibly, once the event was over, the users in question had the idea that Twitter/X affected the outcome in the way they didn't like and they decided to boycott Twitter/X?

Last 3 or 4 days has been 1m/day

https://bsky-users.theo.io/

World token or whatever the Altman thing was was an attempt.

I'm torn. Agreed that allowing machine accounts is good. Not keen on jumping into a bot filled ecosystem. Especially with no way to see reputation that is more grounded in at least a presumably human element.

That is, if you allow bots, how do you limit bots signal boosting each other?

That, and the TOS update which now requires users to give X blanket permission to use their posts for AI training (previously you could opt-out). Not that AI companies really care whether they have permission right now, but if legal precedent doesn't go their way then coercing users into "giving permission" by burying it within 50 pages of TOS legalese will be the fallback plan.

Brazil banned twitter

Isn't that the implication? If you're on a platform with a lot of low quality bitterness and another one pops up with less of that, just move. If it happens again, move again. It's not team sports, you shouldn't feel loyalty. The only problems are practical, rather than psychological.

I’ll have to complain about it and have a big cry first, but yeah.

I’m not actually opposed to people disagreeing with me or thinking my ideas are bad. It’s just pointless chaos and no functional or constructive discourse. That’s more so what bothers me about it.

Even in relatively tame topics there tends to be some devaluing interjection of some sort. It gets tiring trying to find interesting content but only finding that, over and over.

It has pretty good blocking/custom moderation tools.

> And then once they switch on advertising will be printing tens of billions a year.

I’ve seen this said before, and I guess it might be true, but I don’t really get why people would use Threads once there’s advertising on it — isn’t it being a better experience their main value proposition? And they’ve just spent the last few years teaching people how easy it is to migrate between these basically-interchangeable services…

They removed a bunch of Palestinian journalists

I can’t find it now, but in one of the other HN threads, someone had shared a link to some lawyer defending women’s rights for sex-segregated things (like who gets to play in women’s sports). That profile had a label of “Intolerant” at the top, and nearly every post of theirs also had that same word “Intolerant” in a box in the body of each post, in place of the actual content that would be there. A little informational message indicated these labels were applied by an automated system. You would have to click the button to uncensor and view the message anyways, but it makes it much harder to consume their feed since you have to do that for each individual post, every single time you view the page. Someone else pointed out that you can opt out of the default moderation/censorship scheme that applies this labeling but the fact that it is on by default is problematic in terms of offering a politically neutral platform, since that is what most people will get.

No worries friend, many of these signups are us on the right going to troll. We don’t plan to support it for long.

False dichotomy doesn’t bring anything to the conversation. However it it true that the far left is the main motivated to quit X, and the progressive views Silicon Valley were also dominant on HN.

Just something to accept and think about. Do not blame the messenger.

Both extremes on the left and right have their own 'extremely dishonest grifters' and that issue is not exclusive to Twitter / X.

The far-right thinks the far-left is dishonest and vice versa. They're both correct. It's all so tiresome.

And what is PG’s vision?

if everyone is in practice using the same instance, they can just un-decentralize it at any moment they want, though

Why would I want to be on a platform that is friendly to advertisers?