Too late, IMO. The invite-only system meant that the "leave Twitter" crowd split between Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. IMO none of them have ended up being great replacements.
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...
I'm really curious as to what will happen when Threads turns on ActivityPub federation for everyone. At that point, Threads and Mastodon will be the same network, aside from servers that have preemptively blocked Threads.
I heard before that Threads is the number one in app stores. If I look right now (23.12) in the Apple App Store then I can’t find it at all in the top 200 (unless I missed something). I see X on 165 and Telegram for example, but no Threads.
Some people I know use it. I use it from times to times but the crypto community hasn’t really been active there. My guess is that if you have a big instagram following then Threads make a lot of sense.
Whenever I revisit Threads, it feels like I'm in the tourist trap of social networks. Celebrities and brands are pushed into my feed, posting vacuous engagement traps.
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.
Threads has been that for me, but of course YMMV depending on the topics you like to follow. If you haven't tried tools like ThreadLink, Threads Sync, etc. lately, you might be surprised.
What does "too late" mean? I don't like Bluesky; it feels cliquish and insubstantial to me, and I do most of my Twitter-type writing on Mastodon now. But what am I losing by not writing on Twitter? I've been saying this for several months now, but the vibe I get from the current "fragmented" social media situation is of a reversion back to something like the heyday of Google Reader and the "blogosphere". Like: I need multiple browser tabs to keep track of everything?That's fine? It's better than when everything was crammed into a single site, with a single set of affordances nobody really liked.
Can you tell me more about how you see your practice of posting as writing? I don't hear many people talk sbout it like that. Also, what's your goal with it?
I agree that Twitter was a weird amalgamation of different people who wanted to use the site for different things… but for me that’s one of the things that made it compelling. I get to read a person’s musing on JavaScript frameworks and also see pictures of their dog and see them react in real time to a World Cup game.
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.
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.
> Someone please explain how a social network is supposed to succeed when it's invite-only? Hype alone won't carry it.
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.
Gmail interoperated with other email providers, so invites worked. Facebook limited signups based on email domain names, not invite codes, so everyone in those email domains could sign up at the same time. Google+, like Bluesky, started with invite codes without a way for communities to join organically.
The theory behind invite only is that it increases the density of the network. You invite people with similar interests as this the network can nucleate around some niche, rather than being 10,000 people with nothing in common. It's one of the standard plays for overcoming cold-start problems.
Scaling is hard. Invite codes help with that. They’re not terribly hard to find, I’ve several that I’ll happily share with anyone I know from elsewhere.
I don't know, Google+ seemed fine. It wasn't eating the world, and wasn't clear how it was positioned in their branding, but fine.
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.
Bluesky seems to be the "backup" for a lot of Twitter users. When Twitter had their outage a day or two ago the network activity spiked to some of the highest levels seen since like October.
Part of me thinks that's the point, I don't believe Jack set out to make something that could be a meaningful threat to twitter. It seems like it's meant to be just big enough to suck the oxygen out of the room for other twitter alternatives. (Obviously that failed, now that threads is topping download charts and twitter is sitting in the 40s.)
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.
They've been far too slow to respond to Twitter/X's missteps to be able to take advantage. Threads won that race by a wide margin, even if it is still relatively lacking in features.
Really? It feels so slow... interface took a couple seconds to load, and then the actual posts another 3-4 seconds. This is on gigabit too. Overloaded right now?
"Bluesky is a decentralized social app conceptualized by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and developed in parallel with Twitter. The social network has a Twitter-like user interface with algorithmic choice, a federated design and community-specific moderation."
It's lost the initial momentum but it's not dead yet. I'm still holding my breath that the critical mass makes the leap eventually; "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" is a compelling proposition
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
Most of my people seemed to have landed on bsky. Discussions there get shares and likes, unlike mastodon where for me it's just a few void-shouts per day. Threads appears to be 100% mid celebrities who I am sure Facebook is paying to hang around.
Yeah, I haven't even bothered trying Threads (and don't plan to)
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
The problem with that is coordination. All the Mastodon servers would need to align, agree, and implement this new process. The whole point of Mastodon is that it is federated, and so consensus will ensure progress is limited to the lowest common denominator.
Federation works when protocols and standards are negotiated upon, and people do coordinate implicitly wherever they apply the protocol. So I'm not sure if there's anything to explain as if we're at cross purposes.
Why couldn't a protocol and reference implementation exist for a client migration if servers have similar schemas for users and posts?
Do you know how censorship and Balkanization work on Bluesky? On Mastodon this was quite extreme, as entire servers can block each other, without any involvement from the individual user.
The thing that still grinds my gears about Mastodon is the concept of search is inherently broken. In Twitter I can search whatever and see all the old public posts from the start of time. On Mastodon, I'll get ... some stuff.
At the moment there’s no issue because there’s still only one server. De facto I can’t imagine any federated protocol that won’t enable servers to block each other, though.
If you use any of the major (or minor) email providers, you're implicitly buying into a system in which system operators, not individuals, determine what communications are or are not permitted.
That decision-making is quite widely distributed, with email service providers both making their own realtime or near-realtime determinations at both individual message and and network-provider levels (e.g., IP- or netblock-based quality determinations), as well as third-party quality measurements such as Spamhaus and Senderbase / Ironport (long since part of Cisco / Talos).
Increasingly even general Web traffic is subject to similar decisionmaking as with reCAPTCA, Cloudflare, and other services.
Individual decisionmaking simply does not scale to billions (or under IPv6, vastly more) relationships.
There's a give-and-take of blocking practices with Fediverse instances. I'm on a smaller instance maintained by someone I've known online for a decade or so, and who is highly principled in their decisions, though some do rub a bit raw on me. I've brought this up, and may yet decamp to another instance (or spin my own), though I'll also note that blocking fuckwits is a highly effective s/n preservation strategy. (The concept is highlighted in my Fediverse profile as a pinned post: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019>).
And I've been online for going on 40 years. Many of the naive presumptions of kumbaya and universal brotherhood have proved grossly misdirected. I'd once subscribed to many of them. I've grown up (or old).
The difference is that in case of email we are talking about clear cases of spam. In the case of Fediverse instances the reason for blocking are ideological differences. That's exactly what should be left to the individual, as the opinions diverge a lot. For spam everyone agrees that it should be blocked.
Rigid fixation on spam is an overly constrained understanding of the problem.
Email spam is a problem because it directly attacks the utility and value of the communications channel, driving people to other alternatives (or none at all in some cases). Similar issues exist with telephony abuses (robocalls, scam calls, spoofing, privacy invasion and sruveillance, etc.).
In the case of group discussion / social / microblogging platforms, a key dynamic is the nazi bar problem (let one in and you're now running a nazi bar), and the race-to-the-bottom dynamic of various forms of harassment and intimidation: those voices which don't feel safe talking on a platform or channel won't talk on that channel. They're denied a platform, and the platform is denied their voice.
(The Fediverse is actually under fairly sustained criticism by those voices for not having sufficient tools, policies, and/or enforcement.)
For commercial, advertising-supported platforms, an additional consideration is advertisers' sensibilities, and the fact that high-value advertising, brand-safe content, and attractive advertising audiences are all factors which are dependent in large part on content moderation policies. This doesn't apply generally to the Fediverse (though individual ad-supported instances might appear within it, as with Threads). It does strongly apply to Twitter and Facebook's properties generally, however.
There's also the observation that clue flees stupidity and/or banality. The more a channel is taken over by any low-signal content (whether that's overtly abusive or not), the less that intelligent and substantive contributors will care to engage with that channel.
That again is a dynamic I've observed for many decades now online, and am coming to appreciate has a long prior offline history before that.
And also, again, these are all cases where systemic abuse requires systemic response. Your initial comment is not only naive but demonstrable infeasible. It's been tried, repeatedly, and it simply does not work.
The fact that we're having this discussion on a forum in which there are in fact system-level controls over what does and does not appear, and no individual user tools to accomplish same (bar hiding specific stories) somewhat underlines my point.
I disagree. The claim that everything without censorship becomes a "Nazi bar" is ridiculous. It is only defensible if you have an absurdly wide definition of "Nazi". The claim that advertising and "brand-safe" content justifies political censorship is an especially sad one. As for the existence of alleged "systemic" abuse: I don't see any evidence that it exists.
It could certainly be more user-friendly than it currently is, but no, I think it's more user-friendly than having to pick a home server and worry about whether you picked well.
Mastodon evangelists just don't seem to get why nobody else shares their masochistic tastes. It's not terrible if you want something highly configurable but most social media users want to chat, not federate.
I found that most of the "celeb chatter" died off for me on Threads a few months after launch. Anecdotally, there are a lot of gamedevs I follow on there that have migrated from Twitter, and treating it more like an interest-based network (a la Google+) has bumped it up to one of my daily apps.
You've obviously not been to Threads in a while. It has a pretty thriving community, esp now that it's available in EU. There's a reason it's #1 on the app stores in many countries.
The options this creates are super accessible to non-technical people. You can go on the app store right now and take your pick of bsky clients, and you can browse/search different algos from within the app and keep a list of your favorites and swap between them, it's all very user-friendly
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
Choice is only good if the options are differentiated and easy to understand.
A bunch of algo and client options sound good for someone who is already a committed user, but for a new user it just complicated the onboarding experience.
Not to mention, it’s unclear what the incentive to put real resources behind any of these clients is.
It doesn't complicate the onboarding process though, because there's an official client and a default algo. That's Bluesky's whole thing: sensible defaults and easy onboarding, so it can be "just twitter" if you want it to be. But the open protocol and ecosystem that give you more options if/when you want them, and put pressure on the official ones to stay good
That's really the key. Most people don't need to care. Bluesky is nice and easy for their needs. They just use the bsky.app website and the official Bluesky phone app.
This is in contrast to Mastodon where people were told to pick an instance and not really guided to any one as the primary one (because Mastodon devs/users don't want there to be a thought that there even is a "primary" instance).
People here on HN can claim picking an instance isn't a big deal all they want, but I can say with confidence it is. I'm in various furry artist Discord servers where people expressed their distaste for having to deal with the multiple instances.
The thread is discussing Blue Sky getting critical mass (ie casual users), my claim is that for this the algo and client choices are neutral to mildly negative value.
Take that away you’re really back to “just Twitter” with fewer features and less content.
I agree that algo and client choice would be a positive for a mature site like Twitter, but it’s unclear how a site with this strategy will get enough traction for the choices to be useful
An idealistic, technical user might put up with the typical quality of early "alternative solution" apps, but seeing enough errors, crashes, unintuitive UX, and other hurdles, several times across several apps, will get most users to give up on the platform.
ActivityPub wasn't the first federated web discussions protocol. It isn't even a good one. Given how few users use ActivityPub-based services, it makes sense to experiment while the window is open.
During the early days of what would become Bluesky, they first reviewed the available options for decentralized public communications and nothing out there checked all the boxes. So they moved forward building something completely new that did.
This is a very reasonable and common question (I asked it myself before joining the team)
Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data.
Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).
My whole community has moved from twitter to bsky. The first push was for mastodon, but that died out after a few weeks. But all action is on bsky now, not twitter, so I feel most have migrated fully, not just double posting.
Cycling / urban planning / environmental in my country. So it's quite niche. A couple of hundreds.
But that's also how I used Twitter. An account specifically for this. Only ever followed or interacted with content related to this. So not using it to consume other content, write about anything that comes to mind etc.
The fact that your whole community was insular enough to move to an invite-only app is exactly what worries me about Bluesky. It's just a bunch of cliques. Is that sustainable? We'll see.
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.
As I wrote in another comment, it's a clique that I moved with, yes. Related to urban planning, cycling infrastructure etc in my country. If anything, the move has been nice. No longer daily death threats from car drivers thinking that's a proportionate response for us advocating for a new bicycle lane..
Being a small group of course made the transition easier. Most of us didn't use Twitter to follow all kinds of stuff, just mostly these things.
And while being a clique, with no outside influences, can be bad, the "influences" you now get from blue checks on X isn't anything worth having. Just abuse.
> "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" is a compelling proposition
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.
Twitter, previously, was the best of both worlds. A first-party app “most” people used, and then a vibrant third party app ecosystem that others, mainly power users, loved.
In the early days, Twitter used to have a very open and friendly API. It's a big part of why users and third-party devs (I was both) loved it. Same thing was true of Facebook and Reddit.
Over time, they shut down their APIs (or charged huge fees) in an effort to intentionally kill off third-party clients and services.
A key goal for Bluesky is to "lock open" the network and the API so that it's impossible to reverse the decision.
Open source clients and algorithms could serve as a foundation for more end-user friendly abstractions and UIs, that let average users very plainly express (or not express) what they want to see, and who they want to be seen by.
Imagine a sort of plug in ecosystem with sane defaults
It's a consumer product and it has to compete as one. We've been pretty aware of that from the start.
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.
Too early to tell about momentum tbh. Getting networks to collectively move takes time. From a protocol level I think Bluesky probably has opportunity for better UX than Mastodon, which is incredibly clunky when taking actions cross-server.
All my twitter friends got invite codes through other friends pretty quickly (days or weeks), many people now have such a glut of codes that they're throwing them at whoever asks. I've got like 10 myself and nobody left to give them to
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
There is still a waitlist but we're working hard to open things up ASAP. Some people will never believe it, but the waitlist was never intended as a growth hack. It was purely an attempt to keep the network healthy and the servers from catching on fire as we iterated on the app itself.
Loving bluesky so far, thanks for making it. Honestly it's the best competitor to Twitter I have seen so far, and after looking at the company / job listings and seeing how incredibly focused you are on the UI/UX aspects.. it seems an incredibly compelling product vision / company. Kudos.
As an aside, do you have any plans to make your choices of domain names / branding less confusing / sketchy looking? (bsky.app, blueskyweb.xyz, bsky.social for user names, 'Bluesky Social' on the app store, etc)
Thank you! And yeah, the goal is to bring an open social media protocol to everyone in a way that feels familiar and easy. The social media problems we face are societal and most of society is non-technical.
The domain situation is unfortunate and confusing. We don't have any immediate solution but agree it's a problem.
Amateurs. you guys blew a once in a life time. Invites/waitlist... For a social media app. Seen it before with that other app who's name I forgot about.
You guys know that every single playform eventually go downhill in content quality as the user base grows, right? You are wasting your time. You'd better open up now or never. Nobody will bother looking at your product in a year if Threads gets bigger and better.
I think Bluesky is legit building toward being a Twitter successor.
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.
I thought I read that BlueSky was envisioned as a migration of all of twitter to a federated platform by Dorsey. Critical mass wouldn’t be a problem if that’s right.
Brosky sold twitter and before he sold it it went from the best to the worst social media, why on earth would I go back there? Elon might be cringe but Twitter is legitimately less neurotic nowadays than it was before he sold it.
Yeah I've been enjoying Twitter quite a bit since Elon took over, truthfully I'm not even sure what he changed to cause the effect but it seems to be working.
Is Bluesky and Threads basically Twitter with different moderation policies? I can see why someone might leave Twitter for Mastodon but why would you leave for one of those 2? Just block people you don't want to see stuff from.
At this point the ownership of Twitter is the problem for a lot of people, and then there's the change to the system itself, neither of which can be resolved by blocking.
Many of the people that some of us want to follow have now left X.
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.
Interestingly enough, I follow people on both sides of the aisle, and only left-leaning people have left Twitter. I haven't created a threads account because they're blatantly asking me to share every data they could access + their awful content moderation rules. At least there are plenty of options for people to share their opinions.
I think the domain validated handles on Bluesky are a big deal. They help reduce impersonation and let you build a reputation around an identity that isn't controlled by the platform.
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.
I got the app but still can’t browse anything without an account. So I don’t use it :| this is user acquisition 101, if you’re behind a login page people won’t use your stuff.
Bluesky is a different protocol than Mastodon, but conceptually I think it's fair to say they're similar.
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.
Bluesky has a 300 character limit, Mastodon has 500, non-Mastodon ActivityPub servers have a configurable limit. Mastodon can render markdown, has subject lines which are commonly used as content warning tags, can translate posts. It supports custom emoji and non-Mastodon ActivityPub servers support custom emoji reactions. Bluesky has more discovery features like community-curated lists and algorithmic suggestions of who to follow.
Partially true, but vanilla Mastodon does hardcode it at 500. Some forks make it configurable (I believe glitch-soc does), and some admins have edited the hardcoded value manually.
Mastodon features a more complex content filtering based on keywords [1],[2] and you can always try to pick instance that fits your needs. Hashtag support is here since beginning if I'm not mistaken. Bluesky has a rather simplified filtering [3], [4] that most likely will be appealing to mass users, tho since service revolves around customized multiple feeds they shouldn't in theory see and interact with the content they don't like in the first place [5]. There's no hashtag support so far - which seems odd because this is a pretty much standard feature on social networks.
Since the Threads launch, I barely used BlueSky anymore. Now with the new logo, I opened again for the first time in 4 months or so, thinking that well, there was improvements? No.
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.
Most of the "GIFs" you encounter on social media these days are actually autoplay videos without sound. So it's not that crazy. I think they're waiting until they have a robust solution figured out for video support before they land "GIF" support.
One of the alternative clients (Graysky) supports GIFs through some integration tenor.com, I believe.
If you don't convert GIFs on server side it would take much more data than videos. I mean much, much more. GIFs are more or less a long seqeunce of 8-bit images.
Twitter was interesting when you couldn't post photos or videos. You would link to twitpic and knew that people maybe would click... or not. Reminded me of IRC in that regard.
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
I think depends on the algorithm, but the algo is fairly broken. I know some people are complaining about "For You" full of "almost naked" persons there...
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.
No idea what you're doing to see that. Either view your feed of people you're following, or follow curated or algorithmic feeds to your liking. That's the whole point of bsky, the choice.
> You still can't send videos and gifs. That's just, so basic for a social network.
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.
It still doesn't seem to have a public feed though, so you can only view individual posts.
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.
I get that this rage bait works on some percent of the population. 20%? 50%? 75%? What that leaves unanswered is, why aren't these platforms smart enough to adapt to what actual individuals react to? Sure, they picked the most successful single formula, but you'd think they'd want to increase the platform's engagement at the margins rather than just milking one approach for all it's worth.
I suspect these megalithic corpos are actually in it to make a dollar, no matter the cost to reputation or society. You'd think reputation would matter but it turns out once you reach the point of no return ("I keep Facebook so I can share with my grandma"), you'll come back even if there are rats chewing on your toes
You are just describing a (good) recommendation algorithm. TikTok's is infamously good at figuring out your niches and catering to your taste by looking at your minute interactions with the content it shows you. My TikTok "for you" page has absolutely 0 mainstream politics, rage bait, or any other "normie" topics. It's mostly technically fascinating stuff and good absurd humor that caters to my absurd taste.
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.
Being able to view individual posts, even if there is no public feed, is really important if people are going to post things that may get picked up by other media channels.
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.
> 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.
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.
FWIW, this side of Bluesky definitely exists but if you're diligent about curating your follows and avoiding certain custom feeds this type of content is pretty easy to avoid. There is no blackbox algorithm blasting rage bait onto your timeline.
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.
I just used the normal hot and trending feeds. I tried to tell it by hiding posts, but I literally couldn't find anyone I wanted to follow to really curate it.
Personally I have been pleasantly surprised by how useful Grok is for getting a quick read on events around the world captured in tweets, e.g. protests in Argentina or the shooting in Prague. The spotty coverage of global news by US media leaves a huge opportunity for X to exploit.
Just dug up my old invite code to find this is pretty bad. Basically an app for the small obscure minority who left Twitter in protest including a bunch of ex users you'd only know from memes. Curious to see what this evolves into.
If nothing else, there is one good thing of Elon's acquisition of Twitter, and it's that it has made the case for making social media outlets responsible for their content evidently clear.
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.
> If nothing else, there is one good thing of Elon's acquisition of Twitter, and it's that it has made the case for making social media outlets responsible for their content evidently clear.
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.
> He showed that they were engaging in widespread editorializing of conservative content while lying about being neutral.
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.
It feels like Bluesky missed their chance to be the twitter alternative after how well Threads has been going. I'm sure zuck will find a way to ruin it but its gonna be a long road a head for Bluesky.
As popular as it is among specific groups, I can't help but feel the decentralized push is going to hurt adoption. Maybe not as badly as it hurt Mastodon because they do supply a "default" server to join, but most people in my experience, don't want a decentralized platform and enjoy the benefits of a centralized platform quite a bit.
Bluesky has the advantage that it doesn’t “feel” decentralized. It just feels like Twitter: you make an account (with an additional screen confirming you want to create the account on bsky.app or whatever the main instance is) and it works as smoothly as twitter does with some extra goodies in the backend that come from it being decentralized.
I do like how usernames are domain names, which gives them a portability similar to email.
Threads still doesn’t have a very good search function, which in my opinion was always Twitter’s greatest asset. Your feed always had a ton of randomness, but if you wanted to talk about something specific that was going on at the moment, you searched for it. Threads just gives a bunch of random results, some in the last hour, followed by 5 months ago, and then another from 15 minutes ago.
BlueSky is the only place where I have ever received death threats, the only place where I ended in multiple blocklists for upsetting god knows whom, and the only place where I had to block hundreds of accounts to avoid getting porn and questionable furry stuff in the main timeline, even with moderation on.
But it seems to work fine for a particular brand of extremely online people.
No one wants to talk to everyone on the planet at once except extremely online people anymore, that initial burst of enthusiasm from normies 10-15 years ago was borne from naivety and will never happen again.
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.
Complaining about porn (mostly gay/trans/furry stuff, although even the straight kind is NOT something I want on my phone when idly scrolling on a bus or a train in public, or ever really) routinely ending in the default timeline, which is apparently a capital offense threatening the livelihood of sex workers and furry "artists".
I hate it when I manually opt in to adult content and then adult content shows up on my timeline. The fact that only way to avoid it is to just use the app as it is out of the box is a design flaw
That’s odd. I’ve used bsky for several months along with 5-6 friends and none of us has ever had an issue with explicit content with moderation on. Coming from Twitter the overall content isn’t particularly shocking, though if you’re coming from Threads it is less tame than that.
Out of curiosity, who were you complaining about the porn to? I’ve seen quite a few dogpiles on accounts that register and then proceed to reply en masse to every account they dislike.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadFor 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.
Is it really no. 1 or nearby on Android ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Merry Christmas (or happy holidays)
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...
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
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
Why couldn't a protocol and reference implementation exist for a client migration if servers have similar schemas for users and posts?
I'm okay with consuming an upstream block/filter list, but I ultimately want executive control over it.
With your model that wouldn't be an issue.
Some instances and individuals will block Fediverse instances which federate with Bluesky.
That decision-making is quite widely distributed, with email service providers both making their own realtime or near-realtime determinations at both individual message and and network-provider levels (e.g., IP- or netblock-based quality determinations), as well as third-party quality measurements such as Spamhaus and Senderbase / Ironport (long since part of Cisco / Talos).
Increasingly even general Web traffic is subject to similar decisionmaking as with reCAPTCA, Cloudflare, and other services.
Individual decisionmaking simply does not scale to billions (or under IPv6, vastly more) relationships.
There's a give-and-take of blocking practices with Fediverse instances. I'm on a smaller instance maintained by someone I've known online for a decade or so, and who is highly principled in their decisions, though some do rub a bit raw on me. I've brought this up, and may yet decamp to another instance (or spin my own), though I'll also note that blocking fuckwits is a highly effective s/n preservation strategy. (The concept is highlighted in my Fediverse profile as a pinned post: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019>).
And I've been online for going on 40 years. Many of the naive presumptions of kumbaya and universal brotherhood have proved grossly misdirected. I'd once subscribed to many of them. I've grown up (or old).
Email spam is a problem because it directly attacks the utility and value of the communications channel, driving people to other alternatives (or none at all in some cases). Similar issues exist with telephony abuses (robocalls, scam calls, spoofing, privacy invasion and sruveillance, etc.).
In the case of group discussion / social / microblogging platforms, a key dynamic is the nazi bar problem (let one in and you're now running a nazi bar), and the race-to-the-bottom dynamic of various forms of harassment and intimidation: those voices which don't feel safe talking on a platform or channel won't talk on that channel. They're denied a platform, and the platform is denied their voice.
(The Fediverse is actually under fairly sustained criticism by those voices for not having sufficient tools, policies, and/or enforcement.)
For commercial, advertising-supported platforms, an additional consideration is advertisers' sensibilities, and the fact that high-value advertising, brand-safe content, and attractive advertising audiences are all factors which are dependent in large part on content moderation policies. This doesn't apply generally to the Fediverse (though individual ad-supported instances might appear within it, as with Threads). It does strongly apply to Twitter and Facebook's properties generally, however.
There's also the observation that clue flees stupidity and/or banality. The more a channel is taken over by any low-signal content (whether that's overtly abusive or not), the less that intelligent and substantive contributors will care to engage with that channel.
That again is a dynamic I've observed for many decades now online, and am coming to appreciate has a long prior offline history before that.
And also, again, these are all cases where systemic abuse requires systemic response. Your initial comment is not only naive but demonstrable infeasible. It's been tried, repeatedly, and it simply does not work.
The fact that we're having this discussion on a forum in which there are in fact system-level controls over what does and does not appear, and no individual user tools to accomplish same (bar hiding specific stories) somewhat underlines my point.
So don't. There are multiple services you can pay a small fee to to host your own instance with only you on it.
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
A bunch of algo and client options sound good for someone who is already a committed user, but for a new user it just complicated the onboarding experience.
Not to mention, it’s unclear what the incentive to put real resources behind any of these clients is.
This is in contrast to Mastodon where people were told to pick an instance and not really guided to any one as the primary one (because Mastodon devs/users don't want there to be a thought that there even is a "primary" instance).
People here on HN can claim picking an instance isn't a big deal all they want, but I can say with confidence it is. I'm in various furry artist Discord servers where people expressed their distaste for having to deal with the multiple instances.
Take that away you’re really back to “just Twitter” with fewer features and less content.
I agree that algo and client choice would be a positive for a mature site like Twitter, but it’s unclear how a site with this strategy will get enough traction for the choices to be useful
An idealistic, technical user might put up with the typical quality of early "alternative solution" apps, but seeing enough errors, crashes, unintuitive UX, and other hurdles, several times across several apps, will get most users to give up on the platform.
I wrote a comment last week diving more into this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660192
Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data.
Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).
https://atproto.com/guides/faq
I just know I've been burnt, as have many colleagues, on expanding companies stuff. And then them modifying/eliminating APIs.
It also is a PITA that "Open" is now a buzzword, rather than FLOSS. (For example, I'd call OpenAI anything but open.)
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
But that's also how I used Twitter. An account specifically for this. Only ever followed or interacted with content related to this. So not using it to consume other content, write about anything that comes to mind etc.
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.
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EDIT: all have been claimed
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Being a small group of course made the transition easier. Most of us didn't use Twitter to follow all kinds of stuff, just mostly these things.
And while being a clique, with no outside influences, can be bad, the "influences" you now get from blue checks on X isn't anything worth having. Just abuse.
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.
Over time, they shut down their APIs (or charged huge fees) in an effort to intentionally kill off third-party clients and services.
A key goal for Bluesky is to "lock open" the network and the API so that it's impossible to reverse the decision.
Imagine a sort of plug in ecosystem with sane defaults
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.
I don't know how you can expect people to make the move when they're not even able to sign in
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
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For devs that want to experiment, we've had a special waitlist for a while: https://atproto.com/blog/call-for-developers
As an aside, do you have any plans to make your choices of domain names / branding less confusing / sketchy looking? (bsky.app, blueskyweb.xyz, bsky.social for user names, 'Bluesky Social' on the app store, etc)
The domain situation is unfortunate and confusing. We don't have any immediate solution but agree it's a problem.
You guys know that every single playform eventually go downhill in content quality as the user base grows, right? You are wasting your time. You'd better open up now or never. Nobody will bother looking at your product in a year if Threads gets bigger and 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.
So this isn't the same situation again.
Okay, but I never even signed up for Twitter.
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...
Well that's just an opinion. I feel that it's better than it ever was. Sorry.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
It's just odd to me because my Instagram feed is great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
It’s still got centralized censorship, same as Twitter or Facebook.
I suppose time will tell.
I do like how usernames are domain names, which gives them a portability similar to email.
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.
Out of curiosity, who were you complaining about the porn to? I’ve seen quite a few dogpiles on accounts that register and then proceed to reply en masse to every account they dislike.