I'd love to see a more NLP look at this data, Google trends style. What topics of discourse come up regularly, what spikes during certain time periods? Can you summarize what economists are discussing? Can you find people talking about the same things but are not in each other's networks?
Bluesky has really exploded in certain niches over the past week, I think my followers have gone up 5-6x since Saturday.
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.
Yeah, I've had an account for quite a while now (from before registrations were open), but it was largely a ghost town. The last few days there is a lot more stuff happening in my feed. And so far free of all the drama, bots, etc.
I yet to find "utility" accounts on Bluesky. I use Twitter to follow news from games, game studios and publishers, news sites, bands, NASA etc. There is nothing like there yet and I don't care about random people (as I don't care about them on Twitter either)
If you are looking for stuff from big publishers then yeah it's gonna be a bit slow/empty but there are a lot of small/indie devs on bluesky and it's awesome being able to interact with them directly without all the spam that usually came with posts on twitter.
Yeah. Twitter/X after the Russian invasion quickly let me connect to serious professionals in US-Russia relations, war, etc. e.g. War on the Rocks and Mike Kofman, the Truth of the Matter by CSIS, etc.
Are there easy tools that allow you to post on multiple platforms from the same content, that also supports replies?
I'm a web dev and follow a lot of companies and organizations in the web dev sphere and these all created accounts a week ago. Other sectors will probably also be jumping as lumps. When a sizable chunk moves, then the others follow.
The facts are that Threads has 275m MAU and has been #1 on the App Store almost continually since it launched. Bluesky is now #2 and rapidly growing. The momentum is real and significant.
And the world is sick of Elon Musk and US politics.
I don't think that's particularly true but even if it was, the site is overrun with crypto spam and porn bots that will drive people away. I know 3 people who have deactivated their account and switched to bluesky in the past week - and anecdotal evidence for many people on bluesky seems to suggest engagement levels are significantly higher. The network effects are really gaining traction as well.
I gave up on Twitter when I opened the app in public to find a porn video playing in the main feed, despite not following or interacting with any accounts of that nature previously. That was ~6 months ago and I haven't looked back.
Twitter is quite small as far as big social media platforms go (about 300 million, largest individual userbase by far US citizens [1]). Compared to Telegram with a billion users and Instagram, Facebook, TikTok/Douyin in the billions the constant talking about Twitter/Elon and so forth isn't that internationally relevant.
No offense but it's mostly Americans screaming at other Americans about how important America is. It's a little bit tiresome how much headspace that site and owner occupy these days on certain parts of the internet.
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.
In terms of toxicity, X is way beyond 4chan at this point. But the style is very different. Algorithmic vs organic, retweets vs (You)s, anonymous vs semi-anonymous and much more. All the way to how replies are visually presented which is awful on Twitter and it's clones.
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).
Twitter has always been one of the most toxic places on the Internet. It's why I have refused to use it, because I have better things to do with my time than watch terminally online people get into diatribes about their extreme left/right political views. I don't have any faith that any replacement will be better, considering that they are primarily populated by the people who are so extreme left that they couldn't abide the idea of new Twitter ownership.
My X never really degraded (I also spend a lot of time on Japanese-language X which is probably a different beast) but I have been spending time on Bluesky over the last year. For a while it was a fun network but fairly quiet. I could go an hour or so without any new posts. Over the last 3 weeks I've seen Bluesky become a lot more active and now it's feeling a lot like X where there's no way to stay on top of my feed. I'm really excited as I'm a firm believer that larger communities lead to more diverse views.
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.
Japanese language Twitter is indeed a very different beast. It's pretty much the social network over there, and most of Musk's changes that targeted or angered users were primarily targeted at English-language users, mostly in the US. So the Japanese users just kinda trucked on like nothing was happening.
That's been my experience as well, in every sense. A sudden explosion of incoming people, many new options of interesting and salient people to follow, and the overall experience rapidly getting more engaging.
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.
In its heyday, before the most recent acquisition, Twitter was really good for local info (ignoring celebrities, shitposting, and the like). Not just news but announcements, alerts, and other local stuff if you followed the right accounts.
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.
Any of the people/journalists that were reporting on the inner workings of Twitter that Musk didn't like so he shut it down would be something that jumps to mind.
Musk very clearly actively sticks his fingers in the pie to steer narratives. Easy example, one of his children came out as trans (to Elon's apparent dismay), and now "cisgender" is flagged as a slur/hate-speech. There is other, anecdotal evidence that certain posters (ridiculously, Musk included) have their posts elevated above baseline visibility, but I don't have any statistics to back that up. Other flavorful unsolicited changes to the platform, such as changing blocking to allow blocked people to still see your posts, seem again like self-serving dictates from the top. Perhaps generally not censorship, but heavily biased moderation very clearly steered by the agenda of a single man.
Twitter used to have a Firehose API, too. Over time they closed it, and made it only available to large users like Google Search with real-time indexing needs.
Twitter had a really outstanding search and streaming API, but after Musk bought it they put it behind a $60k/year paywall. You can see a corresponding and abrupt falloff in academic network research papers, with newer ones that revolve around Twitter largely limited to cannibalizing old datasets.
With luck bsky keeps growing and researchers invest effort in studying a more open-by-design platform.
Very nice. Modern GPUs really are fast as drawing points.
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?
One would hope the people on bluesky understand that they're posting publically to a centralized database. What data privacy problem are you concerned with?
As I understand it, the moment you're processing someone's personally identifiable information, you're in the red zone, GDPR-wise. The users consented to publish their info on BlueSky, but not on OP's website.
I get the idea behind the GDPR and it's nice to protect consumers but I'm scared for hobby projects like this.
I think GDPR itself is a bit unclear here. Google Search still operates in Europe as far as I know even though it scrapes and indexes people's websites without explicit consent, and I suspect GDPR doesn't intend to make it illegal to do this. Could be wrong...
IANAL but at least in the U.S. I'm pretty sure publicly-available data is generally excluded from whatever protections do exist on PII. I'm not sure what, if anything, has been said about this in the EU.
Hard to overstate just how much I like this. Not only does the end result convey information in many dimensions, it's also extremely appealing visually. The graininess that stems from rendering such a large number of nodes really adds a nice touch here, something that you don't often see in other graph visualizations.
The visualization looks absolutely fantastic. Great work. Would love to dive deeper into the tech behind it.
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.
Hate speech or not, there is nothing pleasant about it.
The irony is that the 'holier-than-thou' crowd, who are against hate and for love all over the world, overwhelmingly post negative political comments and are rooting for X/Twitter to collapse.
This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.
> This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.
What, that people are mean about a very special website sometimes? Seems a rather niche problem, tbh.
There is nothing inherently wrong with people being negative. If you had a social network where people could only be positive about things… now, that would be unhealthy.
It was about "hate speech" though, not "unpleasant speech", then you'd be right.
Stop thinking in us/them, everybody hates someone or something and that's fine. That's not what hate speech is I think. Take one example from the Canadian govmnt:
> The bill defines “hate speech” as the content of a communication that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.
> These grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered.
Sure, there are clear differences between hate speech and unpleasant speech. I can't disagree on the definition. But I’m seeing a lot of hateful anti-Trump posts on BlueSky, and on X/Twitter, there’s plenty of pro-Trump content. These two groups have polarized views, so they naturally clash.
What I find ironic is that BlueSky has many openly anti-Trump posts, while X/Twitter tends to have a significant amount of pro-Trump content. Because many minority and marginalized groups lean anti-Trump, again, these opposing viewpoints naturally clash, often leading to Twitter being labeled as a "hate speech platform". Yet on BlueSky, there’s no problem with people openly criticizing or spreading negativity about pro-Trump people. Since Trump supporters don’t typically fall into minority categories, it seems BlueSky users have the "privilege" to freely bash the Twitter crowd without facing the same scrutiny. Essentially, BlueSky is shielded from the hate speech label despite fostering a different kind of polarized environment.
Good news is you can create your own labeling service that people can subscribe and report posts to and you can have a feed completely devoid of hate speech against the government.
Also, if you're in a group of people that trumps policies target (immigrants with undocumented family members, women and trans people who want bodily autonomy, Arabs with family in Palestine) then all that pro-trump positivity starts to feel pretty hateful too, just in case you haven't looked at it from that angle.
It isn’t ironic to dislike intolerant people or to voice it. It is an individual’s prerogative to imagine that tolerance must be completely uniform, but that doesn’t reflect the reality of groups or systems made up of actual humans.
Social networks require drama in order to stay relevant, this is baked in and by design. Capitalist love this feature. Also you'll never get 100's of millions of people to agree on anything.
Is it really fare to compare a political cartoon to the garbage twitter is allowing? I might still visit twitter if it wasn't so out of control.
… So, wait, two political cartoons (the first one’s been on the go for years; it’s pretty much a classic at this point) and a cat? Like, unless you’re going to claim that ol’ minihands is a marginalised group of one, very hard to read any of these as hate speech. Actually, even if one _was_ to accept that obviously silly premise, still probably not. Maybe the cat, at a serious push.
While I don't think it's technically hate speech, but yeah bluesky is either just unanimous negativity or positivity for different things, and it feels like groupthink. There is no middle ground.
It hasn't avoided that fate. If you doubt me, go into a thread about US politics and praise Donald Trump and watch as your comments get not just downvoted, but flagged so that they are hidden. This will happen no matter how good your arguments are.
Make no mistake, this site is ideologically polarized just like all the others. The only saving grace is that the vast majority of topics are about tech, not politics, so the polarization is usually hidden.
Even in tech, there are various repeated themes you can see here, which are much more prevalent than say general tech spheres like the hate against AI, VCs, MongoDB or the love for Rust, privacy, open source, postgres etc.
That's a current wave going through. There's a bit of discourse going on where some users were rage baiting by constantly posting twitter screenshots over to bluesky and people who left bluesky are pushing back about how they don't want to see that content.
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.
> They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech.
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.
Within the first 15 recommended posts or so there was
- a post about how Canada is overrun by Indians
- a post about how Melbourne is overrun by n-worders (they replaced the Gs with £s)
- a post about how a trans person is ugly
- 2 "nudes in bio" bot posts. This was not hate speech, and arguably the most positive posts I got.
This is not counting the Elon posts and the Trump posts, which were the first and second thing that got recommended. Nor the posts from Elon Musk imitators, who I assume are trying to take advantage of the fact that Elon Musk gets special treatment from the algorithm.
When you create a new account, X asks you to follow an account to determine what your interests are. I picked NASA. I did not get recommended a single space photo.
Bluesky to me still seems like a place completely dominated by software type (HN crowd). I know there are obvious exceptions there's no need for you to list them.
Threads has extreme normies, bluesky has the nerds, and twitter seems to have just the right mixture of both.
There’s arguably a moral difference between having your stuff stolen, and giving it up as part of the TOS. Most artists, you’d assume, would prefer the former.
I won't list out exceptions, but my Bluesky experience is not at all how you describe. Obviously it just depends on who you follow, but I don't think "dominated by software type" describes the Bluesky demographic as a whole, and it hasn't for some time.
if you don't follow anyone, like me, the timeline is dominated by journalists, furries, and people who post nudity. i'm not saying these are bad, just an observation.
one of my biggest subjective takeaways from spending hours scrolling around the map is that my impression that the userbase was dominated by software types was ~mostly wrong! feels like less than half, and the rest is huge swaths of normie, artist, furry, and media people
This thread (no pun intended) is the first I'm hearing that anyone uses Threads at all. To me, it seemed like after the initial week or so, there was only bots left on Threads, trying to hook people to the person's Instagram, or whatever other place they actually post content at.
Threads is the highest ranked "social" app on the Play Store right now, so a lot of real people must be using it despite appearances. Next down the list is TikTok, then Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook, X (below Bluesky!), and
finally Reddit.
There's starting to be lots of news and politics sources on there. The Swifties are moving over, there's a nice "BlackSky" movement, and there's a bit of sports popping up now too.
I find Mastodon much more dominated by that crowd. Bluesky seems to have a decent mix of software nerds and artists, but yes there's definitely a "nerd" bias there that Threads doesn't have which is more aggressively "normie".
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
That looks really cool. I would also be interested to see examples of what commonality links the clusters of nodes- like are there clusters of people with the same hobby? Are there clusters of people speaking the same language, or living in the same city?
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?
The best thing about Bluesky is you can use your domain as your username. I'm @bradgessler.com on there, so if people want to "verify" me, they see something more meaningful than a blue checkbox, which is my website.
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.
Problem with Mastodon is you’re forced to associate with the identity of the sever or run your own instance, both of which are very awkward.
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.
Maybe think about people who (deliberately or not) have neither chosen their domain(s) to read like their real name or online handle. I agree that yours kinda works, but I wouldn't want to be addressed by @<any of my domains>, that's why I use a handle (and have not chosen a matching domain since 1999 or so). And yes, I know you don't have to go that route, and I actually like that it works, I'm just saying it's not a universally good feature. It can be pretty useless.
Neat thing about BlueSky using DNS TXT record is I don't actually have to host a landing page. The way mastodon does it feels like a quid pro quo way of making you put a mastodon icon on your website. Bluesky is really good for corporate and government users who can get an @name.whitehouse.gov account or @name.npr.org etc without polluting the npr.org markup with a thousand "rel" links for each of their employees. I think bluesky is thinking about a different audience than mastodon.
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.
The default handles (ending in .bsky.social) you get from signing up also redirect to your profile on bsky.app by default. Even if someone has no idea what bluesky is, they can load up that URL (even with the @) and be looking at your social profile right away.
Bluesky and atproto seem to be built to be hackable.
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):
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]
Wasn't the @ also invented by users?
I remember it was fascinating to watch this network self organize and create conventions of its own, that are now used everywhere.
Seems to me like Jarkko Oikarinen or one of his crew invented hashtags, no? Denoting the context of your communication with something like #warez or #hack significantly predates web2.0.
That use— to define IRC channels— seems distinctly different than Twitter hashtags to tag individual posts. I wouldn’t be surprised if hash tags started as a nod to that, perhaps even jokingly, but I don’t think you could consider them a descendent.
Rather I think Twitter-style hashtags take inspiration from IRC channels in the format of #topic
Because channel names are not hashtags. The syntax is purely because IRC is a text-based protocol, so you need a special way to distinguish channel names from regular text.
The word "tweet" itself came from a 3rd party developer:
> 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."
The Twitter bot situation only seems to have got worse since they shut down free API access. LLM engagement farming bots everywhere in replies, hordes of scam bots replying if you use certain keywords, porn bots following and DMing everyone non-stop...
Evidently the people running the bots don't really care whether or not you give them an API to work with.
I think that coincided with them removing phone number verification for accounts. Probably due to my browser looking unusual (content blocker, linux user-agent string, other addons) any time I set up a new account and used it for a few minutes a few years ago, it'd lock the account and redirect every logged in page to one demanding SMS verification to unlock the account.
I would usually get support to manually unlock it after a few days by emailing them and mentioning why I didn't want to give them a phone number. Now the process only involves solving captchas. (and maybe some hidden waiting)
Check out bluesky's "labeling services", I think it will be a very simple matter to crowdsource lists of obvious bots and prevent their having any reach. You can create bots that make as many posts as you want, but bots aren't entitled to being included in any feed. It comes down to the posts that the relay choose to aggregate, and what the appview chooses to display according to user preferences.
One of the nice things that make Bluesky different is that there isn't really a single central algorithm that everyone is forced to use. This combined with the many novel moderations tools like feeds and labellers mean it's pretty trivial to filter out entire categories of spam/botting.
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.
Yep, we intentionally built it to be hackable! We believe that social media will improve when people are free to build on it, change it, fork it, and remix it. Bluesky and the atproto ecosystem can evolve as fast as users and developers want them to.
I was contemplating coming over, but this comment is the most convincing to me.
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.
Had to make an account to just echo this sentiment. I recently joined bluesky and holy hotdog as a developer it feels good that you can actually build stuff, data wrangling or whatever you might feel inspired to do.
A lot of high profile commentators were waiting until after the election to move to Bluesky. They felt that they'd be giving up their influence if they left then, but now that the election is over they have time to rebuild onto a new platform. Bluesky seems quite nice. I was on Mastadon for a while, but after the initial burst of activity, its silo-like orientation led to stagnant servers. That is, it neither fully embraced the community-first services that Discord provides, nor the easy-discoverability of open-platform of Twitter/X/.
Also, this may seem silly, but I like the butterfly logo.
There's another narrative that I've heard about the recent flood of former-X users into Bluesky: a new Terms of Service document goes into effect in about 4 days, giving X ownership of your content with respect to its use in training LLMs.
I thought Grok has been using Twitter content this whole time, are they just getting around to updating their ToS?
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
"legal" doesn't imply that Twitter/X won't send a C&D due to scraping that is expensive for a normal person to fight. Moreso if Twitter/X invokes the CFAA which has been common for scraping cases post HiQ vs. LinkedIn.
My personal belief is yes. Legal talks to management after the case concludes, tells them this is the new reality, and management tells product to make the change.
At no time is management obligated or even remotely motivated to tell end users the real reason for making the change, because users believing that the platform is just a greedy corporation is better than them realizing that the platform will just roll over if the police presents them with a subpoena to snitch on a user.
Post-2024, with Elon running the government as fiscal/regulatory czar, Twitter policy is evidently stronger than judicial interpretation of Constitutional rights.
What happens to Twitter when Musk has to step down from his roles with Twitter/SpaceX/Tesla? Will sanity be allowed to fill the void? I really doubt anything at SpaceX/Tesla changes, but Twitter has the most wiggle room under someone else's leadership
Why would he step down? He doesn't seem the type to give up power just because something shiny is taking his attention. It's not like the incoming administration has signed a pledge to avoid conflicts of interest or anything
Huge social media sites are not going to be legible without some sort of preference function from the individual. Whether that's follows, hashtags/keywords, or engagement-oriented algorithms, that's the way. If you're not the kind of person who enjoys socializing In The Large that's fine. That's what topical sites (like Reddit, HN) or group chats are for.
> Building and querying the quadtree is intrinsically heirarchical
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.
I must be one of those tiny dots just floating in nothingness because my BSKY feed is a dead zone. I've posted, I've replied, I've liked and tried to be an active participant but nothing seems to stick. There's only so many posts I can publish "for myself" before I lose interest.
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?
The tough thing is that for the vast majority of end users, the interface that they see is the software or service. So if their instance has a bunch of disgusting pornography, as far as they’re concerned, mastodon has a bunch of disgusting pornography. For a lot of folks, the browser/server abstraction for regular websites and how that differs from native apps is about as far as they’re willing to go in their understanding of Internet architecture and for many, it’s too far. Requiring people understand that not all mastodon is mastodon despite it being kind of the same, in order to avoid explicit hentai, is a non-starter. My grandparents are dead, but they would probably take their computer out back and set it on fire if that shit flashed up on their screen. They sure wouldn’t have used it as an opportunity to get all of the base knowledge they needed to even realize they had to instance shop. Facebook is just riiiiight over there.
Bluesky is trying to differentiate itself with moderation tools -- people have created lists of furry accounts so you can bulk-ignore. But yeah I haven't found my "people" there yet, most of the activity is people I wouldn't choose to interact with.
I used to see a lot of furry accounts in the Discover feed, but I mute them when I see them, and now I rarely see them any more. I don't have anything against furries, but it's not content I'm interested in. This is more a comment that Bluesky does seem to have an algorithm (at least in the Discover feed) that is sensitive to what you do or don't show interest in. Or it could just be that a lot more people have joined recently, so the furry stuff just isn't as prevalent.
Discover has a separate "show more/less like this" button too.
Every feed on the site is its own algorithm, and most are made by third-parties. Some of the more interesting ones have fallen over and broken a little as the volume of posts has increased. The various "catch up" feeds that show the most popular recent posts give a good impression of what's happening site wide (minus any blocks/mutes).
> One can engage on multiple platforms. Don't have to leave something else to use Mastodon.
Sure, and those who have a technically savvy audience can use Mastodon can post on multiple platforms.
In this instance of bad changes X has made, the majority of those who are moving away from X this time round are more likely not going to engage on Mastodon as a second platform.
Too much hassle for them.
They are more likely to engage on platforms that have more engagement, like Bluesky or Threads.
I cannot see artists, journalists, etc going to Mastodon when X makes changes to their platform time and time again.
Twitter and Bluesky are also full of furries. Frankly, if your social network lacks furries, it is probably in trouble; they seem to be a viability indicator.
(Not that it’s a guarantee of anything; notably, SecondLife is essentially _only_ furries.)
The account with your handle is following only a handful of people, and is broadcasting content rather than engaging in a conversation. Consider the reverse.
This is it, the typical model of throwing things out into the ether and hoping they go viral is less effective here. It's easier to build an audience by thoughtfully engaging in discourse rather than trying to advertise yourself as some kind of thought leader
At the moment, BSKY has an enormous “rich get richer” problem caused by starter packs. If you get into starter packs made by influential people, you will get an infinite number of followers for free. If you’re bootstrapping your presence from scratch, you will be almost completely undiscoverable.
I'm part of the wave of users who migrated to bluesky last week. I have to say I really like it so far, which surprised me a bit given that I had been underwhelmed by mastodon before. I already spend more time in bluesky than in twitter.
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.
At some point Threads started to suppress (or at least, not boost?) political content or news. Which sort of crippled it as a "current events + hot takes" Twitter/X competitor. Bluesky doesn't appear to have this limitation (though perhaps for some this is a feature).
The loudest complaint I see about threads (lack of hyperlinks) doesn't apply there. Also, Threads seems covered in growth-hacking dark patterns, like the notification/activity screen being flooded with "picked for you".
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?
> notification/activity screen being flooded with "picked for you"
Strange. Have been on Threads since launch and have never seen this.
Nor have I seen any growth-hacking dark patterns other than the For You algorithm pushing high-engagement content which they've said they are sorting out. But a lot of this is because Threads has the legacy of being built on Instagram.
It mostly seemed to happen on the web client - I tend to avoid "apps" I'd click the "heart" to check my notifications and it would be just a firehose of "picked for you" streaming in. Also iirc it launched without a chronological feed.
> my big worry about BSky is the lack of any coherent monetization plan.
That's a reasonable concern. I assumed there would be ads at some point, but that's not the way that they are going for now.
> we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames.
> 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
BlueSky's big killer features that Mastodon fails at:
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.
I don't think either platform is going to "win" in the sense of reaching the size and influence of Twitter, but both will hopefully be more resilient than Twitter was.
Yeah, "resilience" is my big concern. After Facebook and Twitter, I'm mostly concerned about a social network getting compromised by a moneyed political interest. Obviously I'm a liberal so I have my political opinion on the interest here, but the point stands for any alignment - I'd rather see something like Mastodon where people can fund and run their own servers that reflect their own values and interests, and then those servers can federate and defederate as is appropriate.
I tried it, the tech seems cool but I'd like more diversity. Now that Twitter mostly is crypto scams and American far-right political nonsense, I'd like something a little more interesting than American far-left political nonsense.
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)
If you are good about curating your follows, you can get a nice nonpolitical feed on Bluesky.
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.
Fair enough. My issue is that it seems people have Big Feelings for one reason or another since 2015 and increasingly so. I really do not wish to have to work to train the "algo", especially when Twitter-like social media is worse than useless. It takes no time for my favourite people I follow to suddenly start spamming my timeline with the drama-du-jour.
On these social networks, either you are (un)willingly enlisted in the American Culture Wars, or you're best served not using them at all.
No no that's my point: Bluesky has no algorithm. You see only the posts of people you follow, in order, and nothing else (unless you deliberately subscribe to "discovery" feeds.)
Given that Bluesky is VC funded, I imagine it'll just be a matter of time until the monetization, ads, and growth hacking start. Enjoy it while you can, I suppose.
AFAIK all the "public benefit" aspect does is remove the ability for investors to sue the company for failing to maximize shareholder value. Given sufficient share ownership, it's still possible for VCs to force Bluesky to do whatever they want.
> “I filtered out accounts that follow more than 50k accounts, or follow less than 5 accounts and have less than 5 followers, leaving 7.7 million nodes.”
So not quite 13M but almost half of them, pretty cool nonetheless
251 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadno, but nothing can stop you & a bunch of people from exporting your tweet archive and visualizing that!
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 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:
https://bsky.app/profile/sega.jp
https://bsky.app/profile/panic.com
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?
And the world is sick of Elon Musk and US politics.
I gave up on Twitter when I opened the app in public to find a porn video playing in the main feed, despite not following or interacting with any accounts of that nature previously. That was ~6 months ago and I haven't looked back.
No offense but it's mostly Americans screaming at other Americans about how important America is. It's a little bit tiresome how much headspace that site and owner occupy these days on certain parts of the internet.
[1]https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/number-of-twitter-users-by...
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'm genuinely excited to see if bluesky manages to moderate them.
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.
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.
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.
I signed up for twitter once as it was an effective way to get customer support from my bank :-/
In general it seemed to be celebrities that I didn't care about and people posting shower thoughts.
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/even.westvang.com/post/3laob7tefxk2...
What I've found is you'll find open discussion and real free speech versus whatever Musk tried to implement at Twitter.
Hate speech and harassment is totally fine, but not critique.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet
With luck bsky keeps growing and researchers invest effort in studying a more open-by-design platform.
websocat wss://jetstream2.us-west.bsky.network/subscribe
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 get the idea behind the GDPR and it's nice to protect consumers but I'm scared for hobby projects like this.
IANAL but at least in the U.S. I'm pretty sure publicly-available data is generally excluded from whatever protections do exist on PII. I'm not sure what, if anything, has been said about this in the EU.
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.
https://bsky.app/profile/lepapillonblue.bsky.social/post/3la...
https://bsky.app/profile/sethabramson.bsky.social/post/3larj...
https://bsky.app/profile/browneyedsusan.bsky.social/post/3la...
The irony is that the 'holier-than-thou' crowd, who are against hate and for love all over the world, overwhelmingly post negative political comments and are rooting for X/Twitter to collapse.
This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.
What, that people are mean about a very special website sometimes? Seems a rather niche problem, tbh.
There is nothing inherently wrong with people being negative. If you had a social network where people could only be positive about things… now, that would be unhealthy.
Stop thinking in us/them, everybody hates someone or something and that's fine. That's not what hate speech is I think. Take one example from the Canadian govmnt:
> The bill defines “hate speech” as the content of a communication that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.
> These grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered.
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/chshc-lcdch/index.h...
That's just one "official" definition of many obviously.
What I find ironic is that BlueSky has many openly anti-Trump posts, while X/Twitter tends to have a significant amount of pro-Trump content. Because many minority and marginalized groups lean anti-Trump, again, these opposing viewpoints naturally clash, often leading to Twitter being labeled as a "hate speech platform". Yet on BlueSky, there’s no problem with people openly criticizing or spreading negativity about pro-Trump people. Since Trump supporters don’t typically fall into minority categories, it seems BlueSky users have the "privilege" to freely bash the Twitter crowd without facing the same scrutiny. Essentially, BlueSky is shielded from the hate speech label despite fostering a different kind of polarized environment.
Also, if you're in a group of people that trumps policies target (immigrants with undocumented family members, women and trans people who want bodily autonomy, Arabs with family in Palestine) then all that pro-trump positivity starts to feel pretty hateful too, just in case you haven't looked at it from that angle.
Here is a relevant article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Is it really fare to compare a political cartoon to the garbage twitter is allowing? I might still visit twitter if it wasn't so out of control.
The only reason Hacker News avoided that fate is due to downvote/flag mechanisms.
It hasn't avoided that fate. If you doubt me, go into a thread about US politics and praise Donald Trump and watch as your comments get not just downvoted, but flagged so that they are hidden. This will happen no matter how good your arguments are.
Make no mistake, this site is ideologically polarized just like all the others. The only saving grace is that the vast majority of topics are about tech, not politics, so the polarization is usually hidden.
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.
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.
- a post about how Canada is overrun by Indians
- a post about how Melbourne is overrun by n-worders (they replaced the Gs with £s)
- a post about how a trans person is ugly
- 2 "nudes in bio" bot posts. This was not hate speech, and arguably the most positive posts I got.
This is not counting the Elon posts and the Trump posts, which were the first and second thing that got recommended. Nor the posts from Elon Musk imitators, who I assume are trying to take advantage of the fact that Elon Musk gets special treatment from the algorithm.
When you create a new account, X asks you to follow an account to determine what your interests are. I picked NASA. I did not get recommended a single space photo.
Threads has extreme normies, bluesky has the nerds, and twitter seems to have just the right mixture of both.
https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-year.html
> You grant us permission to: Use User Content to develop, provide, and improve Bluesky Social, the AT Protocol, and any of our future offerings
[1]: https://bsky.social/about/support/tos#user-content
And it's been in the top 3 ever since it launched a year ago. X is #69.
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
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?
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.
https://joinmastodon.org/verification
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.
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.
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]
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3sdna222d
[2] https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3lar3xpuu4c2d
Because channel names are not hashtags. The syntax is purely because IRC is a text-based protocol, so you need a special way to distinguish channel names from regular text.
> 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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweet_(social_media)#History
Evidently the people running the bots don't really care whether or not you give them an API to work with.
https://www.reddit.com/r/webscraping/comments/w1ve97/virgin_...
I would usually get support to manually unlock it after a few days by emailing them and mentioning why I didn't want to give them a phone number. Now the process only involves solving captchas. (and maybe some hidden waiting)
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 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.
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
What makes scraping illegal?
At no time is management obligated or even remotely motivated to tell end users the real reason for making the change, because users believing that the platform is just a greedy corporation is better than them realizing that the platform will just roll over if the police presents them with a subpoena to snitch on a user.
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.
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.
Every feed on the site is its own algorithm, and most are made by third-parties. Some of the more interesting ones have fallen over and broken a little as the volume of posts has increased. The various "catch up" feeds that show the most popular recent posts give a good impression of what's happening site wide (minus any blocks/mutes).
If so, you're probably looking for the "show less of this" feature rather than muting?
I'm pretty sure most "normal" people would react in a similar fashion, which kind of makes this a notable catch-22 for wider Mastadon-adaption.
Maybe you should get over it?
Sure, and those who have a technically savvy audience can use Mastodon can post on multiple platforms.
In this instance of bad changes X has made, the majority of those who are moving away from X this time round are more likely not going to engage on Mastodon as a second platform.
Too much hassle for them.
They are more likely to engage on platforms that have more engagement, like Bluesky or Threads.
I cannot see artists, journalists, etc going to Mastodon when X makes changes to their platform time and time again.
(Not that it’s a guarantee of anything; notably, SecondLife is essentially _only_ furries.)
Yeah, I know, I'm supposed to register on another instance, but AFAICT there's no way to link the accounts?
What's the goal? Why not just mention other account in bio?
https://fedi.tips/using-multiple-accounts-on-mastodon-and-th...
I like the sound of that. Surely there's usefulness in that observation.
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.
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?
Strange. Have been on Threads since launch and have never seen this.
Nor have I seen any growth-hacking dark patterns other than the For You algorithm pushing high-engagement content which they've said they are sorting out. But a lot of this is because Threads has the legacy of being built on Instagram.
That's a reasonable concern. I assumed there would be ads at some point, but that's not the way that they are going for now.
> we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a
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.
Basically: governance matters.
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.
On these social networks, either you are (un)willingly enlisted in the American Culture Wars, or you're best served not using them at all.
So you have complete control.
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
So not quite 13M but almost half of them, pretty cool nonetheless