I won’t be. The majority of accounts I follow have already migrated away or at least mirror their posts on other platforms. There’s nothing I need from X anymore.
Why? I took a last look before finally deleting my account a couple months ago (said account had been dormant since 2022). It's a wasteland; nothing like what it used to be.
Anecdotal, but so many people in my circles have jumped ship to Bluesky that the transition is pretty seamless at this point. It feels more like Twitter than what became of Twitter does.
I second your anecdote. I ran both for a good amount of time but the last time I went to X, I opened it on my phone, waiting for a coffee, and got 3 posts about idiotic culture war nonsense chased with an ad for a crypto scam, and I genuinely aloud said, "what the fuck am I still on this for" and deleted it. Haven't missed it once since.
Curious: what happens when Bluesky has all the same people/posts as Twitter? Will it be any better? Or will it just be the same thing on a new website?
This launched today, trying to address your valid concerns:
> Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart. [0]
> FreeOurFeeds aims to build a new social media ecosystem on top of the AT Protocol, an open, decentralized framework designed to enable interoperable social media platforms, giving users greater control over their data, algorithms, and online experience (it’s what Bluesky runs on). They want to leverage this tech to create a social media ecosystem focused on individual control, creativity, community well-being, and free expression.
> They basically want to build Bluesky out from one company into a whole ecosystem of different apps and companies by making a non profit foundation that opens up its underlying technology so anybody can build on it. [1]
That last part is not very accurate. Anybody can build on it now. Their goal is to make a second AT Proto Relay [2] that is not under the control of Bluesky.
I don't believe that will happen. It looks like the eternal September will never leave the current giants. As more and more of the world came online, we passed a threshold where a majority of users are passive and undiscerning. The current giants are the generation of platforms that benefitted from this.
No, it's not just that. Twitter had already been going downhill when Musk took over. Even if the old ownership was still in charge, now would be a good time for early adopters to find the next generation of platforms.
I found the moderation and choosing your own feed with blocklists so far implies that even if you copied and pasted all the odious people from Twitter, I still would never see them, nor would any other thinking person, and they would die in darkness. Also, there are examples of the most odious people joining and BlueSky banning them sua sponte almost immediately.
Do you have any examples of the odious people being banned?
It was my understanding that with most social networks the moderation is usually very opaque/can only be gleaned from public comments. Examples would help to understand how BlueSky would systematically moderate differently than Twitter (or what the ban process is like).
Interestingly, if blocks are public, I guess you can audit the state of the interconnectedness between people, (seemingly what https://clearsky.app/ does?) and therefore, what has happened to the people odious enough to receive these blocks but not odious enough to be banned.
The ability to control your own experience via custom feeds makes Bluesky so delightful. The new X algo made it impossible to just follow the people I wanted to.
Well, for a start it won't have Musk trying to break it. Like, its worst near-term case is probably 2022 Twitter. It's unlikely they'll do pay-for-attention, say; musk!Twitter is the only social network I know of to have done that outside the dating/hookup site world.
Also, though, it has significantly better self-serve moderation tools than Twitter ever did (they _kind_ of existed for pre-Musk Twitter as third-party stuff, though Musk's API changes broke most of them). For instance, I subscribe to a moderation list which auto-blocks transphobes, so I don't have to read their One Joke again and again (seriously, they've pretty much had the one thing for the last 20 years; you'd think they could at least come up with some new material). People who, er, enjoy the one joke are of course free to enjoy it by not subscribing to that mod list.
I do expect it to get worse over time as more people join, tbh; the current user base is rather self-selecting. But I don't think it will get as bad as current-Twitter. If it does, er, onto the next thing, I suppose.
It's worth mentioning that X's problems with toxicity are greatly enhanced by its current leadership, so even if everybody switched to bsky tomorrow it would be different. There are far better tools for users to manage their own experience on bsky than X allows.
But, assume that bsky does turn to shit too... if nothing else the (successful?) migration from X shows that people are capable of moving - should bsky face its own calamity the friction to move again will be lower.
There's reason to hope that it won't end in total disaster though. It should (at some point) be possible to federate with bsky in a meaningful way, and perhaps a migration can be even easier than this one (i.e. you can switch to another instance that is run differently).
It will be better because Bluesky gives users control of the algo & moderation via the open ATProto(col). We get choice and competition without the switching cost (after you move over to ATProto)
I big question is whether "official" accounts will move to Bluesky - governments, businesses, organizations, etc. I see some, but not too many.
Of course, maybe that's fine, some people prefer it that way. But, for me, it seems nice to have a common place where organizations put out announcements.
Honestly I thought most of that was strictly Facebook's domain. Maybe that's just the consequences of living in a smaller metro than most, the folks around here are slower on the uptake of new tech. But yeah, none of my local municipal orgs are on Twitter or ever have been in any capacity. They use Facebook for everything, that and local businesses are the only reason I still have a Facebook account.
I'm not sure why but blue sky serves me a lot of very specific content I'm not interested in seeing and no matter how many dozens of pictures I choose (show less like this) on, it continues to show.
Curious :why Bluesky and not Mastodon? I would have thought that decentralization would be a better safeguard against Bluesky becoming Twitter after being successful...
Honest question: I left Twitter so long ago (I guess that I never got it) and am not really using Mastodon... so I think that I'm not the right people
Bluesky is much easier to use than Mastodon, particularly for non-technical folks. It’s also has an UI that looks a lot like Twitter from 2-3 years ago.
I feel like “much” is an exaggeration. In my day to day use, the only annoyance I regularly run into is having to tap an extra link or two in order to follow someone on a different network.
Anyone made a X to Bluesky importer yet? It is pretty difficult to discover the users back on Bluesky, and I thought with the Bluesky hose, it should be possible to matching content v.s. user?
The Sky Follower Bridge browser extension[1] works really well to find everyone you were following on Twitter and find their Bluesky accounts. It finds matches, close matches, and maybes so you do need to review, but the tool doesn't autofollow, just makes it easy to follow.
I had to quit both Reddit and Twitter after their respective API changes that disallowed the clients I was using. There are very good nonpartisan reasons to get off these platforms.
I moved over from Twitter to Bluesky with the big wave (I've been using it since mid-2023 however). It's everything I've wanted from the community to the engagement. What's more, I'm not punished for linking to my blog! Everything I could have asked for.
You can't post like this here and I've banned the account.
If it were just one comment, I'd post a warning instead, but your comment history is replete with ideological battle and personal attacks. Not cool. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
This website seems to have scaled a lot in recent times, given higher rankings on SERPs. I know that we should do things that don't scale, but I really don't understand how one person can pay this much attention. Kudos Dan.
I've gradually moved over to Mastodon for most of my posting. The pocket of Fedi I reside within (queer fedi) is quite nice.
Last year, I seriously started using Bluesky. It's okay, but a little too much like "old Twitter" for my tastes. I still use it, but my most interesting posts go on Fedi.
This is all to say, Bluesky has replaced Twitter for me, but I was already phasing it out.
I found the same. It's impressive how much bluesky resembles twitter, but I'm not sure if that's a compliment.
On Mastadon I find much smaller circles, but much more engaged.
I think bluesky is winning at discovery. If I want to feel the pulse on a topic, bluesky is winning. If I'm not even aware there's a topic that I want to feel the pulse on, bluesky is winning. But I think mastadon has been successful at curating a very different 'vibe', and I appreciate it. So I catch up on mastadon first, and then doomscroll bluesky if I need to find work for idle hands.
Now I’m still on Nostr so I haven’t kicked my social media addiction yet, but at least on Nostr I get to pick and choose which of any, algorithm is forging my timeline.
I already did this two years ago. Twitter had already gone down the shitter a decade ago when the far right moved in, and by 2022 I was only using it to keep tabs on the Asahi Linux project. Marcan moving to Mastodon was enough to get me to abandon my account.
I left on 2022-12-18 after some of the muskian shenanigans and I haven't missed it since, quite the contrary in fact. Before that I had to put a time limit on using the app to fight off the dark patterns.
I don't understand the obsession with hating on X/Musk right now. He has his opinions, but X is still a great platform, and last I checked, Mastodon and Bluesky still feel like echo chambers (and the latter has a lot of... furry content). In the quiet, it feels like the media moved from hating Trump to hating Musk, and people are now obsessing over amplifying that message. But for what gain? It all kind of reminds me of Two Minutes Hate from 1984.
I have no interest in EM. I joined an anime themed Mastodon instance and left two months later as all I could read was EM hatred. I wasn't interested in EM to begin with!
FTR the old Twitter was as bad as the new X for those who strayed just a bit from whatever was the trend, in my experience.
Musk turned twitter into a far right echo chamber. Make a new account and navigate to the "for you" page: all you see is Elon Musk, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate and other far right "role models".
The media moved from hating Trump to Musk because the latter appears to hold more political power over the former, he already got his ways on H1B visas and a few other issues.
Musk also appears quite pathetic/sociopathic to non-MAGAs. He has many children he barely sees and often insults online, he was caught lying about a video game recently, and that's not even bringing up the sexual assault allegations.
He also switched from supporting Obama and considering himself a socialist to becoming the largest donor of the GOP in a few years.
Also, please reread Big Brother, because that comparison is very misplaced.
It's not hate but unwillingness to support a guy promoting extreme right wing Nazi parties in Europe. That's a no go in my agenda. The only reason I don't delete my profile is I don't want anyone to use my name.
Musk's politics aside, content on X has been getting less and less accessible. APIs have been shut down and it seems you need to be logged in to view most posts now. That means if you're a content creator relying on X as your main distribution channel, you now have less reach than ever before. The platform also seems overrun with bots. I'm not on X so can't speak directly to the moderation policy, but from reading others' accounts it seems inconsistent and, at best, not the bastion of free speech that Musk promised when he bought it.
Some of these problems pre-dated Musk's acquisition of Twitter, and some of them will no doubt eventually plague BlueSky as well. But that is kind of the way of social media, nothing lasts forever and people tend to hop from one sinking ship to another.
As for not understanding why people hate Musk. I am loathe to get into politics on this site, but he is (himself) actively using X as a platform to meddle and stoke tensions in a number of democracies throughout the world. That is part of why a lot of people dislike him, and it also casts further doubt on X's future viability as a global content distribution channel, if countries start blocking it.
> As for not understanding why people hate Musk. I am loathe to get into politics on this site, but he is (himself) actively using X as a platform to meddle and stoke tensions in a number of democracies throughout the world.
What do you think was happening on Twitter before Musk turned it into X?
I'm not a big fan of Musk either outside of Tesla/SpaceX/StarLink.
But if it's not Musk, it's the DNC, if it's not the DNC, it's someone else. I don't see how it detracts from X still being a good platform. You have to curate your TL, yes -- but you've always had to do that!
I don't think leaving tweets up is much of a good idea since they will be fed into grok. Additionally, they made it clear in the TOS that they will sue users for breaking the TOS, so imo it's best to get out of there sooner than later.
I tried signing back up a couple weeks ago and despite not following and then blocking Elon, and only following non and a-political topics, I was inundated with right wing propaganda. Every 4-5th post was from Elon or similar. It was too distracting to use normally so I deleted my account and moved on.
I'm active in the retro game console modding community and we pretty much all jumped ship same time in early November.
I still log to Twitter once a week to check, there haven't been anything new in my following feed for at least a month beside the people cross posting.
So I can easily see myself do just that, I wouldn't miss anything anyway.
The people fleeing X are leaving because they are being exposed to views that they disagree with and they can't stand to see it, except bluesky and mastadon are even more draconian and capricious than before Elon buying it. I'm staying because finally the views that I agree with are being exposed better, but still 50% of my feed is dominated by views that I disagree with but I can at least tolerate it now.
180 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] thread> Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart. [0]
> FreeOurFeeds aims to build a new social media ecosystem on top of the AT Protocol, an open, decentralized framework designed to enable interoperable social media platforms, giving users greater control over their data, algorithms, and online experience (it’s what Bluesky runs on). They want to leverage this tech to create a social media ecosystem focused on individual control, creativity, community well-being, and free expression.
> They basically want to build Bluesky out from one company into a whole ecosystem of different apps and companies by making a non profit foundation that opens up its underlying technology so anybody can build on it. [1]
That last part is not very accurate. Anybody can build on it now. Their goal is to make a second AT Proto Relay [2] that is not under the control of Bluesky.
[0] https://freeourfeeds.com/
[1] https://www.usermag.co/p/freeourfeeds-a-30m-plan-to-take-bac...
[2] https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#relay
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
So, I am optimistic.
It was my understanding that with most social networks the moderation is usually very opaque/can only be gleaned from public comments. Examples would help to understand how BlueSky would systematically moderate differently than Twitter (or what the ban process is like).
Interestingly, if blocks are public, I guess you can audit the state of the interconnectedness between people, (seemingly what https://clearsky.app/ does?) and therefore, what has happened to the people odious enough to receive these blocks but not odious enough to be banned.
Also, though, it has significantly better self-serve moderation tools than Twitter ever did (they _kind_ of existed for pre-Musk Twitter as third-party stuff, though Musk's API changes broke most of them). For instance, I subscribe to a moderation list which auto-blocks transphobes, so I don't have to read their One Joke again and again (seriously, they've pretty much had the one thing for the last 20 years; you'd think they could at least come up with some new material). People who, er, enjoy the one joke are of course free to enjoy it by not subscribing to that mod list.
I do expect it to get worse over time as more people join, tbh; the current user base is rather self-selecting. But I don't think it will get as bad as current-Twitter. If it does, er, onto the next thing, I suppose.
But, assume that bsky does turn to shit too... if nothing else the (successful?) migration from X shows that people are capable of moving - should bsky face its own calamity the friction to move again will be lower.
There's reason to hope that it won't end in total disaster though. It should (at some point) be possible to federate with bsky in a meaningful way, and perhaps a migration can be even easier than this one (i.e. you can switch to another instance that is run differently).
When a MAGA civil war broke out on there around Christmas last year, accounts that opposed Elon were either disabled or lost their verified status.
You also can’t share links without their feed algorithm limiting your reach.
All social networks are censored in some form.
Your attempt at gaslighting is pathetic.
Of course, maybe that's fine, some people prefer it that way. But, for me, it seems nice to have a common place where organizations put out announcements.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42623590
[0] https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2025/01/2024-internet-...
He says Section 230 is on the chopping and extinction block in 2025 and he would be shocked if it made it to 2026.
I've basically stopped using it.
Honest question: I left Twitter so long ago (I guess that I never got it) and am not really using Mastodon... so I think that I'm not the right people
When are we quitting telegram by the way?
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...
My profile in case you want to follow: https://bsky.app/profile/xeiaso.net
If it were just one comment, I'd post a warning instead, but your comment history is replete with ideological battle and personal attacks. Not cool. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Last year, I seriously started using Bluesky. It's okay, but a little too much like "old Twitter" for my tastes. I still use it, but my most interesting posts go on Fedi.
This is all to say, Bluesky has replaced Twitter for me, but I was already phasing it out.
On Mastadon I find much smaller circles, but much more engaged.
I think bluesky is winning at discovery. If I want to feel the pulse on a topic, bluesky is winning. If I'm not even aware there's a topic that I want to feel the pulse on, bluesky is winning. But I think mastadon has been successful at curating a very different 'vibe', and I appreciate it. So I catch up on mastadon first, and then doomscroll bluesky if I need to find work for idle hands.
I'd love to read why, but the site is down...
Now I’m still on Nostr so I haven’t kicked my social media addiction yet, but at least on Nostr I get to pick and choose which of any, algorithm is forging my timeline.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241226192120/https://www.hello...
It’s been really mentally liberating.
Now I'm going to actually delete my account.
The media moved from hating Trump to Musk because the latter appears to hold more political power over the former, he already got his ways on H1B visas and a few other issues.
Musk also appears quite pathetic/sociopathic to non-MAGAs. He has many children he barely sees and often insults online, he was caught lying about a video game recently, and that's not even bringing up the sexual assault allegations.
He also switched from supporting Obama and considering himself a socialist to becoming the largest donor of the GOP in a few years.
Also, please reread Big Brother, because that comparison is very misplaced.
Some of these problems pre-dated Musk's acquisition of Twitter, and some of them will no doubt eventually plague BlueSky as well. But that is kind of the way of social media, nothing lasts forever and people tend to hop from one sinking ship to another.
As for not understanding why people hate Musk. I am loathe to get into politics on this site, but he is (himself) actively using X as a platform to meddle and stoke tensions in a number of democracies throughout the world. That is part of why a lot of people dislike him, and it also casts further doubt on X's future viability as a global content distribution channel, if countries start blocking it.
What do you think was happening on Twitter before Musk turned it into X?
Not 1984 but just standard 20th century type dangerous cult of personality with one person having way too much power.
But if it's not Musk, it's the DNC, if it's not the DNC, it's someone else. I don't see how it detracts from X still being a good platform. You have to curate your TL, yes -- but you've always had to do that!
I still log to Twitter once a week to check, there haven't been anything new in my following feed for at least a month beside the people cross posting.
So I can easily see myself do just that, I wouldn't miss anything anyway.