Maybe Bluesky has "won"

Threads has 275 million monthly active users.

Bluesky has now 15 million total users (how many active?)

Mastodon monthly active usage has dropped below 1 million.

Many of these alternatives are piggybacking off the parent site. Google at pone point made anyone with a Gmail account a default user for its own social network.

It's early days, I think.

So far I see good sides of both Threads and Blue Sky. Threads has a lot more users, but I see more 'subject matter expert' kinds of people on Blue Sky as well as smaller more intimate communities. But we'll see what happens if that dynamic attracts more people and it stops being quite so cozy.

It's more about the vision and momentum

Threads is not trying to be a Twitter replacement and is another brand in the Zuck conglomerate

What makes Bluesky different to me is ATProto and the possibilities for a new social media fabric, that they learned from some difficulties with ActivityPub to build something better

https://atproto.com

Everyone who has an Instagram account is technically a Threads user as far as I can tell.

I think Bluesky has won the "cool" factor; remains to be seen how effective that is at pulling other users across while maintaining its culture.

There's probably a good chunk of people who just drop Twitter without picking up another social media in replacement.

is that Threads, or is that Instagram and Threads? Kind of a cheat without calling that out

Too early to call, the momentum must also become normal. I can see a future where threads is mainstream and bluesky attracts news/politics.

They probably are juicing the numbers that way, but the dedicated Threads app is pretty high on the app store charts so evidently people are going out of their way to get it.

YMMV depending on your region but my Play Store "social" chart is currently showing Bluesky at #1, then TikTok, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Reddit at #7.

Threads seems unusable unless they change the algorithm. It defaults to For You and For You is 50% Instagram-style engagement bait, 50% people you've never heard of complaining about things you've never heard of, and 0% people you're actually following.

If they fix that it could indeed be quite good, but it still feels too much like "broadcasting" vs "conversation", and I'm personally not ready to be popular like that.

Bluesky does have a little toxic positivity but it's much better, and it's possible to chat with friends on it. (When I try enabling the algorithm features they still won't stop showing me gay porn though.)

Is instagram usage counted in active threads users? I doubt it

All of the major platforms experience major outflow after elections, no? Logically, Twitter would lose more users given that they have a larger user base to start with. What’s the next major event where we can reliably measure to see which platform is actually ahead?

I believe Threads active users are artificially conflated with Instagram and Facebook. In all my circles, I don't know anyone who uses Threads

I'd argue longform content has done more for opinion-making than microblogs in the 2024 election. And to be honest, I like that. Irrespective of the politics the podcasts with JD Vance and even Trump at Theo Von were remarkable. Seeing Trump genuinely care about Theo's drug history was a strange but impactful moment.

Bluesky's issue is the Discover feed is not good. After a few days of activity, the suggestions are mostly random and nowhere close to the stuff I want. Twitter was very good - it makes sense because the graph is rich.

X is at 600 million MAU, for reference.

Edit: Thanks @JumpCrisscross.

I still think Nostr will eventually be the go-to.

Yeah but what made Twitter twitter wasn't really the usercount, it was the mix of established voices and complete randos mixing. If the journalists and economists and politicians go to Bluesky, it will win. I definitely don't think that's a given but it seems much more plausible now than it did a few months ago.

I'm still hoping that X wins. I'm hoping that we learn how to coexist with a diversity of viewpoints. It seems counterproductive to partition everyone up into their own little gardens, without any viable opposition to the dominant views.

> Is instagram usage counted in active threads users? I doubt it

It is if they have a Threads account and interact with any Threads content on the Instagram app, which is extremely easy to do even accidentally, because they shove it into the Instagram feed and make it look like Instagram content.

I would not be surprised if a large chunk - maybe even the majority - of "Threads users" interact with it exclusively through the Instagram app, with many of them not even fully aware that it's nominally a separate product.

If you have a business with a lot of customers who need a support forum, does it make sense to run a Bluesky server?

How does censorship work?

For a nice book on the tech-philosophy of this question (recently endorsed by the Dalai Lama, you might enjoy: https://www.plurality.net/

n=1 but I've never seen a bluesky content link in the wild. I've seen lots of people talking about bluesky or moving to bluesky though.

> This is because the data in the network is all cryptographically signed based on what came before it. The protocol does this using the Merkle tree structure, which is also how Git stores data. The issue with this is: if you want to look at one piece of content in the system, you also need to know about everything that happened before.

This isn't quite accurate. You only need the MST blocks in the merkle path(s) back to the root, for the subset of records that you care about. For a single record, that's O(logn) blocks on average, where n is the total number of records in the repo. For a full checkout, the MST block count is ~33% of the number records in the repo, on average.

(MST = Merkle Search Tree, which is a special type of merkle tree, distinct from the one used by git - https://inria.hal.science/hal-02303490/document )

> Also, it would be great to edit posts! I believe this is tricky because of the Merkle tree structure mentioned above

It's not so tricky at the MST level, and it already happens there when you edit your bio for example. What is tricky (relatively) is figuring out how to represent post edits at the UI/UX level.

For context, I'm working on my own PDS implementation in Python, with corresponding library for working with the MST (both fairly WIP):

https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/millipds

https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/atmst

The competitive advantage to BlueSky, over Twitter / X, is that there's tremendous value in connecting intelligent and kind people while maintaining a certain quality standard.

Twitter / X, for political reasons, allowed extremely toxic behavior while at the same time disempowered communities from moderating themselves. If you force each individual user to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person it's a losing battle and low quality speech will overwhelm conversations. X folks know that but did it anyways.

It's also becoming more and more clear that we need a relatively neutral medium for free speech. Musk claimed to be building that on X but then did exactly the opposite. It's very hard to trust the algorithm isn't being manipulated in one way or another.

On BlueSky it's incredible how much value is already being produced by connecting intelligent and creative folks as compared to what Twitter became.

That's my guess. By having either of those accounts you automatically got a threads account.

And minus bots?

> Bluesky has now 15 million total users (how many active?)

That is a very good question. One of the Bluesky developers gave the figure at around 2.25M DAUs [0]

This chart shows that they now have 3.74M DAUs and have 9.3M MAUs [1]

Mastodon does not give their DAUs, but their MAUs are down to less than 1M users. [2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953421

[1] https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

[2] https://joinmastodon.org/servers

If interesting people start posting interesting things on Bluesky we'll start going there. But, so far, we only see people posing and shoving it down our throats. Just like this post. We get it, you hate Musk and want to see X/twitter dead. Fine.

I'm not on Twitter and used to be on Mastodon so the idea of Bluesky per se sounds interesting. But so far it looks like a forced, desperate attempt by a very political group of people. And that's the opposite of what people like me would like to spend time on.

It's a bigger echo chamber than X. What's the point? I go online to try to get a general idea of the landscape of views and opinions.

I think a general problem with the current political landscape right now is that people literally cannot tolerate reading something they disagree with, because they convinced themselves that the other side is so morally flawed, they can just immediately write them off without further consideration.

But irrespective of that, how are you supposed to understand what is going on if you only read content by people who think the same way you do?

Not everything that is written on Twitter is a viewpoint and those things became mire and more sind Musk bought it.

That's how it looks like currently. Nostr is the open protocol whereas Bluesky is the more open platform.

In all my circles, I don't know a single "X" user. Not even one. Anecdotes are funny like that.

Facebook monthly active users: >3 billion

Instagram monthly active users: >2 billion

Threads monthly active users: ~275 million

If they're cheating, they're doing a poor job of it.

Threads has gone out of its way to make real time engagement impossible. Seeing post about sporting events that ended 3 days ago on your front page is terrible UX. If I was a conspiratorial type person I would believe zuck & elon colluded not to compete in that space.

Something tells me you tend to attract harsh disagreements that may be interpreted as “toxic”. Maybe do some reflection?

I’m tired of threads. In the beginning it was nice but now it just gives me engagement fatigue. So much shallow content provoking replies and adding nothing to your life. It actually makes me feel worse.

And now they will be adding ads. That’s it. I’m out.

It is functionally impossible to run an unmoderated message board that doesn't devolve. Holding out hope that "we" learn where "we" is everyone in the world is not going to happen in 1000 years. The only way for a forum to remain civil and useful is for careful moderation to remove troublemakers and it is equally impossible to do that without ever making a mistake.

Get real. It's a liberal echo chamber. 90%+ of the posts there are anti-Trump and/or anti-Musk.

I used to think echo chambers are bad. I realized that when algorithms force me to consume content that I don't agree with, my mood becomes terrible. In order to protect myself, I no longer think echo chambers are pure bad. They are a necessary evil to ensure my own sanity.

In the real world you congregate with like-minded people. The same applies to my social media timeline. And I use Mastodon by the way, which doesn't have an algorithm driven timeline.

Who on earth is "shoving it down your throat"? Calm down.

There's a reason waste management becomes so important when building cities and large communities.

There will be no great migration like we saw in 2010 with users shifting from Digg to Reddit but, instead, only the slow trickling escapes of users to more dispersed communities.

Here the human condition can flourish in a more localized way, with more participation (less lurking). No more winner takes all.

> they shove it into the Instagram feed and make it look like Instagram content.

And also into your notifications now.

They are definitely “growth hacking” as much as possible - I regularly would see 1/3 of a Threads comment in my FB and IG feed and when you click to expand it takes you to the App Store to download the Threads app. I’m not interested so I just back out but I’m sure it works wonders to get their numbers up.

Just saw a YouTube video from legaleagle, a lawyer and in his videos he usually cites Twitter posts but the recent ones have bluesky posts which made me think bluesky has gone mainstream so I spun up a VM and hosted my PDS for me and a few friends

I like the feeling and style of the app, it's very comfortable coming from Twitter

No idea but bots are not exclusive to X.

It's definitely the best contender, and I've been trying to use it but so far there's less people, my feed there is much blander, there's missing features that I miss from Twitter, and everyone seems to be posting about Twitter itself all the time.

They make it to the HN front page every so often https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bsky.app

Sounds like they are confusing Merkle blocks with block chain.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. Of course, there will be mistakes. And of course there needs to be moderation. But I support the moderation similar to HN, it's about politeness and respect. As long as you're respectful, you can say your piece.

Also, X does provide community based fact checking too, which works best when there are representatives from all sides participating.

When you post on Instagram, there are opt-out features that will 'automatically share to your Threads account too' and you can see Threads notifications in the Instagram app and such .. so I think it's reasonable to assume they are leveraging the Instagram user-base a bit.

The true rival to X is not using social media at all. If you’re mad at your Skinner box, switching bubbles won’t improve your life.

If "Twitter, but decentralized" was compelling to the average social media user, Mastodon would have eaten the world years ago.

True. But you don't become an active monthly user. Unless there are some shenanigans happening, which is highly likely. I think I visited Threads by accident several times by clicking posts in IG, that were apparently Threads posts embedded directly into IG as a growth hack (my speculation).

Yes, I feel the same way. I'm in favor of self-controlled filters that let each of us decide what we want to consume, and when. Don't think that means you need to go into the echo-chamber permanently.

Threads is closer to 300m now.

According to Mosseri it is now adding 1m new users a day.

I find it funny how hard people try to push the “BlueSky is better than twitter” narrative. So hard, that my entire BlueSky feed is filled with Twitter refugees who shit post about twitter being bad.

Maybe instead of having yet another echo chamber of short form content, we should embrace long form, well written content with wide range of opinions.

For the longest time, I didn't get the appeal of Twitter. I started using it a bit more when I was still in the habit of using social feeds, and Facebook's was getting actively bad.

I haven't used Twitter much lately since it got bought, and I haven't missed it.

A lot of the time when I did use it, it was for customer support. I feel bad for my followers who had to see my gripes about whatever behemoth sold me crap.

You know this would be a lot more effective of a pitch if you didn't go with the free speech canard. The only change recently (aside from community notes, which is ok) is the notable surge in porn, crypto, and ads and the corresponding drop in quality of advertisers.

Just double checking - there is an opt-out feature that cross-posts all IG posts to Threads?

HN is also social media…

Threads is unusable. I'm not sure what I expected, but of course it's just the slop-pushing, engagement-farmed, censorship-heavy auto-moderated Instagram algorithm but in a format made to look like Twitter.

The only posts I see on there that look like they're made by humans are jilted twitter refugees trying to convince each other they're having fun by sharing articles about how X is dead. Meanwhile on X nobody has thought about Threads since the day it launched.

An earlier version of the repo commit format (v2) had a "prev" field, which referenced the previous commit by hash. This is vaguely blockchain-ish in that you could follow the chain all the way back to the first commit*, but even then, you still didn't need the prior versions to verify the current version. In "repo v3", the prev field still exists but is optional, and in practice it isn't used.

*unless the repo had been "rebased"

A year ago, Bluesky was an empty place, I wanted to use it but there wasn't anything. Now its bustling, there are interesting posts and they receive thousands of likes.

On the other hand Twitter still feels like where things are actually happening but more and more feels like they are about to start terminating anyone with eyeglasses.

I was there when the Digg exodus happened, it doesn't feel like that. It's something else. It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.

That's true, but arguably x's only draw at this point is the ease of reaching and interacting beyond this bubble. Consider the draw of major public figures being openly mocked in their own comments! It's pretty rare to see any public figure open themselves to criticism.

bluesky is reselling domains? Not sure that's still the case. Never saw anything about buying a new one when I was going thru the settings to change a handle.

That being said, the change handle to domain process is quite slick with very smooth DNS record based transfer done in a minute.

Seems calm to me. It's just a hyperbolic phrase.

The X Community Notes feature is open source. That is at least a step in the right direction, even if the feed algorithm is still closed.

https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes

For better or worse, X / Twitter was never really about communities. It has always been focused on allowing individuals to broadcast their thoughts. If you want a moderated community discussion then there are much better platforms for that.

We do have neutral mediums for free speech: HTTP and SMTP.

Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.

A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.

Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

600mm*

It takes a bit for content to go viral. Bluesky was mostly irrelevant until just over a week ago.

Since then I've seen plenty of Bluesky embeds in articles where there wouild have been Twitter/X embeds.

Twitter was a really good mix of viewpoints and people, but it’s people so toxically politicized and right wing that a lot of the interesting accounts have left. It’s a weird thing that could’ve only existed because they weren’t focused on profit.

The only people I've seen moving to bluesky so far in this latest batch have basically been smug lefty types and lawyers. They're free to do as they please but these are not the early adopters that make a culture good.

I don't think we should, nor do I think it's healthy. Some viewpoints are horrific and should absolutely be suppressed.

Maybe this will finally be the time but every time there has been a “migration” it feels like Twitter still holds onto enough of a stronghold that most people don’t move over so you make the move but you end up back on twitter.

Particularly if you are using it as a tool to advertise your company, channel, stream, etc.

I would love for this to not be true this time. But I am not holding my breath.

The trend is what is important. Threads is growing at 1m new users a day.

And at least here in Australia, X is ranked #69 on the App Store. Threads #2.

Year from now, Threads could well be bigger.

There's also a reason we don't create zoning laws based on political belief, forcing everyone to agree with us if they want to be our neighbor.

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

both bluesky and mastodon also emit RSS feeds

Most people in my circle have given up on Threads (even pre-Bluesky mass migration)

Nope, but I'd wager the share is way higher than on the other services as of right now.

I like going on Mastodon and seeing other people's indie games. It isn't the same as the potato chip / crack hit vibe of other social media, but it's nice.

The top links are mostly from the past week. And a lot of links are about Bluesky itself.

Threads is literally built on Instagram so of course they are leveraging it.

But that's very different from saying that Threads MAUs aren't specific to that platform.

IMHO, there are some great advantages compared to X/Twitter (I'm not sure about Threads).

1) links in your posts do not penalize your post, making it much easier to share content and link. It's absolutely refreshing to click on a link in mobile and have it open directly in your preferred web browser instead of the in-app hassle.

2) You can choose your own algorithm, without having weird stuff shoved in it

3) it's a new network and early adopters are hopping on, so it's unusually high signal of interesting people, and interesting people are much more likely to follow you because there's not as many people.

4) far far far far less spam and bots

5) people can't pay a nominal fee to jump to the top of replies, which makes discussions far higher quality and much more interesting

It's an all around better experience. It may not stay that way. Twitter was always an ever-changing beast, as all social networks are, but the big changes that have been taken on over the past few years all came at weakening the value proposition of Twitter in order to feed the ego of a lucky narcissist that does not understand the experience of others or care about creating a good product. X is now the play thing of a wanna-be oligarch, and it's afraid harder to get useful information out of it compared to even a couple years ago.

Bluesky has already become far more useful to me in finding technical material and technical collaborators in just a few days, even after years of careful curation of my X/Twitter network. I don't know if that will last, or if those outside of science/data/programming will find Bluesky useful (and I actively unfollow anybody that posts a lot of stuff outside that area so I won't know!), but for the HN crowd I think Bluesky already has the potential to be a much better and rewarding use of time invested.

isn't it exclusively inhabited by bitcoiners? and relies on never leaking your private key, with no recourse for key rotation? or am I out of date

Well, i'm in favor of pursuing the ideal, even though it will never be perfect in practice.

Social networks have been algorithmically deprioritizing long form/well-written content, with Twitter/X being the most egregious offender.

Atleast Bluesky has a chronological feed without shenanigans.

I see a few in some Telegram chats that I'm in

It certainly made them feel more human to me. I wish Kamala would have done the same just so people could see her have a real conversation. I have no idea how that would go.

I hope we get a nice distributed protocol, and I'm not completely negative on AT (or nostr) yet. Twitter is a critical chokepoint for independent media right now, and the guy who owns it is in the coming administration.

Shutting down twitter, rumble, and substack would be a massacre for independent media right now. Elon could make an offer that couldn't be refused on the other two, and turn on the censorship harder than Facebook.

The right-wing free speech heel turn is always the same: when you censor, you're trying to prevent the free expression of ideas, when we censor, we're trying to prevent the "support" of terrorism. Lèse-majesté is always around the corner.

If you follow and engage with enough people, the engagement bait stuff goes away, for the most part.

Protocols > platforms. Nostr will win long-term because it is a protocol.

An advantage of Bluesky over Twitter that’s valuable to a lot of people is the degree of control it gives. Algorithmic feeds are more precisely tunable so it’s easier to get them to show the things you want to see, starter packs make it easy to follow entire circles at once, and moderation tools are robust, which helps tamp down on spam, trolling, harassment, etc.

It feels more designed for meaningful interaction than it is engagement at all costs, which is probably why it’s common for people who've moved to have seen much higher numbers of substantiative replies to their posts despite having a fraction as many followers as they do on Twitter.

It may not catch on regardless, but I think it has the best shot of all the Twitter alternatives thus far.

Well, the algorithm only pushes engagement bait so it's selecting for morally flawed takes rather than nuanced takes.

I agree but I fear it would be used as an excuse to no longer interact with the public and turn off all reply comments by default.

One thing I like about bluesky is it allows you to watch embedded videos from external media sources (e.g. youtube) without leaving the app. Seems like twitter/X was clearly opposed to the loss of control this entailed.

You forgot to list one:

X/Twitter has over 500 million monthly active users.

Setting up a PDS isn't too hard but still requires a dedicated IT person right now IMO. If you have a lot of customers I think it's worth it (aka you can justify spending budget on keeping the PDS up.) If you're small, it's not worth it yet I don't think.

Censorship/moderation is based on labellers that label posts for content. The default App View has opt-out moderation based on the default Bluesky moderation labelers. You can also opt-into other labellers if you like. You can run your own labeller to get your own moderation. I run my own labeller and my own feeds so I can customize my experience but none of it is in a state that others could really fork the code. It's not too hard to start reading the jetstream (a version of the firehose that's easier to parse/read) though.

There is no monopoly on what makes a culture "good".

Every community will have its own strengths and weaknesses.

Right. My opinion is that following people/accounts shouldn’t be the single approach (and that it may even be the overall more detrimental one), and that it’s generally better to follow communities. Like HN, or subreddits, web forums, formerly Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, or also more chat-like platforms like Discord and IRC.

It would be great if Bluesky could generalize to that. My understanding is that it’s focused on primarily following accounts, and that you don’t independently have communities focused around topics and interests.

I don't let the algorithm dictate who I follow. I pretty much know the big names in all the areas that I want to keep up to date with. And for every big name I know their main rivals, so I can have a complete picture. It's that simple. If Bluesky manages to attract the same diversity of opinions I might start using it.

The real issue is that none of these alternatives (Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky) offer anything other than "we're not Twitter".

Digg to Reddit was a unique case, because Digg very specifically fucked up their site, badly, with the V4 update. Reddit was in a great spot to pick up users from Digg because of not only having a similar overarching purpose as a link aggregator, but additional features like subreddits which enabled more smaller and casual link sharing and comment sections. It was a clear upgrade from Digg V4. I do think that Reddit would have eventually overtaken Digg anyway, and V4 only sped up the process.

Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now. If you're on there to look at funny memes, cat pictures, celebrity news and pornography -- which encapsulates about 98% of Twitter use cases -- it still functions much better than the alternatives. The migrations are happening for meta reasons, either political or ToS-related (specifically, X claiming they can use images you post for AI training). This isn't a recipe for long-term success, it's a precursor for people making bunch of noise for a month and then heading back to Twitter.

As someone who doesn't really participate in these large social networks -- even modern HN is way too mainstream for me honestly -- I do think it's a good thing people get off them, though. Smaller communities are a good thing. Shouting your loudest, hottest political takes on Twitter so you can pat yourself on the back for 10k likes is a fast track to mental health issues.

Hmm ... yeah but that's wandering into "the supposition of a supposition" territory.

90% of social media is the crowd of people using it. A new social media site will take over with having better people, which might be caused by getting better features but unlikely. Or, it could be that the dominant social media site makes blunders that push its users away, like Digg did.

Twitter used to be unbeatable for me in 1) areas with technical expertise or, 2) following the latest in news. Using Twitter to get the latest on news has only recently been destroyed, as evidenced by its failure as an information source during the recent hurricanes in the US.

And most technical users are now reevaluating the crap they have to put up with every day that they didn't have to a while back, and finding X lacking. And in science, this is especially with a new administration that is dedicated to science suppression (e.g. RFK Jr) and X is run by a wanna-be oligarch that wants a part in the administration controlling their social media without regard to free speech. (For example, blanket banning of "cis" made lots of discusion really hard. "Cis" is a technical word that is used all the time in my field unrelated to the culture war, and not being able to use it was infuriating and really made a lot of people angry that they were mere pawns in a stupid culture war. It is not a curse word or a slur or hateful word and nobody's life was made better by banning its use, but many discussions became silly.)

Mastodon is more clunky than Bluesky, too clunky to get working for most, though a lot of scientists got close. Bluesky is easier and is getting the community now.

People aren't leaving X because of polite disagreement. They're leaving because ideological extremism and hate not only run wild but are actively promoted by the platform.

Here’s how I see it: imagine you like going to a restaurant for dinner fairly often. Recently, a group of rowdy patrons has started coming in, getting drunk, and making all kinds of noise. Strangely, the restaurant seems to encourage their behavior. You don’t love this—you’re just trying to enjoy a nice dinner and some casual conversation. So, you leave and don’t come back.

You can’t force the restaurant to calm down or kick out the rowdy patrons. They should be allowed to serve whomever they want. Luckily, you’re also not forced to endure their actions.

That's about what I'd expect from a network that's also undergone exponential growth in the past ~week, while still being much smaller than e.g. twitter in absolute terms.

Correct.

Essentially you’re switching one filter bubble for another filter bubble that makes it harder for any contrary opinion to pierce it.

It's definitely something that's happened community by community. A lot of space news I care about is still just on Twitter but urbanism stuff has mostly moved to Bluesky, for instance.

I don't understand this critique:

> I’ll also add that the reason I’m a big fan of a ActivityPub solution like Mastodon is that it’s quite inexpensive to run your own complete stack unless you’re extremely famous. Hosting a Mastodon instance is a one-step process, and you then control everything. To get the same experience with atproto, you’ll need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, and even then you still don’t control everything as of today.

When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison. I'm quite interested to find whether there will be niche relays that only index posts from certain pds (or provide a kind of community-chat discord competitor by being one server that hosts the PDSs of the community, and also provides the relay and appview for that community)

They announced today they are rolling out Lists which will be chronological.

So you would be able to build communities around specific topics.

I don't think the answer to the potential right-wing censorship, is left-wing censorship. Right now, X is actually closer to the ideal than any time in its history.

But yeah, if there is a truly distributed system, that had facilities and incentives which support and even promote diverse interactions, that'd be even better.

a bluesky appview that intertwingled RSS feeds into my home feed would be pretty killer.

Social networks' usefulness is proportional to the size of the network so they are naturally winner takes all markets.

> coexist with a diversity of viewpoints

Create a new account on X and then come back and talk about this.

You will notice that it is entirely right-wing political content that is being pushed.

The "early adopters" arrived almost 2 years ago ;)

> People aren't leaving X because of polite disagreement. They're leaving because ideological extremism and hate not only run wild but are actively promoted by the platform.

I disagree. I think the definition of hate and extremism has been warped to encompass things that aren't either of those things. And that's part of the problem. The rhetoric has become so hyperbolic that we're having a hard time coexisting.

The answer is for us to walk that back, and encourage actual dialogue, not run into our own safe bunkers.

You can talk to the people at your table in a restaurant, and it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking about something you disagree with. The food tastes the same.

The horde of right wing blue checks that dominate all popular political tweets is not a filter bubble. It is a user-hostile feature that makes organic political interactions impossible on the platform. It turns a peer-to-peer network into top-down broadcast.

I think the last wave was towards Mastodon but most migrants returned because it was too unfamiliar. On the contrary Bluesky seems to be Twitter but without the enshittification . I can see a future for that. The open protocol/network story being a probably small bonus.

Well, Mastodon is not a private business. Government agencies could post on their own instances.

XMPP would like to have a word

If you want to run your own social platform, you can do so by running your own Mastodon instance. If you want to do the same with Bluesky, you simply can't at the moment. You'll either need to rely on other parts of the system that you don't control, or you'll need to control the whole system at great expense.

The 15 million figure is several hours out of date, it's currently over 17m. (https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats)

9.4m active this month (and counting), according to https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

even that is an avoidance of a real time feed that twitter has had since the beginning and bluesky has now.

One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above?

I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

Only a few of the top links are from the past week https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You might be right, I don't have the data to know. But it might just feel that way, because previously it was entirely left-wing political content that was being pushed.

Not to disagree with your post, but I'd *love* to support a renaissance of RSS. It was/is essentially peak distribution of content in a proper decentralized manner, putting users first and letting providers use whatever they want freely to generate it. No walled gardens. No restrictions.

And it doesn't penalize links off the site.

Did everyone in tech run out of new ideas in 2013 or something? There’s something so depressing about the hot new app of 2024 being a Twitter clone.

It's very hard to moderate an online forum that allows political content without succumbing to your own political bias. I don't like the trolls on X, but if X started moderating against hateful content, it would just end up censoring news and opinions like they used to do beforehand. There is just no way around that. I am not going to name examples because it would start a flame war, but there are enough recent examples.

Also, maybe I'm from a different generation, but the trolls can be very easily ignored. What do I care is some no name account is posting some stupid content somewhere on X? I already know which people I want to follow. The rest I don't care about.

That's a very dangerous idea that has been tried in communistic countries many times. It always leads to horrendous outcomes and the authoritarian control of the public.

We should each follow our own moral compass, and oppose viewpoints that we find horrific. But trying to systematically stamp out disagreeable ideas, rather than to influence people with better ideas, is a road to hell.

Yes, that's why people go to Usenet for their discussions and not Reddit.

> I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?

Doesn't it make more sense to go for Stack Overflow / Reddit model instead for a support forum ?

The best responses will bubble up and that really the main innovation that makes a forum more practical.

What about hosting a Lemmy instance or and if you have the money, Stack Overflow for Teams ?

I'll never create a bluesky account because the people who use it ultimately think it's some sort of genius political point to rag on X.

Went to GopherconAU last week and one of the organizers very proudly announced that you should "skeet" with their hashtag like the word didn't have another completely inappropriate connotation. I really can't take this sort of internet circlejerk seriously when I have a mortgage to pay and a family to look after.

Podcasts are RSS. I don't think it's dead at all there.

I don’t think the problem is the algorithmic or chronological feed.

I think the problem is that short form content simply should not exit. I don’t care what people eat for breakfast, or reading the same motivation quote over and over again.

I want to have discussions, with different opinions. And current microblogging platforms do not provide that. Hence it doesn’t matter who “wins”. IMHO they are all net negative for humanity

It has had a real time, chronological feed since day one i.e. Following.

Many people hold worldviews which are ontologically incapable of co-existence with other viewpoints. By reducing discourse to intergroup sparring and affinity signaling, the intermingling of various such extremists only solidifies the status quo.

I follow a bunch of people on X who seem thoughtful but with whom I typically disagree with. That's useful for self-correction and avoiding group think. I also try very hard not to react negatively or dramatically.

I believe it's a mistake for the owner be so busy with his own platform but I don't follow him or any famous people. That helps too.

That depends on what you use as criterium to decide which platform is ahead. For me the best criterium is how much diversity of opinion - the only type of diversity which really matters - is allowed on the platform and how much real interaction (i.e. not just shit fights) between those groups occurs. Currently X comes out on top in the former category while none of them scores anything worth mentioning on the latter.

There is a way to coexist, without it being a constant ideological battle all the time. If we can talk about the things we DO agree about, it makes it easier to talk about the things we don't. That's only possible if we're in proximity to one another.

Hiding in our own echo-chambers does not solve any real problems, and it creates new ones.

I think those sorts of publishers should have a script that posts notifications to all sort of places automatically.

RSS in the large is a nightmare. My agent YOShInOn lives on the wrong side of an ADSL connection and has all its RSS fetching done by

https://superfeedr.com/

which I like operationally. I'm following about 110 RSS feeds which cost 10 cents/month each. I like having a simple AWS Lambda that puts the notifications in SQS and then fetching them at my convenience later. It's a steal for a feed from MDPI that has 1000+ papers a day or arXiv or The Guardian but not affordable to follow 2000 independent blogs which I would like to do. The poll and poll and poll some more and poll again and maybe poll too fast and waste resources and other times poll too slow and not only get content late but miss it entirely situation is just not cool. I could write an RSS poller but it would be slowing down my internet connection or adding to my cloud bills and would need maintenance.

Bluesky looks promising. In my bubble it seems like a lot of artists have been moving to it after some Xitter fiasco with AI training or whatnot (idk, I don't keep up with those news).

But, this:

> Radically open

> I think some might be surprised to learn how open Bluesky is. It’s trivially easy to grab an export of any user’s data. It’s also a core assumption of the service that all the data (aside from out-of-protocol stuff like DMs) is completely open.

I'm still skeptical of Bluesky having "won" until the average user is completely aware of things like this. I fully expect that there will be some drama about this openness at some point in the future.

When this happens, we'll see if people go back to Twitter again (how many times has it been already?); or if they embrace this new social network where your art and posts can be scraped waaaaaay more easily than in Twitter, so they're probably more likely to be used for AI training anyway.

Until conversations about these topics happen between non-tech users, I'm mostly just watching how the situation evolves.

Aha, agreed that they are not offering anything for the use case of standalone communities. I wish they would, and I think the architecture is there for it, it's just that no one has used a relay in that way yet. I /might/ take it up myself in the next year or two, really I just want phpbb to have a second renassiance - special interest, user moderated forums like reddit but each community able to fork off to their own infrastructure if there's some schism re: moderation or otherwise.

The average user (non-tech oriented) doesn't really think about or care that much about openness. This is the kind of user who posts disclaimers on their Facebook wall saying that Facebook is not allowed to use their content.

Care to check how much time blue collars spend swiping on their phones? On those few daily hours, what makes you think they don't have time to argue online?

That's exactly what Threads seemed like when I dipped in, so many complaints about non-Meta tech companies.

Interactivity from the part of the reader

And no good tools. RSS readers in 2024 still keep failing with the same failing interfaces that failed in 1999.

No, I don't want a portal with a little box for every feed I follow.

No, I don't want a listing like an email client.

No, I never want it to show me a piece of content twice unless I ask for it. (e.g. as David Byrne says: "say something once, why say it again?")

Yes, I expect to subscribe to more RSS feeds than I can read entirely so I expect it to learn my preferences like my YOShInOn agent does. In a cycle of a few days, YOShInOn might find 3000 or so articles in RSS feeds and it chooses 300 to show me which I thumbs up or thumbs down. I knew such a thing was possible when I wrote this paper

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/

but now it is not only possible but easy.

It came as a bit of surprise this morning when an radio interview with a politician concluded with mentioning her Bluesky account, not Twitter or Facebook.

Still I feel like Facebook/Instagram, and certainly X/Twitter has done a lot of damage, which has cause many of us to be sceptical about ever opening another social media account.

Not true. If someone can make a point honestly and in good faith I do my best to respect it even it's "harsh". I myself am no stranger to being very blunt when trying to make a case for something.

What I consider "toxic" is using slurs, trying to make people angry, bad faith arguments, spamming replies without giving them much thought, etc.

Which has limited value during real time events. If you are not preemptively following people who are interested in or involved with that event then you lose out on following that event in real time.

Threads artificially juicing their numbers with Instagram integration. I can't remember what it was but recently when posting to Instagram it offered me an option to enable all my posts to automatically cross-post to Threads, very possibly defaulted to "on" too.

Community Notes is a great feature.

But on X too much value was / is being lost due to policy and algorithmic choices that discourage signal and encourage noise.

I used to go there for critical discussion of various tech issues or smart people talking about innovations at the cutting edge. As an example I used to use X to learn about modern graphics programming by searching certain terms to see what the smartest people in the field were saying while talking to each other.

It used to be that if a big account Tweeted something often you'd see true experts responding as the first replies. Now you'll see dozens of Bluechecks spamming memes or gross statements before you get to any substance, which inevitably has lower engagement.

Too many smart people have been turned away from the platform and it just doesn't generate the quality of discussion it used to. Already in the communities I care about I'm finding vastly more substance on BlueSky.

I'm trying to avoid national politics on BlueSky simply because I want to take a breather from it.

I'm seeing vastly more signal and less noise on topics I care about like game dev, urbanism, art, and tech.

My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.

A common kind of profile on that kind of platform is: "There are good people and bad people and I'm one of the good people"

It is very easy to other people and share memes that build group cohesion while driving other people away. Really making progress requires in politics a lot of "I agree with you about 90% but there is 10% that I don't" or "Well, I negotiated something in the backroom that you'd really hate but headed off a situation you would have thought was catastrophic but you won't appreciate that I did it so you and I are both better off if I don't tell you" and other sorts of nuance, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, etc.

To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read) I have to have about 20 or so block rules.

I see some people with the same kind of profiles on Bluesky but see a lot less othering in my feed because the "Discover" feed on Bluesky filters out a lot of angry content. My rough estimate is that it removes about 75% of the divisive political junk. That

(1) Immediately improves my feed, but also

(2) Reduces the amount of re-posted angry political content (it's like adding some boron to the coolant in a nuclear reactor) and

(3) Since angry political memes don't work anymore people find a different game to play

My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable. Those who go are less agreeable than those who stay. On the other hand, a certain amount of suppression of negativity could stop it from spreading and might not even be noticed as "censorship".

BlueSky's platform choices are encouraging far more signal than noise.

X / Twitter is doing the opposite. It's rotting into a place where meaningful discussion is hard to have and you have to put up with tons of trolls / spam.

It'll be interesting if Twitter/X does drift rightward amongst contributors and still keeps its For You feed oriented toward "engagement" and view counts, whether or not it will just end up leading to infighting between far right and moderate right views.

Bluesky is increasingly getting that way. Every time I check it this week I'm seeing new content from recognizable people. I think at some point there will be a tipping point where Bluesky will have more content and just win outside of alt right circles.

Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism. In theory, I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn. I haven't had a portfolio in years, because I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it. Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists. (And plenty of precious content that ended up on other services, like Qik, no longer does.)

If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.

The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.

I think so, extreme ideologues like communists, islamists or any other hardcore ideologues fight among each other and in their own tribes all the time because they are actually divided quite a bit on the implementation details. Once the thing they rage against is gone, they will have to rage against each other. The anti-jewish Trump supporters already begin dropping out with disappointment.

I have reasons to believe your belief is incorrect. Thread's app downloads, number of posts etc. match the MAU numbers.

In all my circles is unreliable argument.

Bluesky released a statement today about data use [0] - saying they will not use your data for "Generative AI" (surely in response to X's recent change to say they will).

As you imply, this is a bit meaningless for people who don't want their posts used for AI, because anyone can grab all data pretty easily (at least for now).

But, AI aside, this is so much better for a lively ecosystem - 3rd party apps, bots (the fun and useful kind), research, etc. A lots of things simply died when Musk decided effectively end the API program [1].

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3layuzbti6s2x

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-near... == https://archive.ph/ikPOk

This is probably more rhetorical than anything, but why does it need to be interactive?

What nobody has figured out how to do yet is re-create that physical reality in the digital world. Policing is a reality few people want to talk about, and nobody wants to point out that graffiti (trolling in the digital world) is vandalism and not free speech. Nor do they want to face the reality that while graffiti is pretty easy to spot in the real world, it's much more difficult to detect in the digital world. All those problems are in play before we add in the problems brought by advertising and the fact that online communities legally look similar to media.

Online communities have existed for over four decades now and we still haven't solved these problems.

Recent and related:

How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147430 - Nov 2024 (42 comments)

1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144340 - Nov 2024 (109 comments)

Ask HN: Bluesky is #1 in the U.S. App Store. Is this a first for open source? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129768 - Nov 2024 (44 comments)

Ask HN: Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129171 - Nov 2024 (13 comments)

Visualizing 13M Bluesky users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118180 - Nov 2024 (236 comments)

Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42112432 - Nov 2024 (168 comments)

How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086596 - Nov 2024 (79 comments)

Bluesky Is Not Decentralized - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952994 - Oct 2024 (194 comments)

There are lots more...

If you want to avoid groupthink, I recommend against following "people you disagree with" and instead following people talking about completely different things. The first group isn't really exposing you to new ideas, and the most likely reason you disagree is one of you is talking their book (ie lying) rather than some heartfelt disagreement.

> Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now.

The Bluesky app both performs better and uses much less battery than Twitter does. I think because it uses Google ads now, but not sure.

Twitter also has disk space leaks - I regularly find the app has gone up to 3GB or so. (And it's not from image caching, seems to be an SQLite db of all accounts I've seen posts from.)

> These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

The problem is that it's very hard to justify spending money to accomplish this when Twitter/X/Bluesky/Threads/etc. is offering the service for free.

App store ranking is kind of irrelevant, it favors new rising platforms, and underestimates an existing platform with a consolidated user base.

There is nothing to win. Fediverse has always been and will always remain an interesting place for sub-cultures.

Good point, and that's what I do, mostly. My interests are history and technical topics. But I follow scifi authors, cartoonists, some minor (relatively) politicians.

Imma let you finish, but since Trump won the popular vote by millions of votes, the word "reasonable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Only by the loosest possible definition that would also encompass forums, IRC, game lobby chatrooms, etc. There's a clear and practical distinction between communities driven by a specific interest like this one and platforms like Xitter.

Saying that HN is social media is like saying that a taco is a sandwich.

>If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.

Good! Higher barrier to entry is exactly why Neocities, Mastodon and [redacted] are so much higher quality than the NPC internet. We need a couple hurdles to keep out the low effort posters.

See, your post is exactly what OP is talking about.

> Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists.

by the good grace of Meta Inc. and nothing else. Your account can get purged because:

- they decide to start purging old content

- they comply with a censorship order from the country you live in (or a country you don't live in)

- the CEO decides they don't like you (though that's really only a current issue on Twitter)

> Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism.

Decentralization is the bedrock of all the _most_ pragmatic internet technologies (DNS, HTTP, Email), centralization is a more recent phenomenon driven by a dozen or so very large companies.

The decision to promote blue check replies is a product-level decision that has made the user experience much, much worse

Wait, did I miss something that happened just over a week ago?

People do that when feel it's socially acceptable to do so. It feels like it could be a matter of time. A million people joined in a 24 hour period yesterday.

Disagree. That's what HN and IRC fans tell themselves to draw an artificial distinction between networks they like and networks they don't. I don't see a huge meaningful difference except in scale and content breadth.

Saw one for a sports journalist on a subreddit. I think that's a clear sign of it making it, given how twitter and reddit are joined at the hip

Last time I checked that’s called gatekeeping.

Neocities is a ton easier to try for “non-engineers”- it even has a discovery feed and a WYSIWYG editor…

Do you have any examples of articles with Bsky embeds?

What information gain is there in most of the "interactivity" that is afforded by social media?

A quick look at the Bluesky homepage having never been there before tells me that it's just another Reddit without the r/conservative part.

Making an argument that fascists are taking over the world may indeed be what gp doesn’t like.

But gp (and yourself, presumably) not liking it doesn’t make it untrue, and certainly doesn’t mean the argument should be censored.

> I try to filter out political tweets.

> Seriously!? But don't you realize that ${political.outrage.tweet.792305}??

I agree largely with what you wrote but have a small disagreement. I don't actually think the character count has that big of an effect. I've seen plenty of self-righteous posts on places like here (HN) and the LessWrong forums that just use more words to do the same thing.

I think the kind of person that's energized to comment online generally feels more strongly about the issue than most lurkers. This means that online conversations are dominated by the most passionate, most invested, and often least interested in impartiality. This post [1] comes to mind.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

Beware of enshittification though: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...

The U.S. Presidential election and its outcome on November 5th was the inflection point for the significant migration from X to Bluesky, as a) many were staying on Twitter/X only for the real-time news and discussion about the election results which ended up not being that interesting due to the Trump sweep and b) the results in favor of Trump will give Elon more power and make Twitter/X more insufferable.

> It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture

My belief is that there's some very real reasons for that!

First, incendiary posts seem to get boosted by the algorithm. It's good for engagement, which keeps people online and hooked, which feeds more ads, and is good for the business. Elon and his CEO of the company know this.

Second, the more you look at the replies, the more you find people who are weirdly into Elon Musk. They'll bring him up even in a thread where he's not mentioned and the topic isn't about him. "Thank god Elon saved free speech!" or something rather. Just profoundly weird stuff that I can't help but feel is designed to stroke his ego. Again, I believe the algorithm is intentionally boosting these things. It also serves to create a cult of personality. He's not just the site owner, but he's its "savior".

Lastly, the company is clearly in trouble financially. Revenue is down substantially by all accounts, and there's a very high valuation to live up to. They want to get people to pay money, look at ads, and keep them coming back again and again for more. Being community-first and focused on people having the kind of good time they want in their communities just doesn't align with those very difficult business constraints.

People seem to like it?

You’re right that people can write hateful, divisive and othering content with many words. The trouble with the short content platforms is that you can’t do anything else.

Bluesky app is becoming a fine React Native exemplar, and it's been a blast watching former Facebook React guy Dan Abramov, now working at Bluesky, start using Native for the first time. https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov

There's plenty of right wing posters on Twitter now. They get boosted even. The reason they weren't visible prior to boosting is that they only communicate in death threats, misspelled slurs and the laughing emoji.

(Far-leftists esp. tankies also communicate mainly in death threats, but in a much more literary way where they accuse you of misreading a theorist from 1840 first.)

The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance. I have a strong interest in interacting with cybersecurity professionals, so infosec.exchange was perfect for me, either browsing subscribed or local posts. Browsing all is something I do only when I'm bored, because many posts are not what I'd like to see. You can always migrate your account if you want.

https://instances.social/

That being said, BlueSky is simpler and easier because there's no real federation yet, and even if they have a "Discovery" algorithm, you get many options to control what you want to see. It's feels great, like Twitter before their 2012(ish?) IPO.

> I think the definition of hate and extremism has been warped to encompass things that aren't either of those things.

The definitions of hate and extremism are inherently tied to personal values. Many people perceive much of the speech on X as hateful and extremist because it directly contradicts their core values, not because they're arbitrarily expanding those definitions.

> You can talk to the people at your table in a restaurant, and it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking about something you disagree with. The food tastes the same.

This analogy only works if everyone abides by a social contract. that’s often not the case on X. It’s like if the people at the next table overheard you, didn’t like what you said, and decided to come over and spit in your food. That’s the experience many people have on X.

There are _huge_ differences. Compare HN to Xitter et al:

- Barrier to entry is higher and participation is tiered by karma

- Moderation and community participation guidelines are heavier-handed and more defined

- You can't embed media or have a profile picture

- There's virtually no advertising anywhere

- You can't delete posts after a few hours which means no way to nuke your presence after the fact

- No hashtags

- Far less algorithmic manipulation of user attention (infinite scrolling, per-user algorithmic feed, etc)

- Encouragement of longer-form discussion because of a lack of (at this point historical, from what I understand) character limits on posts

- Likes/upvote counts aren't visible to other users

- No official app with telemetry and push notifications; in fact, no notifications _period_ for things like replies

- No friend or follow mechanism

My taco comment stands. Both a sandwich and a taco comprise flat, oblong starches with ingredients in the middle. One or two people have called them the same. In practice virtually nobody would confuse the two or substitute one for the other. People are migrating from Xitter to Bluesky but almost none are migrating to HN.

> Online communities have existed for over four decades now and we still haven't solved these problems.

The beautiful thing about digital graffiti is that you can remove it instantly, and return to an unmarred environment. As long as such tools are provided to each person, those who enjoy graffiti can leave it in place too. Win-Win.

We do need a new vision, with people embracing and promoting digital maturity. Both in a reduction of trolling, and in a stronger resilience against it. Because not everything that is objectionable, is graffiti. You should not hate your neighbor because he has a different political sign on his front yard during election season. We have to stop equating everything that is objectionable, as a catastrophic, intolerable insult.

This isn't tenable because you need to do moderation and spam filtering, which require centralization.

Interesting point, I'm inclined to agree. I'm curious now about how many Likes and Reposts a thread on Bluesky gets vs a compact emotional response. I run a firehose ingester so maybe I'll test this out.

EDIT: I realize you specifically called out politics here and that makes me even more inclined to agree.

> Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now.

The app is a bin-fire.

The fediverse very much is "the commons", at least it's as close as you can hope to get online.

Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should be able to make their own instance that they can control and plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.

I like and use matrix (I'm indeed one of those ideological types), but even their nice webapp is janky in comparison to discord, with fewer features on paper (E2EE is huge, but the median discord user doesn't care). I use it in spite of the jank.

With bluesky on the other hand, there really isn't much jank, certainly not relative to twitter (except right now when it feels like the servers are struggling to scale fast enough...). The average bluesky user doesn't seem to be ideologically motivated (or if they are, their ideology is "I don't like elon musk"). They mostly use bluesky because it works for them, regardless of implementation details.

They do. Since July. https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-namecheap

I follow a decent number of tech people and I do see some of their posts, but then it runs out. In particular all the people I follow go to bed at US nighttime and then it's all bait until they wake up.

Also, half the people I follow are getting baited by the "random people complaining" posts - so I just see their replies to it!

When I can engage in conversatons with a wide variety of different viewpoints, without any of those viewpoints being repressed through some censorship mechanism, then I'll agree that the platform has 'won'.

But Bluesky is already censoring viewpoints that the collective don't want to see promoted, so its really not much better than X.

The issue is, whether or not a collective, reactive crowd, is really the ultimate form of human discourse. I happen to think not, but its sure interesting to see the dynamics of humans flowing from one echo chamber to another ..

if it’s not interactive and not littered with “likes”, how will i know to care about it or not?

But it's not because each node is still controlled by someone who can choose what's on it and who has access

Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need decentralization are people who are being censored but that's very few people. So everyone incurs extra complexity to benefit a small minority.

I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it

This is caused by you writing custom software, not by decentralization. If you were running some off-the-shelf software like WordPress it would probably be updated to keep pace with the world so you wouldn't have to do much.

Which is why it isn't each node that is the commons, but the entirety of the ecosystem.

"the world" is more than the US.

Newspapers filled this role once, and they're privately owned. You have two choices: privately owned or government run. I'll take the private ownership route. Better than prior, now users can openly write back outside of "letters to the editor" and without paying money. People used to complain about Twitter censorship, now they complain about its ownership. One is about free expression. The other is about political tribalism.

> there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department.

Their website! Now get off my lawn! :p

Other countries exist, but they speak other languages so you're not reading their posts. Japan /loves/ short form text social media.

Thats a factor of time given how new it is - and likely inevitable.

This is exactly why WebSub, formerly Pubsubhubbub, was written. Publishers can push to a relay only when something new happens, never having to be polled.

It was created more than a decade ago.

> Many people perceive much of the speech on X as hateful and extremist because it directly contradicts their core values

People disagreeing with you is not "hate and extremism".

> The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance.

I was very disappointed to find out that whatever instance you choose can essentially hold your identity and content hostage.

I'd been hoping for something where my identity comes from a private key that I could take elsewhere.

You are presently commenting on a platform that has upvotes and replies. Even you apparently want to use a platform that has interactivity.

For things like a missing person alert, it provides an instant feedback mechanism and the ability to share things with people you might know in the affected area.

Otherwise, there’s absolutely utility to interacting over social media. We’re doing it right now!

You're collateralizing bad mortgages and rating them AAA.

I think the central question is how people can collectively own a node and organize its decision making. Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's feudalism.

I agree - short form content doesn't leave enough space to have a nuanced arguement and conversely it leaves a lot of space open for misinterpretation and encourages hot takes and mic drops over expression of cohesive thoughts.

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/)

Bluesky is a left wing echo chamber and most of the world has no idea what it is, nor why should they care.

People act like Elon is the devil while using Gmail and googling things. Lol.

Why is information gain the correct metric?

We're talking about marketing here. Shouldn't it be conversions or awareness or something?

You just received basic instructions to get the data. You hold such strong opinions in this thread, I think it's important you inform yourself properly.

Likes could just be part of the RSS feed

I will never, ever use Bluesky. ActivityPub is the present AND future of decentralized social networking on the open web. Bluesky's protocol isn't even a standard and amounts to little more than smoke and mirrors.

I'm fine with people backing the wrong horse (again), and I don't have an ounce of FOMO. It's upsetting in a general sense that people will regularly behave in a manner against their own self-interest. But when Bluesky is fully enshittified in a few years and people are wondering what in the hell just happened, the Fediverse will be here waiting to embrace them with open arms.

Mastodon is not a bloated sloppy mess. Have you even used it? I use it every day and it's enjoyable. It felt like 2010s Twitter. It both makes me feel good and is also educational (because I have chosen to follow accounts that provide educational value, not just empty rhetoric).

I sure am! Just because I'm commenting on this platform doesn't mean that I actually care about upvotes and such (spoiler alert: I don't give a shit what my score is). I interact, but I never feel the need to and I don't find the interactions to be the important aspect of the site, rather the kinds of articles I find submitted here are what I appreciate the most. The commentary is secondary, "extra" if you will - take it away and I wouldn't care. Hell, I have an RSS-based news reader that I utilize on a daily basis that provides no interactivity and I find it a more pleasant experience than on this site, and you know why that is?

Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)

> When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison.

That's the point, though. You don't need (nor, I imagine, would most people want) to mirror the entire network. If not needing to mirror the entire network makes self hosting simpler, then that is an advantage for the people interested in self hosting.

One important one is reposting that shows post to your followers who might not see the original. It is important way to see other content.

Also, liking it signal that other people were interested in the post. I don't global likes are useful for likes from people you follow are important.

Finally, replies mean can see interaction from people you follow. If you follow interesting people, you see interesting discussion.

With social media, it isn't possible to read everything, I know I used to try to read my whole Twitter feed. There needs to be some way to filter than just time when you looked. I think the current algorithmic feed is bad because it tries to show other stuff instead of ordering things that want to see.

Yes, it's the same argument that people have been making about facebook being dead when it's hitting all time highs.

> That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone.

When you want to reach people you go to where the people are. You fish where the fish is. It is that simple. People did not join twitter because the police was posting there, the police post on twitter because that is where they can reach the people.

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

To be fair, that is what ActivityPub is - less simple syndication.

Being censored is not the same as not being amplified.

Why does a police department need a feed to be interactive? Actually, doesn't it being interactive invite improper interactions from citizens that should have used official channels?

ActivityPub is something like RSS. It is based on OStatus which used Atom and other standards. But it also does multidirectional syncing.

If Bluesky did ActivityPub, that will federate Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. There are tools for posting to old social media, we will probably see tools for the new ones. Should be easier since protocols are more open.

> Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need decentralization are people who are being censored but that's very few people.

There is a larger group of people who are frequently harassed but don't have sufficient control to prevent harassment on Twitter, for instance the recent change in what the block button does.

With decentralization, one can self-host on their terms, or find one with like-minded people and have more stringent controls on both incoming and outgoing messages, via blocks or defederating unmoderated or otherwise disagreeable instances.

It is an official channel.

This is a platform for discussion, but if it was the example of a police department, why do they necessarily want to turn a feed of updates into a space they have to moderate (or if they can't moderate it, having to put up with most responses being along the lines of "ACAB"?). Communities can have value, but sometimes you wouldn't lose much by having your feed be read only.

> Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?

The users. You can put your news on RSS and approximately nobody will read them. Or you can put them on twitter and it will reach people.

This is true even now when the management of the bird app is seemingly hellbent on destroying the site. It was even more true when the decision was made.

I guess we can hope (or work) on an RSS based future, but the key thing to achieve is users, and then the rest will follow.

I suspect being spun out of Twitter, developed by Dan Abramov, and not owned by Mark Zuckerberg are all inputs that make Blue Sky feel like the blessed continuation of what used to be Twitter (at least for people in the hacker sphere).

Kim Kardashian is much more important to a social network than any journalist, politician or economist. Perhaps more so than all of them combined.

There are many interest verticals on Twitter like politics, sports, celebrity, influencer, porn etc.

Yes. And it was a bloated sloppy mess I ran from screaming. It SUCKED, and STILL sucks.

Actually, my opinions are not reliant on the results of such a test.

Anything that X does which favors right-wing opinions, and censors or diminishes left-wing opinions, I oppose. I'm for free speech, and all of us being in the same proximity to hash out our differences, and accept that there will be some which always remain.

I'm still not gonna use anything besides the Fediverse.

I thought you could subscribe to an RSS feed for basically anyone on mastodon?

> until the average user is completely aware of things like this.

The average user doesn’t care.

This feels like an argument that stuffing cash under your mattress is better than keeping it in a bank. The number one cause of data loss - by far - is technical incompetence. 99.9% of users do not have the expertise to spin up an AWS instance and maintain it.

By "official" channel I was thinking of making a police report, or writing something in a complaints book. Tweeting at a PD's account is comparatively as official as scribbling something on the wall of the station bathroom.

The problem is that departments want to put the news in front of people, and people want interactivity.

Right now RSS is, for the vast majority of the public, a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to hear it.

X is owned by an opinionated rich guy, completely entangled in government (even before the Trump win.) There's nothing ideal about a situation where he could be flipping the switch right now to turn it back like it once was, or even worse. He doesn't even have to care, all he has to do is lie back and let it happen. It's the path of least resistance.

I firmly believe his posture with twitter has been because 1) it's a fun place for him and it was obviously a money losing purchase* so he might as well have that fun, and 2) his level of censorship is something that he can use to negotiate with government over contracts or regulation.

He might even really believe in free speech, but a conceptual belief in free speech doesn't mean he'll feel obligated to personally provide it if he can make a dollar denying it. His speech will remain free no matter what happens, he's a rich guy.

-----

* (not unlike say the Guardian, the New Republic, Mother Jones, the Intercept, or the Atlantic, or the WaPo, aparently, and probably CNN and MSNBC at this point. They're not for making money.)

Social media was coined to distinguish between platforms based on social graphs and older platforms like forums and IRC.

Have you ever tried to stand one up?

No, it's more like dropping a note card in a "Tips" drop box in the station lobby. It's literally an officially monitored communication channel that is explicitly authorized.

If anything, the transparency of a social media post is much better than, say, private emails that can be buried and ignored.

Except when they're on soundcloud, or spotify, or audible, etc...

For those who find Mastodon's default client a little bloated, please check out https://phanpy.social. It is one of the most thoughtful PWAs and websites I have ever used, and made Mastodon a daily for me now. It's feels like Threads but with deeper functionality.

It can just talk to your Mastodon server, which as the article notes is very easy to set up on Coolify/Digital Ocean, etc

But then you need to go to each website for updates. The benefit of these platforms was aggregation.

>Currently people can set up their own PDSs, which will host both their identity’s signing keys and their content on Bluesky. Setting this up requires a fair amount of server-level knowledge, but it’s relatively cheap (maybe $15/month USD) and lets people control their own data

Man, really? Domains tend to be around that much for a year.

I guess it's cheap if you're doing this for marketing purposes, but given that this was marketed towards "developers", I thought there'd be more homespun method to get this up.

But aside from that, I don't quite understand the counterargument of Bluesky not being federated/decentralized for custom domains outside of "Bluesky handles DM 's" (to paraphrase). I'm sure most users will more or less choose the centralized approach of Bluesky handling everything, but the fact that you can decentralize off is very valuable (even if it's a different service than ActivityPub)

>The whole Twitter mess has taught me not to attach myself too closely with these things anymore. I hung on far too long to Twitter while it made me feel terrible. My goal going forward is to post more to my own site and aggregate to any social channel I currently care about.

indeed. Don't put your eggs all in someone else's basket. If you're selling, always try to get people on an email list (the only popular standard of federation as of now) so when that basket is taken that your devout followers can keep in touch. Ideally this decentralization of Bluesky (if you take the time/money to set it up) should let you take most of your ball home, but it may not be as easy to just "move it somewhere else". Mastodon's ideals vs. reality certainly show this.

This sort of absolutism is the same kind of garbage middle-school level philosophy that Elon Musk peddles, and it doesn't work in practice. For example, holocaust denialism, or in the most recent example, Sandy Hook massacre denialism isn't an opposing viewpoint worth hosting on a private platform. The best course of action is to simply eradicate it. Infowars being shutdown is a great example of a good thing happening.

Twitter is a place where they can reach some people. Using it was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not.

It also means they will become increasingly radicalized in their echo chamber.

It's telling that people who are leaving X are doing so not because they are being censored, but because their political opponents are no longer being censored.

Credentialing. I frequently find myself reading Tweets from people I’ve never heard of because someone who I know to be an expert in a particular topic has liked or retweeted them. This kind of signaling helps surface more obscure content and make it available to people who wouldn’t have found it on their own. This is a huge deal.

Twitter almost literally started as a place to get updates on celebrities, designed closely to UI's seen in tickerboard updates. So the metaphor is more apt than you'd think.

They're a government department. This is literally something which should be coordinated by the government.

I.e. police.gov should just dashboard this for you using location services.

Realistically I think all social media should have been operating on an open standard years ago.

And Twitter is just a spiritual clone of .plan

All these advantages are only due to the fact that it has less users and thus it is cheaper to run it and less need to monetize it.

How could you possibly know what a million users are "basically" like?

Yeah but is it good gatekeeping or bad gatekeeping? Because having to agree to a code of conduct is a gate, but I don't think we want to remove that one. And anyway, when did gatekeeping pick up such a negative, pejorative tone? The gatekeeper is the one who kept people out of the gate. Some people were kept out for good reasons, others were kept out for bad reasons. Depending on the gate and country politics, nobody or everybody was let in through the gate. That doesn't make gatekeeping inherently bad. Doctors gatekeep who can call themselves a doctor, and while there are broader problems with that, fundamentally, some random fraudster shouldn't be able to call themselves a doctor sell rat poison in a pretty box as cure for cancer. There are some kinds of gatekeeping that are bad, but it's not inherently so.

So in theory one could publish into the ATP network (or whatever it's called) and a bunch of ATP clients could receive it?

And Bluesky is a publisher and a client?

> The problem is that departments want to put the news in front of people, and people want interactivity.

Views exceed interactions by orders of magnitude.

Mastodon reminds me of the internet before people started doing dumb shit with social graphs.

You follow people because they will show you a cool rock, not because its a slot machine that pays out massive amounts of dopamine.

I don't find it particularly interesting to argue about which analogy is more appropriate. My point is that it doesn't have the same degree of officialness as a report or some other public record, and it existing just invites to confusion on that matter.

> It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.

Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.

Whoa stop shoving your posts down my throat!

Why is this site so unbearably political now? Some of these takes are almost as bad as the stuff you find on the front page of Reddit...

I literally forget Threads exists for months at a time.

Nobody I know uses it, or has even acknowledged its existence. I see people on other social media talking about their Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and directing people there, but I have never seen anyone do it for Threads. I have never seen anyone share a link to Threads, I don't even remember what its domain name is. I have never seen Threads included in those little sets of social media icon links that all brand websites have.

I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe Threads has actual users who care about it and aren't just clueless Facebook/Instagram users who were not-so-subtly encouraged to also use Threads by those apps.

Again, I totally understand your objection, and you're right about the potential abuses that exist. The reason I said it is better now than before, is that the abuses under the previous ownership were not potential, they were real and being perpetrated every day. So I see X as _currently_ a much better place than it has ever been in its history.

But I'm with you on the potential problems and would rather have a system that was immune to such issues. What i'm really arguing against is people who saw the previous regime as correct and just, and are looking to recreate their echo-chamber somewhere else.

Part of what it will take to create a healthy town-center, that is much better than X, is for more people to speak up for ideals of diversity and tolerance. And to fight against the very loud and angry segment of people who see censorship and authoritarian control as good things, as long as they're working in their own favor.

The rational thing to do for someone who (1) thinks of themselves as a human being first and something else second is to join mastodon.social and (2) cares about visibility (why else are you on social?) is to join the biggest instance you can find.

Most notably people can only follow hashtags from accounts that are on their server so if you insist on joining some micro server please save yourself the hassle of putting hashtags on things.

Until they start censoring. Some orgs (like Guardian,) don’t like getting fact checked in real time. Old Twitter is far worse than new Twitter. In the recent old days, you’d get suspended for even debating Covid vaccine safety. Couldn’t even debate it! They even colluded with the U.S. government to silence dissent. Crazy.

Do you believe that Trump won the popular vote... for the entire planet?

This was solved 20 years ago with RSS, I guess it's about time for someone to rediscover the idea and reimplement something like it, push it like a great new invention, and make a couple of billions in the process.

I feel like that's fine, as another boomer. The internet wasn't designed with this idea that you only visit 10 websites and everything else is on the fringes. Did people forget that bookmarks exist?

Back to crushing reality, that's also why I'm a huge RSS fan. your feed should be based on websites you want to follow, not what the website's algorithms want you to follow. RSS puts the control back to the user while giving 95% of the convinience of a centralized platform.

But people don't bother looking on non-interactive platforms. This is a problem for outreach that aims to hit 100% of the public, ideally.

Unfortunately you are way more likely to get a blank stare when you say "add our RSS feed" than when you say "add us on Facebook" or similar, especially if you are an organization like a police department. Ordinary people do not tend to set up RSS readers or know how to handle feeds.

Picking a reader means making one or more choices (for your phone, laptop, tablet whatever), adding a feed is several steps, and it is easy to get overloaded with too many boring items (and too few interesting ones) because curation is left to the end user.

Centralized social networks require no choosing of readers, let you add an info source in one click, and ensure you have neither too few nor too many interesting items -- for some value of "interesting" -- regardless of how many entities you follow.

I love RSS and decentralization but creating a smooth, user friendly experience with such tools is a major unsolved challenge.

You don’t think the left misspells slurs, communicates in death threats too? That’s not a left right thing, that’s a crazy-normal thing.

Interactions draw views. If someone asked the same question you had, and had it answered by the original poster, that's more valuable to you than a simple feed.

Twitter was never a majority of Americans let alone 80-90+% share that justifies being a single outlet for a taxpayer funded agency.

Huh that’s a great way of putting it.

These ‘federated’ systems are just recreating feudalism in cyberspace.

Edit: Well even worse in some ways, since it’s not like a majority of the ‘gentry’ and ‘nobles’ could challenge and seize control of e.g. a Mastodon instance from the owner.

It will never make sense cause Claude Shannon already told us why.

When everyone Broadcasts, info explodes, no one hears anything. And as a reaction, they shout louder and louder or increase the number of times they repeat their message. This compound the absurdity of giving everyone Broadcast capability even further.

When you use the word commons you dont even realize the commons never had Broadcast (1 to All messaging) for Free.

Technically we can give everyone a radio transmitter that support Broadcasting. But no one allows that anywhere on the planet ever since Claude Shannons Theory of Information came out. Because it clearly shows us everyone can not broadcast simultaneously.

Even the human body with more cells and more signalling going on than the entire dumb internet does not give every cell broadcast capability.

I see BlueSky getting some traction regarding some specialized discussions (akin Discord?), but Twitter will continue to be the public space to go.

Correct. Bluesky is dogfooding AT Protocol.

https://atproto.com/specs/atp#protocol-extension-and-applica...

The difference between Facebook and your bank is that it's illegal for your bank to just say "you don't have an account here anymore and we're never giving back any of your deposits".

What I want to know is how did people come to believe that microblogging is a social necessity. How have we allowed for what’s perhaps the most impoverished form of human expression to become a gathering place for ourselves and our institutions.

Twitter won because that's where the people I follow are. If/when they move elsewhere, wherever they move to will have won.

It was solved 20 years ago. But companies unsolved it by deciding to de-prioritize or even remove such RSS API's.

Getting around that requires some heavy and expensive scraping (compared to a lightweight API to hook into), and as we're seeing right now companies are at each other's necks in real time over scraping.