Maybe Bluesky has "won"

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Whoa stop shoving your posts down my throat!

Even if that’s true, it’s irrelevant from the user’s perspective. Regardless of the underlying reason, the result is a user experience that’s enough of an improvement that users feel motivated to migrate.

If Bluesky becomes dominant, it will likely eventually degrade too, at which point something will take its place. Such is the fate of social media apps. The only variable is how long the app can stave off that decay.

I've never seen people claim they leave Twitter because of censoring. Rather because of the toxicity and death threats you receive on what's even mundane and non-political posts. All communities have been invaded by crazy people.

Can you explain how any of these are due to it having less users, or being cheaper to run?

>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.

Your statement appears completely illogical without a good deal of explanation connecting these concrete statements to yours.

People only keep on hitting the endorphin button if it gives them endorphins. If the media channel owner dilutes the content too much by forcing too many advertisements or too much unwanted unpleasant politics down their users throats, you can't expect them to stick around.

I avoided politics, but I got tired of the bots, the spam, the idiots who paid $x getting promoted to the top of discussion with uninteresting replies rather than more informative replies.

Musk literally censored a key technical term, "cis," because it's used in culture wars in addition to all sorts of other uses in biology.

Calling this dilution of value and signal to be "uncensoring of opponents" is merely insulting reasonable people. That's not what happened at all. And the only "uncensoring" that actually happened was letting nazis and antisemites and racists be as offensive as they wanted. And that's pure uninteresting noise to all communities except the nazi, antisemite, and racist communities.

It would be good for all tech people to learn what happens when you insert too much politics into your platform: you go broke.

it's very hypocritical to say nothing interesting is on a platform or that it's all soo loud and then proceed to perpetuate that by using a hyperbolic turn of phrase in your own comment that no body asked for.

When Musk himself is making the experience more hostile for users and advertisers, I think this is the few times "we're not X" is applicable.

I always say that the only thing that can kill these conglomerates is themselves. Musk has done a wonderful job of that these past two years. This wasn't a spur of the moment thing with some explicit breaking point like most other migrations.

I left because a large fraction of the things its algorithm was showing me were factually wrong. And I don't mean things that people accidentally got wrong. Or where the wrong things are there for entertainment purposes. No, I mean things where they purposefully are wrong and they want people to believe them.

I only ever followed a handful of accounts and those had stopped posting many years ago, so when Musk made it so the algorithmic feed worthless there was no reason to keep my account.

Twitter algorithmic feeds are designed to promote engagement even if you don'like something. It is important because more engagement with various content, means more clicks, more reactions and so on.

You get something you like, you get something don't like, click bait, then begin to argue etc. It is basically like a flea market with ads floating around and retailers promoting their stuff. All for the engagement.

But BlueSky creates isolated tables - like in a cafe. Sure they have more than 5 chairs, but it does promote engagement and closer to weekly clubs.