Maybe Bluesky has "won"

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.

HN is also social media…

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.

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.

Correct.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In days of LLM, 99 out of 100 users are likely bots. That is probably also true for bluesky.

Like it or hate it, spending money is about the only semi-reliable defense against boting.

I agree with you for what that's worth.

I think there are two central criteria for some interaction-based online system to be called 'social media': follows, and DMs.

Hacker News has neither of these things, so it isn't social media. YMMV.

Thing is, Twitter was, well, not good before Naughty Ol’ Mr Car showed up (there’s a reason it was affectionately known as the hellsite) but often quite enjoyable. Then it was ruined by an idiot, and Mastodon and Bluesky filled the niche. For those of us who liked old!Twitter, Bluesky isn’t a bad option.