Maybe Bluesky has "won"

This is the third Bluesky submission in the past week or so. My previous comments were heavily downvoted, so I don’t expect it will be any different this time.

Many people are comparing X and Bluesky, but I think this is a mistake. The two platforms shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence. These are two drastically different platforms. X is a real-time news app, currently holding the #1 spot in the News category on the App Store (e.g., The New York Times is #8). Bluesky, on the other hand, is a social network and the #1 app in the Social Networking category. These are fundamentally different categories, so let’s stop treating them as rivals - they’re solving different problems for different audiences.

Which app store?

Is X also in the Social Networking category and Bluesky also in the News category?

If not, why do you assume that which category some intern put the apps in has any evidentiary weight in or relevance to today's conversation?

> Which app store?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)

> Is X also in the Social Networking category and Bluesky also in the News category?

No. Each application is in their own category.

> If not, why do you assume that which category some intern put the apps in has any evidentiary weight in or relevance to today's conversation?

I did not assume anything. I use X as a news app, the CEO of X has stated it's a news app, and its category in the iOS App Store is News. There are no assumptions here.

It doesn't matter how much Musk pays, trying to sell to to the social concious that twitter is a "news app" is a fool's errand.

That said, I do agree that Twitter is a horrible social networking platform. Not even in a snarky way.

- I could never follow conversations on whatever the hell response system it sets up.

- It's focused on short form comments but tons of people use it as a blogging platform (including its new owner).

- The algorithms and filtering are just horrid. It is so bizarre how I can be logged off and not even see user feeds in any meaningful order (ignoring that it filters out NSFW stuff).

- They recently made worse with blocking changes. a social networking tool with bad user filering is failing its most basic task. meanwhile they also recently decided to privatized what people liked, so it's all sorts of backwards in its design.

But despite all that, Bluesky as a "social network" platform solves #3. For now. Wonderful,I can see tweets in reverse chronological order without being logged in (and for now, the curation is... fine). But people still want imageboards with small character limits so I'll just continue to yell at a (literal, not digital) cloud.

Why are you trying to use it as a social networking tool?

That's the neat part, I don't. I only made an account after years of being broken down by trying to get past their "make an account" wall when I just followed some random link from HN or Reddit. I was fine just browsing tweets in a news when linked, but they clearly want to try and force me into their, uhh, "news network"? I never used any of the features; no comments, follows, likes, etc.

But others do and that's the sad part. I felt the same about Google+ dying to facebook; the inferior technology wins and it works against all the ways I want to communicate with others. So I gave up; I'm using Bluesky as a fresh start to be able to connect to future people I couldn't years ago that I met at conferences. But had nothing else to share other than a Twitter.

While I think it's horribly inefficient, it's even less respectful of me to ask them to take the time to make a social media account they don't have. That's all this is about for me. Meeting people at their level instead of trying to be this hipster trying to shill for this "cool misunderstood platform that's way better". I'll still use my hipster spaces, of course. But I can manage multiple feeds just fine.

Twitter is also present way down the list in the social networking category. The ‘news’ category is a much smaller pond in which it can be a big fish, but it is in both.

I just scrolled through the first 200 apps in the social networking category. There is no X in there. Can you share a screenshot?