Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day

As someone who never used Twitter, I made a Bluesy account and it was okay. I learned that I have no idea how to engage with that style of social media.

One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter. I hope they can move past that.

Lol, I got curious about nostr, and it's the same thing, with an extra layer of "crypto currency will save the world"

I joined twitter like 3 years ago, so also quite late to this type of game. Compared to forums, hn, reddit etc it's quite difficult to get your voice heard in the beginning. Anything you post is just shown to no one when you have no followers. Takes some time interacting with others and hope they follow or repost to get some traction.

People talk about what’s on their minds. Most of the users just moved in the past week or two so that’s the hot topic. But it’ll change soon enough.

They have, the front page is all about how terrible Trump is right now.

Blue Sky feels like a cocktail party where half the guests are knitting sweaters for their cats, the other half are debating how to save democracy, and I’m just standing there wondering how I got invited.

It’s like scrolling through a group chat where everyone forgot the topic but kept texting anyway.

Honestly, it’s impressive how they’ve managed to create a platform that feels simultaneously too niche and too random.

Idk, I spent a few hours over a few days trying to find something cool about it, and couldn’t.

The astro pictures are neat. Everything else ... less so.

I hope so too. I had to leave threads because my wall was 90% people talking and complaining about Twitter and Musk and memes about the same stuff. Dude, I was here _precisely_ to avoid this, but it's even worse!

Yeah, I followed a bunch of game dev "starter pack" account collections and 90% of it was screenshots of tweets from Elon.

That's still 80% of Mastodon's content so I don't expect much from Bluesky.

What is "the front page"?

Scrolling through the first couple dozen posts on my following feed, I see a selfies, science educators, artists, makers, a couple naked people, a complaint about days getting shorter, and a few people talking about health conditions they've gotten under control. If you don't want to see people talking about Trump, follow people who don't talk about Trump. Or add "trump" to your list of muted words.

What you see is up to you. If you don't like what you see, there are a ton of levers in your control.

> One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter. I hope they can move past that.

Judiciously using the muting features is required to have a good time in social media. Add "Twitter" to muted words to move past that on your own.

This, it happens for a while after every big exodus moment and chills out after.

> One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter

That was a huge turnoff with Mastodon for me. Seemed almost everyone was just saying “wow, isnt it so much better here than on Twitter?” over and over and having everyone agree. By comparison Bluesky isn’t so bad, at least right now anyway.

Open https://bsky.app/ in incognito mode and you get to see the front page.

Currently the top post on the latest refresh is:

>I'm honestly surprised he hasn't started selling stool samples. His followers have been buying his BS for years, so it seems like a natural next step...

https://bsky.app/profile/calltoactivism.bsky.social/post/3lb...

This is not a network I want to join if this is the popular content. We've been told to curate our own garden for reddit, twitter, mastodon, etc. It never works because people who see that and like it join by the millions and those who don't don't.

You can quite literally write your own algorithm for Bluesky.

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds

That's nice. It doesn't change the fact the default feed is amplifying the same posts that made twitter a toxic wasteland.

Same - it was actually technically impressive how fast I got crypto spam upon joining nostr.

Serious question here, I use Twitter all the time but I still don't understand this. What do people mean when they say Twitter is toxic?

You seem to be advocating going to a party where the lobby is full of people yelling about something annoying, and then pushing past them to some separate room where those same people are talking about something else, for the moment.

I’d rather pick a different party.

Except there's not really "a" lobby. It's a building with equally sized entrances on the red light district, wall street, silicon valley, and capitol hill. A lot of people happen to be coming in from capitol hill at the moment, because a pretty significant event just happened. Just because you know there's an entrance to the building on capitol hill, doesn't mean that's where you're coming from when entering the party. As soon as you have an account, you never need to acknowledge that entrance again.

It just seems weirdly petulant to make a stand based on that. Even more so considering the post about Trump winning was similarly a front page post here, and that thread got more votes and comments than almost any I've ever seen here. And here there really is only one "front page".

What do you call the place where everyone has to go through to get to every other place?

The lobby.

This is a UX decision that the blue sky team made to make signing up more streamlined and its one that's very poorly thought out. Given its the same people who almade twitter it's no surprise they are making the same mistakes.