Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day

Back in the news net days, there used to be a parable about a Berkeley hot tub. The owner would give out the code to people, and it would be a good party with a rotating cast of characters for a while, until eventually a few people ruined the party. Then the code would change, and a different crew would start coming through.

Pre-Elon, it seemed that Twitter was doing a pretty good run of keeping a single social network running for a long time. As has Facebook.

But for lots of dedicated communities, the new owner has such direct contempt for them and has focused on ruining the party.

Bluesky will work for now. Already science Twitter is having a huge renaissance now that links are no longer suppressed and discussion has lower noise:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-151688877

Aha, so it was real too? For the past few years I have not been able to find the old text that I used to, and I'm sure my memory has shifted a bit over time too.

These starter packs sound like a good idea, but I have a hard time using them to find interesting people to follow.

When I look at at the "People" tab, they look like pretty impressive people (academics, etc), and then I look at the "Posts" tab and it's the usual noise: cat pictures, politics, etc. Not a lot of signal.

Maybe I've just been starved on Twitter/C for so long, but the signal was real for me, but in science there's been a sudden exodus to Bsky and an outpouring of joy that people are able to find new papers again and discuss conference talks live and post whatever they're cooking in their kitchen or lab. It's like the old days of Twitter are back, but it does take a lot of work to find that corner.

Once upon a time...

I mean, academics are allowed have cats, too.