Ask HN: Bluesky Accounts Worth Following for HN Enthusiasts

There’s a deep lesson in the victory of Bluesky over Mastodon about the general inability of Open Source projects to provide a simple, intuitive end user experience. It’s unsurprising for those of us who have participated in Open Souce for a while, but Bluesky vs. Mastodon will become the canonical example.

Where is this “victory” of bluesky over mastodon? IMO they are both losers and most likely stay losers (as in never be anywhere close to twitter).

Even the accounts posted here, signed up in 2023, posted on bluesky three times.

If anything, I at least know some people who seem to have found some small community amongst the mastodongers.

I suppose that time will tell. Twitter is in the midst of an experiment to see if social network effects will keep users around despite unlimited levels of political hostility, abuse, and algorithmic shenanigans from the ownership. My impression is that there’s a limit and we’ve crossed it post election as Bluesky has been gaining a million users each day, but my bias is showing.

Wasn't Bluesky developed in house by a paid team at Twitter, who also developed the protocol? And isn't its UX essentially a clone of Twitter's, which itself is the result of millions of dollars in R&D and proprietary labor? And isn't the existing familiarity with Twitter the only reason Bluesky's interface is "intuitive?"

A lot of the rough edges for Mastodon come from it actually being decentralized, and the extra complexity that brings. There is for all intents and purposes only one Bluesky instance, and there will likely only ever be one instance due to network effects. It's open source in the same way Reddit or HN are open source - the code is available, but there is only one implementation that matters.

I don't think you're entirely wrong - Mastodon could definitely do with better UX, but let's not pretend the playing field is level here. Bluesky's success is very much the result of corporate and proprietary development culture, advertising and startup hype, not of open source culture.

There's one Bluesky appview and so far one public relay run by Bluesky.[0] There are over 1000 independent AT protocol instances and numerous independent appviews.

[0] Technically two if you count the development site.

[0a] New appview just dropped and it's Discord https://bsky.app/profile/samuel.bsky.team/post/3lbfdkqinl22z

HN is not open source. Only the base software package is, the 'secret sauce' is proprietary.

Twitter is a global social network. Clearly Musk made some very questionable business decisions e.g. changing the name, the aborted attempt to ban links to outside profiles, etc, but that period seems to have settled, and the main reason for leaving now is the rightward politicization.

If you live in the US then yes that's a seriously compelling reason to leave, but a large number of Twitter's users are not using English, they're not involved in US politics, and don't have much reason to switch unless Musk seriously upsets the operation of the platform.

Don't know why you're being downvoted, every point is bang on.

Whatever. The original point I was trying to make was a comparison of usability between Bluesky and Mastodon. But everything has to be about Elon Musk, so here we are.

> despite unlimited levels of political hostility, abuse, and algorithmic shenanigans from the ownership

This was happening before Musk bought it but now that it’s coming from the socially unacceptable side of the political spectrum people don’t like it

It is now a private company, with an owner who openly campaigned for a particular candidate and is now expected to take a role in that candidate's administration.

You can see the difference, right?

One is certainly more visibly political while the other is much harder to see. Seems like even you are confused by it.

So, you do see a difference. Meanwhile, you still ignore the difference in being a public vs. private company and the necessary disclosures that come from that difference.

That said, please open my eyes. I have yet to see you provide anything to support your stance that the publicly-traded, pre-Elon version of Twitter was equally as active in pushing a political agenda as the current version.

It's ok to admit, even if the guy is on your team.

The recovered documents that showed communication between the whitehouse and twitter resulting in censorship around covid and other issues like the laptop from hunter biden. It was political, hidden and many will say eviler before Musk.

I assume you are referring to the documents released by Elon Musk, the person mentioned in this thread who is overtly political. I think he's proven that he isn't a reliable narrator on these topics via his public comments.

Just to be safe, we have the reporting which proves that there were many censorship requests from the Trump Administration and other Republican officeholders like Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik. [0]

===Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" focus on Democrats, but former administration officials and Twitter employees say Trump’s team and other Republicans routinely demanded posts be taken down===

Why do you think Elon chose not to release this information in the "recovered documents"? In my view, it is further proof that he has turned Twitter into an overtly political machine. Prior to him, both sides played a game of trying to pressure Twitter to serve their purposes. Now, Twitter openly serves the purposes of one side of the aisle over the other.

You might agree with that side's opinion, but it doesn't change how he has made the platform itself political and actively hidden the political actions of people on his side. Sounds pretty evil to me.

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-tru...