Requiring phone number is a straight no go from me, sorry.
It requires a phone number now? That's weird. The invites didn't require a phone number.
Because the numbers were limited before and now they've thrown open the doors to massive botnetting.
Bluesky signups are now open to the public
171–180 of 284 posts
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#172[dead]
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#173I've had some concerns about the namespacing issue.
Bluesky accounts should be permitted to have both a bsky.social username and one with a custom domain. If I am a company and want to use @myname.com as my username, I would not want someone @myname.bsky.social to fall into the hands of anyone else. So it sort of necessitates signing up for 2 accounts, if only to reserve your name so nobody takes it.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#174It's nice to see this is the case now, though I worry it may be a bit too late. Having BlueSky stuck behind an invite wall gave a huge boost in popularity to other alternatives like Mastodon and Threads, and even now I'm unlikely to find most of the accounts I want to follow on the former service as a result.
It just feels super quiet to me at the moment, and I suspect the long time exclusivity played a big role in that.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#175bluesky is really a bad name for a social network. sounds too entreprisy, compare it to: twitter, instagram, tiktok
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#176The comic on this post is a whole lot of mess. Talking about moderation? Talking about "what if I want to leave"? Those sound like (1) work for me, and (2) why would I want to leave if it's so great? Uggh. And the fragmentation into silos continues.
> (2) why would I want to leave if it's so great?
A lot of people felt burned by the changes at Twitter over the past 14 months or so. They made meaningful connections on there and with new ownership came changes that altered the character of the platform, in their eyes. But because Twitter is centralized, it's difficult to move your social graph to a new platform in a robust way.
The promise of the AT protocol is being "billionaire-proof." If Bluesky gets bought out and you don't like the new owner, you can move your entire social graph and all your posts to a new atproto service without needing permission from the old service.
That would be the nuclear option. A smaller step you could take before that is use a different set of moderation services to curate the experience you want (more info: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation)
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
A bit macro and optimistic view about sustainability (in general, not specific to Bluesky): If everything goes according to the prediction of economists for 2024, a light crisis should decrease consumer confidence in the US. One of the solution to re-energize the economy might be to lower interest rates. Which means that if interest rates go down in 2024, companies are going to be able to borrow at extremely low cost…
Speaking as someone who has been stubbornly offering paid-for-access Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix (and now Funkwhale) accounts at communick.com for 5+ years, I learned already that very few individuals are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Everyone loves to complain about the exploits of the tech companies, but no one really cares about paying for a service unless it gives some sense of exclusivity. What is g…
It's difficult, we compare two different views, one from tech-perspective, and one from user-perspective.
I understand your arguments about the technology, they are absolutely correct, but they attract a typology of niche users, which are extremely demanding and very difficult to convert to paying users.
Twitter, the platform is very glitchy, the owners are who they are, the developer access is horrible, but still, I am using it, because there is exclusive and fresh content.
Bluesky is an interesting project, but I can strongly suggest leaning toward content/user-focus than pure-tech, in order to secure a stronger business-model (and eventually, as a consequence, a sustainable + open ecosystem).
Focus on onboarding great content first, and then walk back to the tech, not the other way around.
For example, to support more extensively those newspapers or institutions to onboard the platform, and most of all, all these unofficial content creators.
There are also some things which feel very strange, like the main description of Bluesky when you search for it on Google: "Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is".
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#178Reading testimonials from people who seemingly enjoy Bluesky, it sounds like the main perk is its exclusiveness and feeling like the good old days when Twitter was just for hardcore social media nerds? Is that that a recipe for success and wouldn't opening up undermine it? I don't see how any Twitter clone would avoid the pitfalls that make social media like Twitter fundamentally annoying. It's not about the technolo…
> internet-scale communities just not working well
I think you have to dig into that, and figure out why internet-scale communities don't work well, and then whether or not bluesky addresses it.
First of all, what does internet-scale really mean? I think it has to be that, to some degree, everyone is talking at everyone else.
For twitter and some other social networks this is because users don't fully control their feed -- they see what an algorithm decides they should see... and the algorithm is designed to increase engagement... because ads are how the social network makes its money. So you have content creators competing to make the most engaging posts and twitter doing its best to deliver those posts.
So I think it's probably twitter's ad driven business model, combined with the sad fact that it's a lot easier to engage people with anger and outrage than with civil, thoughtful content, that leads to a social media wasteland more than whether you need an invite to join.
I don't know if it will work, but if bluesky stays away from an ad-driven business model, they can let people control their own feeds and creators aren't incentivized only for engagement and it might stay a nice place to visit and hang out.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#179I selected my interests as Cooking, Fitness, Nature, Video Games, and my feed has absolutely none of that. Just random politics, activism, and jabs at Twitter. Anyway, nope.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#180I've been on for a few months now. It feels like 2014 Twitter in that it doesn't have gifs or video, so you will see some very good jokes. A number of people I used to follow on Twitter are over there but seem to have broken out of the posting habit and are quieter now. When I look at the "discover" tab I don't usually see much stuff that's interesting to me. It's a lot of men posting thirst-traps, furries, bog stand…
Yeah, I've tried to seek out and post technical stuff but it's mostly people virtue signalling, rage baiting, and complaining about other sites.
This is sadly a bit of a problem with most Twitter alternatives right now; many more niche communities haven't moved over (or have only chosen to go to one of them), so there's a good chance you won't find content you're interested in. Mastodon seems to have more of the tech crowd from what I can tell, but even then it's maybe 1% of the audience you might have had on Twitter.