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Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

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Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#71

[flagged]

Based on your replies I doubt there’s anything that would actually convince you, but as it happens the data is pretty public and there are plenty of charts charts:

https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3lamm7liwrc2w https://bsky.app/profile/jglypt.net/post/3lahqd45qqw2y https://bsky.app/profile/alice.mosphere.at/post/3lac4bbxhty2...

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Given what happened with X during the election, Meta unquestionably made the right call with Threads. If you want news/politics then simply follow your desired journalists. But forcing it on people who don't want it is not making the world better. It's just allowing bad actors a clear vector on how to make it worse. b) You can switch to the chronological feed which is much better. But as you say you can't make it…

I'm not sure what you're alluding to regarding what happened on X during the election. If anything 2024 was smoother (very surprisingly) than what happened in 2020 even when Twitter had a Trust and Safety team, mostly because the election was not contested this time.

Right wing accounts were heavily pushed in the later stages of the election.

I manage a number of business X accounts which are publish only and all switched to showing right-wing politicians, pundits and extensive amounts of Elon Musk. I created a new account to check and same thing. Even though when I selected interests I specifically chose non-political topics.

For me it was very clear then that whether it's Musk or Zuckerberg no one should have the ability to push political content.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threads has become worse over time due to a series of anti-user policy decisions (no news/politics) and a very weird Discover algorithm that strongly incentivizes clickbait (and said feed is the default on the app and cannot be changed)

Does federation work? Or Threads just doesn't federate anything into itself?

Its getting there. They just need to allow replying back into the fediverse. But making it all opt in kinda has limited how many people use it. Perhaps that was intentional due to infrastructure needed and potentially overwhelming the fediverse. Or its just their way to say "we tried!"

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#74

Unlike previous attempts for groups of people trying to leave Twitter/X post-Elon acquisition for a competitor social network but failed due to the difficulty of getting all their friends to also switch, this time it might actually stick. Even before the election results on Tuesday, the vibes on X have been steadily been getting worse from my perspective, and the fact that Musk will get more power and influence from…

Ehhh, at this point people have been predicting the downfall of X/Twitter for so long such predictions feel a bit meaningless. Twitter was always terrible and I was hopeful Elon’s mismanagement would finally destroy it, but I think its clear that its never going anywhere.

it was never going to die overnight though. It's had a steady decline since the takeover.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#75
I deleted my Twitter account a few days ago. I am so disappointed in what became of Musk as he teamed up with Trump and I don't want to support him any more. Of course it does not make a dent in his life, but for mine it does. The time I save I can do more useful things with. I aim to consume less and produce more. or consume more long-form media, like books, or actual newspapers. It will be better for my mood I think, to decouple myself from current events unless they are really significant. So what is the relationship of this to Bluesky? That I am not keen on trying it. I will attempt this change of focus seriously. I will not just change ships, I will stay in my new destination.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#76
post #7

[flagged]

What I hate about this statement is that "truth" has been wrapped in political ideology. The idea that carving a section of memespace out for a worldview now means that worldview owns the "truth" is batshit insane. Truth doesn't care about progressive or conservative. Truth doesn't care about left or right. Truth doesn't care . Truth just is. The problem is when people don't care to seek the truth, and instead they s…

Truth is less straightforward than might appear. More often than not, if you try to establish truth on some divisive question from first principles—honestly, without any hidden agenda of your own—you arrive at the unknown (no consensus in the field) and/or philosophical matter (out of scope of natural science) before you can blink.

(Of course, that’s in addition to the fact that all science is inherently flawed and biased, because we are.)

In case of politically divisive questions, as an example, these two sentences can contradict each other and be true at the same time: 1) “abortion is killing a living being”, and 2) “abortion is a free person exercising control over her own body”. The host of questions you’d need to explore in order to make a point of truth is vast and includes the definition of life, whether there is free will, whether consequentialism is better than deontology, etc.; and if you claim that this does not matter then congratulations—you have already adopted a position on some politically divisive question.

In philosophical terms, truth in absolute sense would require having some hypothetical access to underlying reality; since we can never have that (as all of our access to reality is mediated by our mind), we only have access to lossy models or maps; and because there is always more than one model or map that can be useful depending on the purpose, there is always a subset of claims where one has the opposite truth value (or no truth value) in one of the maps.

In short, not only no one “owns” the truth, but anyone who claims to actually “know” it is being delusional or misleading; the solution to alienating political divisiveness is not obtaining unobtainable objective truth but finding common ground.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#77

My hypothesis is still that the problem isn't Twitter per se, but that Twitter-like failure modes are built in to that structure. A communications platform that has certain qualities will tend to become Twitter-like: Many-to-many, short messages, reposting, etc. These are mechanics that will just create certain kinds of behaviors. So, that would predict Bluesky having many of the same problems as Twitter sooner or la…

I never thought twitter was a failure until Musk introduced $8 “pump you to the top” blue check accounts, then that’s when the bots -really- moved in because they knew they could pump propaganda for a small fee and get far more traction than they every could by setting up bot armies that were easy to detct. Bsky will be fine as long as they try to control the bots.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#78

It's beyond words how much Elon Musk has wrecked Twitter. But, I am not ready join another echo chamber that mirrors the same flaws from the other side of the spectrum. My initial impression of BlueSky is just that. Twitter's greatest flaw—no, I won’t call it "X"—is its obsession with engagement to promote tweets. This creates the worst feed you can think of: - People ask the dumbest questions, just to bait responses…

The great thing about bluesky is that there are no “algorithms” by default. You see posts from people you follow in the order they were posted. There’s no feed pushing toxic posts in your face, and since there’s no monetary incentive for engagement, you don’t see the egregious bait that’s ubiquitous on Twitter.

As for it being an echo chamber, that’s a function of who chooses to join. Again, there are no algorithms, so no viewpoints are favored by the site (unlike on some other sites, ahem). And the protocol ensures you can’t really be banned.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#79
post #71

[flagged]

Based on your replies I doubt there’s anything that would actually convince you, but as it happens the data is pretty public and there are plenty of charts charts: https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3lamm7liwrc2w https://bsky.app/profile/jglypt.net/post/3lahqd45qqw2y https://bsky.app/profile/alice.mosphere.at/post/3lac4bbxhty2...

Thanks! These actually look trust-worthy. See, wasn't that hard.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#80
post #71

[flagged]

Based on your replies I doubt there’s anything that would actually convince you, but as it happens the data is pretty public and there are plenty of charts charts: https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3lamm7liwrc2w https://bsky.app/profile/jglypt.net/post/3lahqd45qqw2y https://bsky.app/profile/alice.mosphere.at/post/3lac4bbxhty2...

Get ready for the goalposts to move again. You can never satisfy a proofster.
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