The success of Bluesky has been driven, in part, by the sophistication of their system for blocking. I know this is the main thing that draws me in. There are many people who, on a volunteer basis, build block lists that I can subscribe to. I've subscribed to many of these, more than 20, to block Nazis, scammers, MAGA, crypto bots, Russian trolls, fans of Elon Musk, racists, various political causes, and more. I've been planning to start my own list to block libertarians and anarchists. I hear other people complain about the bots on Bluesky, but I've seen very few bots on Bluesky, presumably because I subscribe to so many block lists. And I keep telling people: you can make all of the bots disappear, just subscribe to more block lists. And it's these block lists that have turned Bluesky into the most pleasant social media experience I've ever had.
Bluesky now has 30 million users
121–130 of 192 posts
Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users
#122You would think people would learn from their mistakes and not move onto another centralized platform backed by VC money, but here we are.
In theory Bluesky is not centralised. In practice there's only one company operating a relay.
The model of "identity backed by domain ownership" is a nice one, and deals with the Mastodon identity portability issue.
Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users
#123The reason Twitter was successful is they paid celebrities and corporations to join their network. That usage seems to have waned in favor of Instagram, but Twitter is still the #1 place for breaking news, especially in the sports world. I think many people supporting bluesky assume the value is in attracting the plebeians. I don't see that being the case. There are already Facebook groups and reddit (among tradition…
Not yet, but in the echo chamber I dwell in, a lot of orgs are joining Bluesky, and most actually left X. These are mostly journalists, scientists or people involved in politics. At some point, it may become impossible for some of these groups - probably starting with journalists - to do their work and not be on bluesky. They will be on X and bluesky. Maybe. If it happens, then bluesky will eventually replace X. Beca…
I suspect Twitter and Bluesky are heading to the dustbin. If each one becomes an opposing echo chamber, there are more efficient ways of distributing that kind of dialogue and content.
Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users
#124Has anyone managed to get a "functioning" tech discussion feed on bluesky? I tried not long ago, mostly help me get acquaintanced with the ruby ecosystem and news, but even using starter packs and the like the best I got was following devs that mostly talked about non tech stuff (personal life, politics and the like). Particularly annoying was the constant "we hate twitter" posts (I know, I'm here now, so why are we…
I follow people mostly from the JS/TS web development community and have a pretty good balance of tech takes and some lighter life updates/humor in between. I mostly the "mutuals" and "popular with friends" tabs to check things out. Every now and then there's too much US politics, but it's hard to escape nowadays.
>and have a pretty good balance of tech takes and some lighter life updates/humor in between
That's mostly what I want to avoid. Not that I'm not interested in humor, but I don't really care about the personal life of some random developer in the other side of the planet.
I was just trying to get a RSS like, relatively context dense feed to substitute reddit and other similar sites. But I'm not sure it's doable in any current social network.
Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users
#125You would think people would learn from their mistakes and not move onto another centralized platform backed by VC money, but here we are.
What put me off from mastodon is the fact that you can't migrate your account easily. Yes, Bluesky is more centralized, but I feel like it is decentralized in the ways that matter for a Twitter/X Alternative use case : - Self hosting of data, easy migration - Automatic verification via DNS - Custom feeds, Custom moderation, but you can still use the official ones
It should be noted that, at least for now, account migration can only go one way. That is, from the main Bluesky PDS to an external one. According to the documentation on account migration[0], they plan to enable incoming migrations at some point in the future, but there's no timeline.
I'm sure a big reason for this the possibility for abuse, since "migrating" an account is a different action than simply "creating" a new one
[0]: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGR...
Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users
#126You would think people would learn from their mistakes and not move onto another centralized platform backed by VC money, but here we are.
The first push was to mastodon and it was a disaster that probably saved X and might have contributed to trump winning all because of decentralized’s inherent bad UX.
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Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bluesky asks about which server to use on registration like mastodon.social does. For me the difference seems to be better marketing for Bluesky which makes people want to deal with the change and somewhat enjoy it rather than see every obstacle as a pain. Bluesky does have some advantages like starter packs (and network effect now that it has so many accounts).
"Bluesky asks about which server to use on registration" No he doesn't ask, you're wrong. And there is no single one alternative server where we can register and interact with people on bsky.app
> "Bluesky asks about which server to use on registration"
>
> No he doesn't ask, you're wrong.
It's not very prominent, but the Android mobile app does have the option to change what server you register on.
You can tap on the bold "Bluesky Social" text to change it.
> And there is no single one alternative server where we can register and interact with people on bsky.app
You absolutely can host a PDS that interacts flawlessly with the rest of the network. I host my own. There's an entire section in the README about self-hosting: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#sel...
Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users
#128half the comments so far talk about bluesky being similar to x ie private companies. However AFAIK the use of the "AT protocol" seems to me to be a major difference https://bsky.social/about/faq . I am really curious to know how I am wrong in that. As a long time X user and now on bluesky i can tell that there is a huge difference in the content which makes it clear that the platform was pushing accounts with specifi…
Doesn't mean anything. Facebook used to support XMPP.
Supporting is on thing, being build on top of it is another thing. And on top of that, AFAIK on bluesky there is no "algorithm"
Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Muting is fine, blocking is censorship. You'll know it is decentralized when someone can run an instance and remove the blocking and censorship. (Never, I predict)
You already could have a client that treats a block as a mute. Easier to just open an incognito tab though. > In theory, a bad actor could create their own rogue client or interface which ignores some of the blocking behaviors, since the content is posted to a public network. But showing content or notifications to the person who created the block won’t be possible, as that behavior is controlled by their own PDS and…
I’d argue this one feature is the core reason Bluesky has 30 million users.
Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users
#130You mean the social network that keeps showing my wife dick pics even though she turned off adult content? That social network? Pass.
It was a few months ago, but when X was banned in my country I tried Bluesky for a while. It took a lot of effort (adding blocklists, muting words and blocking individual accounts) to cleanse the timeline of k-pop and furry content. I am not interested in either type of content and didn't follow any such accounts, but still, the "Discover" feed kept showing that stuff to me. It was the strangest onboarding experience I've ever had in social media.