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Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

bsky.app

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Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#121

Post by rconti »

duxup wrote: post #91

I've tried a few twitter alternatives (including Bluesky) as someone who hardly ever uses twitter anyway. I was a little disappointed how it just felt like ... more twitter. I'm browsing around finding mostly memes or outrage that doesn't have context to me. I fairly quickly get exhausted trying to find / curate content. I guess I should have expected it, but I hoped that somewhere a different network would have a di…

I feel much the same way. Facebook tried to sell me on threads by showing me an ad with 2.5 threads visible: one of them was clearly a racist post that I didn't want to see the conclusion of, the other was clearly a liberal outrage thread about how much money Jeff Bezos makes that I ALSO didn't want to see the end of, and the third was a mostly-obscured post by a ceramic artisan I follow. They don't seem to have any idea who they're advertising to if they think these things will get a positive reaction out of me, rather than just closing it and marking it as "show less like this." For that matter, the vaunted algorithm is not very smart if it can't figure out that I only engage with reels and stories about 1% of the time, vs the content I actually like to engage with.

It's like, these social media companies wrote a SINGLE outrage-farming algorithm that they push on everyone's feeds without regard for whether it works on individuals or not.

This all is why, despite it getting worse, I use FB more than the other platforms. Actual content posted by actual humans I actually know with their actual names under them. Not some pseudonym where I can't remember if it's an IRL friend or some internet rando I follow (or why I follow them), a bunch of emojis, contextless junk, and clickbait outrage farming.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#123

Post by caslon »

hobo_mark wrote: post #74

BlueSky is the only place where I have ever received death threats, the only place where I ended in multiple blocklists for upsetting god knows whom, and the only place where I had to block hundreds of accounts to avoid getting porn and questionable furry stuff in the main timeline, even with moderation on. But it seems to work fine for a particular brand of extremely online people.

Out of curiosity, what action on your part caused the death threats?

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#124

Post by madeofpalk »

mullingitover wrote: post #98

Bluesky's big selling point is that it's an open protocol, but it's their own homegrown protocol that nobody else is using. Meanwhile Threads has working ActivityPub[1]. You can see threads posts on Mastodon. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-ac...

In all fairness, while yes Bluesky so far has not yet lived up to their promise of decentralisation/federation, it’s still under development. It just hasn’t been built yet.

Though, the whole blue sky stack is significantly more complicated than ActivityPub so I’m doubtful as many would actually set up “instances”.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#125

Post by brundolf »

malermeister wrote: post #105
brundolf wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky is an open protocol

But why isn't the whole thing just an activitypub client? It seems like it's an open protocol in the same way OOXML was an open format.

It has no overlap with ActivityPub, it's an entirely separate protocol

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#126

Post by dymk »

fliggertiggy wrote: post #64
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so dumb. Someone please explain how a social network is supposed to succeed when it's invite-only? Hype alone won't carry it. IMO, being invite-only is THE reason Google+ failed. There were so many memes about people getting excited for an invite, getting on, and then finding only a couple people they knew were on it, if any at all. For a social network to work, it needs to be a network . Limiting on-boarding el…

I think it's supposed to create a feeling of scarcity or exclusivity and make people perceive the network as more valuable.

No, it's because their servers would fall over if it was public registration, and they wouldn't be able to keep up with moderation

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#127

Post by rconti »

mminer237 wrote: post #48

It still doesn't seem to have a public feed though, so you can only view individual posts. I will say as someone has an invite: you're not missing out on anything. It definitely has far less activity than either Twitter or Threads, but somehow it also just has worse content. You would think they were invite-only to keep the quality high, but everything is either furry porn or hate-filled rage bait, neither of which I…

I get that this rage bait works on some percent of the population. 20%? 50%? 75%? What that leaves unanswered is, why aren't these platforms smart enough to adapt to what actual individuals react to? Sure, they picked the most successful single formula, but you'd think they'd want to increase the platform's engagement at the margins rather than just milking one approach for all it's worth.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#128

Post by madeofpalk »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #107
brundolf wrote: post #20

It's lost the initial momentum but it's not dead yet. I'm still holding my breath that the critical mass makes the leap eventually; "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" is a compelling proposition For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for. A few never came back to twitter, but most did mostly for social reasons. But twitter as a pla…

> "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" is a compelling proposition For the average twitter user this is probably the exact opposite of a compelling position. Tech people want more control and less abstraction. Everyone else is happy with their walled gardens and ten layers of separation from the machine code. Its why things are the way they are and not some technopunk utopi…

Twitter, previously, was the best of both worlds. A first-party app “most” people used, and then a vibrant third party app ecosystem that others, mainly power users, loved.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#129

Post by lopatin »

andygeorge wrote: post #81
wg0 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All gone :(

Seriously? Says they're all still unused in my view in the app. Dang.

It's pretty fun seeing "create scarcity" in motion. I wonder if it's a viral strategy or a way for slow, sustainable growth.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#130

Post by mullingitover »

afavour wrote: post #4

Too late, IMO. The invite-only system meant that the "leave Twitter" crowd split between Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. IMO none of them have ended up being great replacements.

Part of me thinks that's the point, I don't believe Jack set out to make something that could be a meaningful threat to twitter. It seems like it's meant to be just big enough to suck the oxygen out of the room for other twitter alternatives. (Obviously that failed, now that threads is topping download charts and twitter is sitting in the 40s.)

The man has enough access to capital and can easily hire folks with the know-how to make a service that can scale. That fact that this hasn't happened says something.

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