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bsky.app

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

#151

Post by joepie91_ »

npunt wrote: post #116
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…

Twitter clones thus far have all been cover bands with a different (speaker) stack. Focus seems to be entirely on the backend protocol side - important for decentralization but fixing only part of the problem. I haven't seen much in the way of innovation on the UX itself, which is what I'm really interested in. I guess its a mix of a) why mess with success, twitter-like design is proven to work, b) a lack of experime…

I mean, there's plenty of UX innovation going on in the fediverse, for example. But for some reason bringing that up is consistently met with "that can't ever work! nobody can understand this! it's too difficult!" and complete bafflement from the peanut gallery.

I think tech companies' lack of interest in experimenting with UX might have something to do with that...

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

#153

Post by edavis »

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.

During the early days of what would become Bluesky, they first reviewed the available options for decentralized public communications and nothing out there checked all the boxes. So they moved forward building something completely new that did.

I wrote a comment last week diving more into this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660192

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

#154

Post by skybrian »

matsemann wrote: post #97
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…

My whole community has moved from twitter to bsky. The first push was for mastodon, but that died out after a few weeks. But all action is on bsky now, not twitter, so I feel most have migrated fully, not just double posting.

What sort of community?

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

#155

Post by npunt »

duxup wrote: post #135
rglullis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is what I'm really interested in. Whenever I see comments like these, my immediate thought is "How interested are you, if you had to put a dollar figure on it?" Also, you are missing alternative (e): availability bias. Maybe you haven't seen a lot of innovation around UX not because people are not trying, but because those who tried to experiment with different UX were aiming at such a niche that completely f…

>failed as social network Is that the case? Serious question, I'm curious about any social networks that have tried some new UX? The twitter clones seem to play things very close to twitter's style. At least it looks that way to me as someone who isn't a heavy twitter user. Also what is "failed as a social network" when Twitter, one of the biggest bleeds money as it is? Is the market just messed up? Or maybe UX where…

I'm of the opinion there aren't a lot of good alternative ideas circulating. There's been some work in a design pattern libraries but it's hard to design new features from the outside, and I don't think until very recently people saw starting a rival social network as a good business move, since social networks are defined by their network effect moat. Twitter's meltdown has created some opportunity but it remains to be seen if the attack of the clones is just a fracturing versus a cambrian event.

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

#156

Post by nomilk »

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…

Via heavy use of the ”Hide|Show Less|Not Interested” button I’ve managed to get youtube recommendations surprisingly relevant, and a big surprise was facebook reels, which started as complete junk, and is now an astonishing mix of science (startalk, Tom Scott, Physics Girl, colour theory) and nature videos. It’s arguably the most relevant “tv” I’ve ever seen. I suspect curation on Twitter is solvable, but neither Twitter nor its clones have successfully done it yet.

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

#157

Post by vitorgrs »

edavis wrote: post #108
vitorgrs wrote: post #38

Since the Threads launch, I barely used BlueSky anymore. Now with the new logo, I opened again for the first time in 4 months or so, thinking that well, there was improvements? No. You still can't send videos and gifs. That's just, so basic for a social network. Let alone all the other missing things, and how awful the apps are. They are basically the worst example to show React Native. The app here on Android takes…

> You still can't send videos and gifs. That's just, so basic for a social network. Yeah, I'd agree if you're looking for a more polished social media client then Twitter, Threads, and even some Mastodon clients will probably better serve you. But the official client primarily exists as a means to an end (building atproto) rather than an end in itself. Those features are still on the roadmap, I believe, but just not…

To be clear, I'm not even complaining about it being React Native. For sure you can do better with React.

I believe the new Discord client is RN and works fine for me.

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

#158

Post by al_borland »

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…

Being able to view individual posts, even if there is no public feed, is really important if people are going to post things that may get picked up by other media channels.

As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that. It’s a move that reeks of desperation and makes me not want to sign up. I should feel compelled to make an account if I want to follow someone or post something, not just to read a single post. I’m not sure how they expect to grow when they hide what’s inside and word of mouth is largely negative. Walled gardens have their place, but it’s not the “town square” Elon has been taking about. In the town square I can walk through and overhear conversations without identifying myself or joining in.

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

#159

Post by mal-2 »

caseyavila wrote: post #34

How does Bluesky compare to Mastodon?

Bluesky has a 300 character limit, Mastodon has 500, non-Mastodon ActivityPub servers have a configurable limit. Mastodon can render markdown, has subject lines which are commonly used as content warning tags, can translate posts. It supports custom emoji and non-Mastodon ActivityPub servers support custom emoji reactions. Bluesky has more discovery features like community-curated lists and algorithmic suggestions of who to follow.

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

#160

Post by echelon »

cubefox wrote: post #136
brundolf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I haven't even bothered trying Threads (and don't plan to) Mastodon puts too much onus on the user to pick a home server Bluesky got it right by saying "we're going to be exactly familiar to people who like twitter, just open and better". The concepts are an almost exact drop-in replacement, for practical purposes, other than which one your friends are active on I don't use it much right now because most of my…

Do you know how censorship and Balkanization work on Bluesky? On Mastodon this was quite extreme, as entire servers can block each other, without any involvement from the individual user.

This is why p2p will always be superior to federation. I don't want others making decisions for me.

I'm okay with consuming an upstream block/filter list, but I ultimately want executive control over it.

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