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Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

joelgustafson.com

21–30 of 252 posts

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#21

Bluesky to me still seems like a place completely dominated by software type (HN crowd). I know there are obvious exceptions there's no need for you to list them. Threads has extreme normies, bluesky has the nerds, and twitter seems to have just the right mixture of both.

Bluesky seems to be also very common among artists.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#22
post #4

Bluesky has really exploded in certain niches over the past week, I think my followers have gone up 5-6x since Saturday. I'd been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now t…

Considering X is an app used by the world I don't see how there could be any real momentum. To begin with, the world is more conservative than the US.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#23

The visualization looks absolutely fantastic. Great work. Would love to dive deeper into the tech behind it. I'll just share some irony. They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X/Twitter.

Hate speech is derogatory or harmful speech targeted at a marginalized community. Hating a company or product is not the same thing.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#24
post #4

Bluesky has really exploded in certain niches over the past week, I think my followers have gone up 5-6x since Saturday. I'd been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now t…

I yet to find "utility" accounts on Bluesky. I use Twitter to follow news from games, game studios and publishers, news sites, bands, NASA etc. There is nothing like there yet and I don't care about random people (as I don't care about them on Twitter either) I check time to time but basically it's 0/50

For NASA, looks like someone has made an unofficial mirror account:

https://bsky.app/profile/nasa.extwitter.link

Also, some game companies do maintain a presence on bluesky:

https://bsky.app/profile/sega.jp

https://bsky.app/profile/panic.com

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#25

Bluesky to me still seems like a place completely dominated by software type (HN crowd). I know there are obvious exceptions there's no need for you to list them. Threads has extreme normies, bluesky has the nerds, and twitter seems to have just the right mixture of both.

I won't list out exceptions, but my Bluesky experience is not at all how you describe. Obviously it just depends on who you follow, but I don't think "dominated by software type" describes the Bluesky demographic as a whole, and it hasn't for some time.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#26
post #4

Bluesky has really exploded in certain niches over the past week, I think my followers have gone up 5-6x since Saturday. I'd been a somewhat active user over the past year as conversation on the field I work in (energy) become so degraded on Twitter as to make it kind of worthless (mean in multiple senses of the word as well as ludicrous levels of spam), but Bluesky was pretty relaxed without a lot of traction, now t…

For me, everything is settling.

Threads is a half Twitter, half Instagram hybrid strong in creative, travel, social etc type content. Bluesky is original Twitter with strengths in news, politics, science etc. These days not sure it will ever be possible to have one app that does it all.

Which leaves X as the new 4chan.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#27

The visualization looks absolutely fantastic. Great work. Would love to dive deeper into the tech behind it. I'll just share some irony. They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X/Twitter.

https://bsky.app/profile/mnateshyamalan.bsky.social/post/3ju...

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#28

Love this kind of post! I was surprised to see you really can drink from the firehose: brew install websocat websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos ...haven't tried to decode it, though.

Twitter used to have a Firehose API, too. Over time they closed it, and made it only available to large users like Google Search with real-time indexing needs.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#29

The visualization looks absolutely fantastic. Great work. Would love to dive deeper into the tech behind it. I'll just share some irony. They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X/Twitter.

Seems weird to find irony there, unless you think people and websites are the same thing.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#30
That looks really cool. I would also be interested to see examples of what commonality links the clusters of nodes- like are there clusters of people with the same hobby? Are there clusters of people speaking the same language, or living in the same city?

Another thought since Bluesky is a pretty inclusive place, are the LGBTQIA+ folks clustering into their own respective labels, or is everyone mixing together? Is any of this behavior similar or different to what we see on other social networks?

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