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Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

joelgustafson.com

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Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#211

Post by YetAnotherNick »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #195
minimaxir wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all social networks have been ideologically polarized since 2016. It's not new or specific to Bluesky. The only reason Hacker News avoided that fate is due to downvote/flag mechanisms.

> The only reason Hacker News avoided that fate It hasn't avoided that fate. If you doubt me, go into a thread about US politics and praise Donald Trump and watch as your comments get not just downvoted, but flagged so that they are hidden. This will happen no matter how good your arguments are. Make no mistake, this site is ideologically polarized just like all the others. The only saving grace is that the vast majo…

Even in tech, there are various repeated themes you can see here, which are much more prevalent than say general tech spheres like the hate against AI, VCs, MongoDB or the love for Rust, privacy, open source, postgres etc.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#212

Post by jakevoytko »

josefresco wrote: post #88

I must be one of those tiny dots just floating in nothingness because my BSKY feed is a dead zone. I've posted, I've replied, I've liked and tried to be an active participant but nothing seems to stick. There's only so many posts I can publish "for myself" before I lose interest. Contrast this with early Twitter where everyone was just super excited, and eager to follow new people. I don't get it, shouldn't a new soc…

At the moment, BSKY has an enormous “rich get richer” problem caused by starter packs. If you get into starter packs made by influential people, you will get an infinite number of followers for free. If you’re bootstrapping your presence from scratch, you will be almost completely undiscoverable.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#213

Post by jchw »

zdimension wrote: post #210
jazzyjackson wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would hope the people on bluesky understand that they're posting publically to a centralized database. What data privacy problem are you concerned with?

As I understand it, the moment you're processing someone's personally identifiable information, you're in the red zone, GDPR-wise. The users consented to publish their info on BlueSky, but not on OP's website. I get the idea behind the GDPR and it's nice to protect consumers but I'm scared for hobby projects like this.

I think GDPR itself is a bit unclear here. Google Search still operates in Europe as far as I know even though it scrapes and indexes people's websites without explicit consent, and I suspect GDPR doesn't intend to make it illegal to do this. Could be wrong...

IANAL but at least in the U.S. I'm pretty sure publicly-available data is generally excluded from whatever protections do exist on PII. I'm not sure what, if anything, has been said about this in the EU.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#214

Post by mrits »

Barrin92 wrote: post #115
mrits wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The facts are that the world is addicted to Elon Musk and US politics.

Twitter is quite small as far as big social media platforms go (about 300 million, largest individual userbase by far US citizens [1]). Compared to Telegram with a billion users and Instagram, Facebook, TikTok/Douyin in the billions the constant talking about Twitter/Elon and so forth isn't that internationally relevant. No offense but it's mostly Americans screaming at other Americans about how important America is.…

If Telegram was used by a relevant country you might have a point.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#215

Post by jcul »

saila wrote: post #184
jcul wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never really "got" Twitter. I don't know why, but I always felt like the hype went over me head, and it was a bit boring. Though I'm tempted to check out Bluesky, the AT protocol seems really interesting.

In its heyday, before the most recent acquisition, Twitter was really good for local info (ignoring celebrities, shitposting, and the like). Not just news but announcements, alerts, and other local stuff if you followed the right accounts. Mastodon is cool, but it's hard to consistently find that local info. Bluesky seems like it has a chance of supplanting Twitter in this way, but it's not there yet. Some of the acc…

That does sound useful.

I signed up for twitter once as it was an effective way to get customer support from my bank :-/

In general it seemed to be celebrities that I didn't care about and people posting shower thoughts.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#216

Post by purplethinking »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #125
purplethinking wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no interest in being in a left-leaning bubble. I get both sides on X, so far. People think X has been leaning more and more to the right, but in truth it's just not being censored (sorry, moderated) anymore, leading to more right-leaning content. Leftists can't really tolerate any difference of opinion so they move to other platforms, it's sad. But I think they'll be bored and eventually come back for some mor…

What specific type of content was being censored before Elon took over that is being allowed now?

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115286/documents/...

"“A new [Twitter Files] investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics — all in secret, without informing users,” Weiss wrote in a tweet Thursday."

It's a very enlightening document, I recommend a full read through

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#217

Post by Sammi »

SoftTalker wrote: post #47
cwal37 wrote: 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…

The spammers and trolls will be there soon. Nothing popular is ignored for long.

The problem on x is that the spammers and trolls aren't moderated.

I'm genuinely excited to see if bluesky manages to moderate them.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#218

Post by Sammi »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #65
unpopularopp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah. Twitter/X after the Russian invasion quickly let me connect to serious professionals in US-Russia relations, war, etc. e.g. War on the Rocks and Mike Kofman, the Truth of the Matter by CSIS, etc. Are there easy tools that allow you to post on multiple platforms from the same content, that also supports replies?

Yeah I've been missing these people too, but I just noticed them suddenly appearing on bluesky over the last 24 hours. Things are afoot.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#219

Post by Sammi »

unpopularopp wrote: post #12
cwal37 wrote: 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

I'm a web dev and follow a lot of companies and organizations in the web dev sphere and these all created accounts a week ago. Other sectors will probably also be jumping as lumps. When a sizable chunk moves, then the others follow.
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