I've had trouble finding interesting content on Bluesky that's not politics. Any recommendations?
Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
261–270 of 357 posts
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand how Bluesky is going going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken. Do you have any data to back this up? Also famously twitter is losing value and advertisers and users still it’s not stopped twitter from existing Regarding engagement doesn’t twitter have lot more low quality engagement vs Bkuesky
I wouldn't invest in Twitter either!
People are overlooking the fact that Twitter’s situation wasn’t exactly great even before it was taken private.
If it's in a stronger financial position today, it's almost entirely because of the merger with xAI.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it a pain when you can just skip the server selection process and use mastodon.social like pretty much everyone else?
This. I still don't understand why there's so much consternation over choosing a Mastodon server. It doesn't limit who you can follow. I suppose if you're the sort of person who actually likes seeing random content from people you don't explicitly follow it could matter, but that's not for me.
> It doesn't limit who you can follow.
That's simply not true. All servers maintain blacklists of other servers they don't like and won't federate with, including mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about (last section, "Moderated servers")
You could argue that it's normal to block problematic servers, but it's not you the user who gets to define what is problematic, it's your server. Therefore your choice of server may very well prevent you from seeing content you'd like to see.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup. Heaps and heaps of political rage bait on the main discover feed? Yup. I wanted to like BlueSky, but it's such a bizarre echo chamber of people who left Twitter for ideological reasons that it basically filters for people that I actively don't want to engage with. Those types of peop…
I never see that but on both sites I only ever look at the feed that only includes people I follow. I don’t understand why anyone would use a feed that includes other co the t
New users follow zero people on Bluesky.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
So Bluesky for academia and X for tech and everyone else. I don’t think X is in trouble. Scientist tend to form their own closed communities anyway.
It's like internet media is reaching a new level of maturity in that it is bifurcating into the tabloids and the serious magazines, like printed media was before.
In your analogy I suppose bluesky is the serious one? Have you spent any amount of time there?
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Science was defunded by politics, and sometimes is political due to existing interests. Why shouldn't scientists talk about politics?
Lack of self control or awareness. People make the mistake of thinking that because they are informed on one topic that happens to be political that their opinions on other political topics are relevant. I’m fine seeing scientists arguing for the importance of science on social media. I don’t want to hear rants about LGBTQ+ people from geologists.
"I don’t want to hear rants about LGBTQ+ people from geologists."
Build the filter bubble you want, not the one you've got.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#267Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#268I don't understand how Bluesky is going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken. It has apparent value propositions past the social network, but none of those use cases are visibly taking off and none of them appear to be monetizable. The social network itself is what will be evaluated when they go out for more funding. And I don't…
I googled: $23m raised (8 seed, 15 A in Oct 24).
Also, linkedin says 53 people, though crazies like to say they're employed places. It does say 29 in the US so that's more likely real. Assuming that skews eng a bit, that's probably (225 fully loaded eng, 150 fully loaded the rest) $6m in payroll alone. Not to mention server expenses. That's tough.
The case for more funding: 1 - yolo; 2 - non-economic investments; 3 - Musk gonna Musk, so expect Twitter to further shed users. There may be a business to be built there if you can run significantly more efficiently than Twitter which was a shockingly poorly-operated business (Zuck was dead on re: the clown car. Except maybe more like a silver mine, not a gold mine.). Oh, and 4 - the EU is pretty hostile to Twitter and Threads, so maybe there's some there there. Dunno.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Btw if you set your browser default search to anything other than Google searching for people works much better. No customized bumping of X based links over other options when searching for people. Duckduckgo and Bing put the bluesky link as #1 for the above. Seems straightforward to make the switch to me. If you haven't changed your browsers default search engine in the past 5 years now's a good time to do so. Much…
I had to switch to DuckDuckGo for work, AI stuff was too annoying
At least the AI stuff can be disabled. Duckduckgo allows you to store settings in the URL too, if you're the type of person who disables cookies and localstorage. Edit your search URL to: https://duckduckgo.com/?k5=1&kbe=0&kbj=1&kbg=-1&q=%s
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it a pain when you can just skip the server selection process and use mastodon.social like pretty much everyone else?
I see that now the website shows a simpler choice - join mastodon.social or choose another server. I don't think it was like that when I joined (maybe 2 or 3 years ago), you were just given a list of servers or a search and told to choose. This is an improvement for average user onboarding - although if almost everyone clicks mastodon.social, you kind of lose the value of decentralization, right?
The time to have an opinion on which servers are cool and which host the fun people you follow is not the instant you go to sign up. Over time, you can notice which servers have buzz for bad moderation vs good, or where half your follow-list lives, and consider moving then
Having it take longer to form an opinion isn't exactly a negative either. The longer you take to pick a new server, the longer that server will have been around, and the longer it'll likely continue to be around.