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Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

joelgustafson.com

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Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#41

Post by threeseed »

mrits wrote: post #22
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…

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.

The facts are that Threads has 275m MAU and has been #1 on the App Store almost continually since it launched. Bluesky is now #2 and rapidly growing. The momentum is real and significant.

And the world is sick of Elon Musk and US politics.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#42

Post by mhartz »

typical182 wrote: post #40

Bluesky and atproto seem to be built to be hackable. Someone in the community recently built a searchable directory of Bluesky "Starter Packs" (which are a way for a user to publish a set of interesting people & feeds to follow, primarily to help newcomers bootstrap their experience): https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all Dan Abramov posted about it earlier today, saying he liked it and: "the fact that it ca…

Wasn't this also sort of a feature with Twitter? iirc the retweet and other now popular features were originally hacked together by users

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#43

Post by anigbrowl »

alpb wrote: post #28
willcodeforfoo wrote: post #11

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.

Twitter had a really outstanding search and streaming API, but after Musk bought it they put it behind a $60k/year paywall. You can see a corresponding and abrupt falloff in academic network research papers, with newer ones that revolve around Twitter largely limited to cannibalizing old datasets.

With luck bsky keeps growing and researchers invest effort in studying a more open-by-design platform.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#44

Post by sundarurfriend »

declan_roberts wrote: post #19

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.

This thread (no pun intended) is the first I'm hearing that anyone uses Threads at all. To me, it seemed like after the initial week or so, there was only bots left on Threads, trying to hook people to the person's Instagram, or whatever other place they actually post content at.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#45

Post by andreygrehov »

minimaxir wrote: post #35
andreygrehov wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just clicked "Discover" to see popular posts. https://bsky.app/profile/lepapillonblue.bsky.social/post/3la... https://bsky.app/profile/sethabramson.bsky.social/post/3larj... https://bsky.app/profile/browneyedsusan.bsky.social/post/3la...

None of that is remotely close to hate speech. President Trump is not a marginalized community.

Hate speech or not, there is nothing pleasant about it.

The irony is that the 'holier-than-thou' crowd, who are against hate and for love all over the world, overwhelmingly post negative political comments and are rooting for X/Twitter to collapse.

This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#46

Post by degosuke »

tomrod wrote: post #14
tcdent wrote: post #10

[flagged]

We've had enough of that, thank you. What I've found is you'll find open discussion and real free speech versus whatever Musk tried to implement at Twitter.

I'm not up to speed. Are there currently any instances where free speech was limited on x/twitter? Genuinely curious

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#47

Post by SoftTalker »

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.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#48

Post by minimaxir »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #36
andreygrehov wrote: post #18

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.

While I don't think it's technically hate speech, but yeah bluesky is either just unanimous negativity or positivity for different things, and it feels like groupthink. There is no middle ground.

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.

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#49

Post by kps »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #21
declan_roberts wrote: post #19

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.

The mid-October bump was artists discovering that posting on Twitter allows them to use posts for training AI.

https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-year.html

Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users

#50

Post by mrits »

threeseed wrote: post #41
mrits wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The facts are that Threads has 275m MAU and has been #1 on the App Store almost continually since it launched. Bluesky is now #2 and rapidly growing. The momentum is real and significant. And the world is sick of Elon Musk and US politics.

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