Show HN: I organized Bluesky feeds by categories and growth rankings

I don't get it, could you explain it?

Mastodon's lack of growth or even perpetually declining MAU is not a coincidence. The community is obsessively anti-growth.

It's politically intolerant in the sense that the vibe is left to hard-left, and even within that sphere there's lot of infighting. Sure, you can use Mastodon as a normie centrist, but the culture is unappealing to many.

Any attempt to plug Mastodon into other decentralized media (Threads, Bluesky) is met with extreme hostility.

Any attempt to make Mastodon more discoverable and searchable is met with hostility. A vocal part of the community is obsessed with safety culture and consent.

Institutes, celebrities, influencers can't use Mastodon because there's no reach and users act like stung by a wasp when anything remotely commercial happens.

Anybody within Mastodon that tries to improve or grow things is shot down and crushed.

The guy that created Mastodon has sacrificed a decade of his life into this thing, for a compensation bordering poverty. He's under constant attack and framed as evil just because he didn't implement some random feature.

There's now a guy creating an Instagram clone called Pixelfed. He's white and talks hip hop slang. Which is close to inevitable for young men as it's deeply integrated into music, gaming, etc. He now stands accused of "cultural appropriation". As he did not immediately fall down to his knees to apologize, he's now framed as a racist.

There was a gay man running a large LGBT instance. Activists were flooding it with spoilers of that Harry Potter game. He tried to stop it and got angry at this behavior, after which he was bullied into a total breakdown, and shut down the instance.

There was a man running a large instance with supreme infra skills. The instance was ballooning. The instance was instant-fast and scaled beautifully. It was popular for being very middle of the road, a generic instance with decent moderation. It was the only instance at the time having a proper search experience. The activist community kept hammering on him for even enabling search and for his moderation not being strict enough, until he ultimately just gave up.

Mastodon doesn't grow because the vocal minority that runs it are chronically online purists that take sadistic joy in destroying anything that would grow it.

I mean, even Mozilla quit their experiment after 3 months. It's shockingly bad.

I’m surprised to find someone who still believes “non profit” carries any weight.

These are all propaganda sites. The value is the influence.

I agree, there are countless issues and challenges (and ideas, designs etc. how to tackle them). The most fundamental is for mainstream, non-technical people to realize that "social media" is not rocket science invented by Zuck, its infrastructure. Every bit as vital (actually more) as the roads and parks and water utilities of a city.

There will be some happy surprises required to overcome the inertia of network effects but enshittification is now terminal, so it actually looks promising :-)

Honestly, it just highlights how little traction Bluesky has. We tried it within our company's niche, but it's like a desert. Feeds that rarely get updated. 0 engagement. What's the point? Whatever you may think of the management, X does the job (and arguably better than before). You can just filter out the stuff you'd rather not see on your feed.

Also, I second the other commenter's mention of the lack of sports on BlueSky. That's a pretty large category not to have...