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Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

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Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#61
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to see politics, rage bait, sexism, hate, performative superiority, whining, or negativity. Who invented all of these algorithms? I want none of this. I want good news, awesome things, uplifting stories, cool hacks. That's it. That's literally it.

my tiktok fyp is just that.

FWIW I find much more politically motivated posting outside of the big social media platforms than on it. I suspect it's a combination of algorithmic downranking and just the fact that more politically motivated users are going to be on alternative social media.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#62
post #40

I wanted to like bluesky, I really tried, but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself, it's off-putting. I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things. It'd be like if 90% of twitter was talking about twitter the platform, it's an odd thing to focus on.

When was this? Other than posts from official the Bluesky account (bsky.app) my feed is roughly 0% about Bluesky itself. There was more discussion about Bluesky itself early on, when the contrast with Twitter was more topical.

And I actually wouldn't mind seeing more discussion about atproto. I'm mildly curious about whether anyone is doing anything with it.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#63
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction is that Mastodon doesn't have to grow, and Bluesky does. There's an extent to which Bluesky is viable because its venture-funded owner pays for the infrastructure it operates on (Mastodon communities generally have to stand on their own two feet). If there's no path for Bluesky to grow into a viable business on its current financial runway, the funding for the infrastructure will end.

ATProto infrastructure is mostly open and there are folks operating pieces of it independently even if the landscape is dominated by the Bluesky PBC. It's true that Mastodon grew bottom-up without centralized funding so the shuttering of the PBC will be a big deal for the AT ecosystem but it's all independently doable.

Everything is doable, I'm just completing the comparison the preceding comment made.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#64
post #51

Bluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen. Hands down. I can't imagine anyone enjoying it unless they're 1) super into the US politics/domestic issues AND 2) politically aligned with the main user base of Bluesky. The funniest part is that there is a better algorithm. It's right here: https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/feed/for-... But somehow the devs of Bluesky never…

> Bluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen. Even worse than Mastodon's?

I don't think it makes sense to think of Mastodon as having a central "discover" tab. Mastodon is much closer to the blogosphere than to Twitter.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#65
post #2

I hope against hope that people started to realize that the problem isn't the platform, it's the entire approach. Who am I kidding, people just realized that Bluesky wasn't going to be the next big thing and so it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.

> it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale. I liked Josh Barro's take: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...

I think there's some truth there, but the bigger shift IMO has been that companies, politicians and institutions have begun to notice that volume on social media doesn't translate to irl opinions. Left or right, social media is dominated by the loudest, most dedicated extremists with the most insane focus on single issues. You and I have lives, we can't compete with someone who pulls 12 hour days editing Wikipedia, cranking out Tweets, spinning up bots to vote and sock puppets to react.

It's a lesson I think we all need to learn over and over: the loudest are not really the most representative, they're just the loudest. Online I'd add that they're often the craziest and least able to compromise.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#66
post #62
post #40

I wanted to like bluesky, I really tried, but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself, it's off-putting. I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things. It'd be like if 90% of twitter was talking about twitter the platform, it's an odd thing to focus on.

When was this? Other than posts from official the Bluesky account (bsky.app) my feed is roughly 0% about Bluesky itself. There was more discussion about Bluesky itself early on, when the contrast with Twitter was more topical. And I actually wouldn't mind seeing more discussion about atproto. I'm mildly curious about whether anyone is doing anything with it.

Perhaps it's the crowd I've followed and I've fallen down a niche, but I keep getting pushed threads such as this: https://bsky.app/profile/palle.eurosky.social/post/3msirglff...

And a whole bunch of other stuff about whether people should even be on bluesky, or should be instead on other federations, and it all just feels so meaningless to me.

It's as if someone has invented a few different ways to print, and there's a million interesting things to write about, but everyone in my echo chamber is talking about whether we should be using A4 or letter sized paper.

And to be clear, this is the "for you" feed even after some shaping, the official discover feed is so much US politics it's straight unusable. Plenty of politics still leaks through to "for you", but it's a manageable amount.

There's a dotnet feed I follow too, but honestly it's hard to find any real people to follow between the dotnet foundation reposts, the linkedin grade BS, and the lost musicians. ( Not their fault, the feed picks up any mention of F# as being dotnet! )

Like I said, I want to make bluesky work, it ought to have less engagement bait, and less lock out of anonymous users, but there's a still a lack of critical mass of real people.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#67
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that Bluesky has first class support for me to choose my own feed algorithm is proof it’s NOTHING like truth social.

Whenever I point out (in agreement with your statement) that the idea that the left and the right are somehow equally bad is a kind of fantasy on HN I usually get downvoted. People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong. Yeah, often things are more complicated than they appear, but I find it almost hilarious how often you c…

the thing is that the "left" in the US (and then on HN) have almost no political representation. The Democrats aren't left, just the leftest available. They aren't better than the Republicans at all.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real percentage of bots on X is a baseline of 10% and can quadruple around contentious topics; see: https://www.clickguard.com/blog/twitter-spam-bots/ Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Blue…

We get to block them. They may exist but they’re invisible. The bots and trolls and agents on X are always on your front porch.

Interesting, because X is able to work the same. When an obvious bot follows an X account, the user can simply block the bot. Also, your X feed can be configured to show posts only from accounts you follow in chronological order, so if you're following a bot, that's on you. Oh, and X hides replies that are probable spam from bots, though you can view them if you'd like. With my X account, they're around but definitely not on my front porch. It seems like you've been given some pretty egregious misinformation; perhaps people report bad experiences with bots because they don't know how to correctly use the platform?

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#69
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I point out (in agreement with your statement) that the idea that the left and the right are somehow equally bad is a kind of fantasy on HN I usually get downvoted. People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong. Yeah, often things are more complicated than they appear, but I find it almost hilarious how often you c…

> People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong. > And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines. Seems like you've fallen to the same fallacy within the same paragraph, which is quit…

“Not the same kind of mess” breaks the comparison, so… no.
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