"Bot rings show up clearly exposed, for one."
I like the sound of that. Surely there's usefulness in that observation.
Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
91–100 of 252 posts
Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Musk very clearly actively sticks his fingers in the pie to steer narratives. Easy example, one of his children came out as trans (to Elon's apparent dismay), and now "cisgender" is flagged as a slur/hate-speech. There is other, anecdotal evidence that certain posters (ridiculously, Musk included) have their posts elevated above baseline visibility, but I don't have any statistics to back that up. Other flavorful unsolicited changes to the platform, such as changing blocking to allow blocked people to still see your posts, seem again like self-serving dictates from the top. Perhaps generally not censorship, but heavily biased moderation very clearly steered by the agenda of a single man.
Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
#93"We can't make a map of all of Twitter, because the data isn't available and scraping it would be difficult and illegal." What makes scraping illegal?
The LinkedIn vs HiQ case makes it so that scraping data behind a login screen is not okay but publicly accessible pages are fair game.
Was this the main reasoning for moving everything behind login more than data hoarding of the viewers?
Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
#94Bluesky 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.
Threads is the highest ranked "social" app on the Play Store right now, so a lot of real people must be using it despite appearances. Next down the list is TikTok, then Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook, X (below Bluesky!), and
finally Reddit.
Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
#95Bluesky 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…
That's been my experience as well, in every sense. A sudden explosion of incoming people, many new options of interesting and salient people to follow, and the overall experience rapidly getting more engaging.
Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
#96Bluesky 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…
My X never really degraded (I also spend a lot of time on Japanese-language X which is probably a different beast) but I have been spending time on Bluesky over the last year. For a while it was a fun network but fairly quiet. I could go an hour or so without any new posts. Over the last 3 weeks I've seen Bluesky become a lot more active and now it's feeling a lot like X where there's no way to stay on top of my feed…
Japanese language Twitter is indeed a very different beast. It's pretty much the social network over there, and most of Musk's changes that targeted or angered users were primarily targeted at English-language users, mostly in the US. So the Japanese users just kinda trucked on like nothing was happening.
Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
#97I 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…
Did you try Mastodon? Many have a better experience there.
Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
#98I'm part of the wave of users who migrated to bluesky last week. I have to say I really like it so far, which surprised me a bit given that I had been underwhelmed by mastodon before. I already spend more time in bluesky than in twitter.
For those (like me) who don't know what bluesky is, it's basically a carbon copy of twitter circa 2015, down to an almost identical UI. Except that there's no monetization, no ads, no growth hacking, which means that in the main features are there to serve the user. My favorite example is the simple expo/react native based mobile app, which lets you open links in safari rather than a useless in-app browser.
Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
#99Bluesky 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…
It's just getting a lot more attention everywhere, as evidenced by Google Trends.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...
There is an obvious need for Twitter-like platforms, but Twitter/X has become too right-wing for many users. The left needs a place to talk and vent about the election, and Twitter is no longer friendly to that. Therefore, Bluesky is taking off due to that event.
Re: Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
#100The 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.
Hate speech is derogatory or harmful speech targeted at a marginalized community. Hating a company or product is not the same thing.
Corporations are people, my friend. This is being tested again with anti-boycott laws and lawsuits.