Bluesky hits 20 million users

The amount of artists and creatives I follow on Bluesky aren't vapid trash media.

I had hoped that with the downfall of Twitter people would finally kick their addictions to vapid trash media.

And yet, here you are

Yeah. I think that's the appeal. You could just shout things and hope others would follow until a part of the auditorium would turn their heads to you. So, if someone shouted "it's an Earthquake!", and people nearby felt it and tweeted, implying it was true, everyone in the auditorium would know about it. Of course, other types of messages were send in Twitter, but most importantly, actors and robots started to use Twitter to plainly shout lies and noise.

Small notes to be answered rarely.

I've looked at the early Usenet archives, and typical posts there resembled this format quite a lot. It's later that Usenet became a place where you write long considerate posts, and also expect rather quick answers.

It's actually interesting to communicate in a rare terse format.

The reason I don't use Twitter, BlueSky, anything like that is - I don't have a scenario of it being useful for me.

In an auditorium with everyone shouting you don't get to hear anything. In Twitter you get to see what you want instead of what most people want like on reddit and Lemmy. I much prefer that to other people deciding for me. At least that way I can see something other than shitposts and US politics.

I’m with you 100%. The Twitter product has always been a clunky pile of bullshit for me. But somehow it became the default public space and choice of celebrities, etc and I think that has been 98% of its appeal.

Me too but here's one useful function:

Perhaps you are aware there is an ongoing event, say for example a football game, or an election, or an outage of your email service provider. You go to one of these "scream into the void" social sites, search on the topic, and learn what people are saying about it. Maybe someone knows what's really going on, maybe some of those people have some interesting insights and you engage with them, not unlike you and I are engaging right now. Others can observe, perhaps contribute, and after the event has concluded, everyone goes their own way. Hopefully in the end the interactions are beneficial for all.

About 15 years ago, I moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone. I joined Twitter because I like to try new apps as early as possible. It turned out to be a great place to talk about live music in my city, amongst other things. I met all my friends on Twitter.

At that time in my city, it was very much the town square that Elon wants it to be now. It was a place to discuss events in realtime; especially sporting events.

I suspect the advantage for Twitter was that you could communicate with people you didn’t know directly like celebrities, authors, politicians, etc. Not just write to them, but they write back because sending off a short message is much easier than making a call or writing a letter. Sometimes that is an unhealthy parasocial relationship but, it doesn’t have to be.

Kevin Smith basically started writing the movie Tusk in a collaborative way with Twitter.

Agree, it’s like I had a feed for reading only instagram/facebook comments. No, thanks

Seems to me like you comprehend it perfectly!

I also never really saw the appeal. And I closed the account I'd barely used since 2007 (When it was primarily for announcing you were pooping and Lifehacker told me you could make lists with remember the milk) when the first buddy bought it.

I occasionally tried to use it for getting near real time news about things, but I guess I sucked at following the right people.

Now, with privacy badger, I never have to interact even when sites embed xits (if we're going with xitter, then it's full of xits, right?).

Me too. Tried twitter way back in the early days of it. Never found it useful. Others did though obviously, which I don’t understand, but they did. What I find interesting is the seeming need to replace it with something similar. Why? Is it like gradually kicking an addiction by switching to something slightly less bad, but not going full cold turkey?

Yeah it works fine. My mastodon account has gained 40 followers from bluesky even though I have a bluesky account too!

I'm trying Bridgy Fed, but it's too janky. My Bluesky friends and I are able to follow each other and see each others' posts. But, I tried to respond to a Bluesky post and Bluesky never saw my reply.

Bridgy Fed is pretty straightforward. You just follow the account and away you go.

It doesn't make your bridged posts particularly attractive-looking (essentially you appear as a bot under a subdomain of a server), but it's searchable and discoverable in the target network.

I'm now mostly using Blue Sky, but I bridge to Mastodon, so all my posts form part of the content that's available to fediverse users. For little old me that's not all that important, but if every big organisation or journalist or celeb did that too, that'd do a lot to build vitality into the fediverse network.

Except on Bluesky you create your own algorithm. You're not rage-baited by an algorithm that exists to "maximise engagement", and although spam bots exist on Bluesky, they have virtually no reach.

All that matters is the cesspool that isn't going to make Musk any money

Twitter, where the response to “I like Hot Dogs” is “Why do you hate Cheeseburgers????”

No.

I don't think there are any other Instances aside from the default bsky.social‬ right now. It's only federated in theory and essentially a closed platform until that changes. Pretty sad that it gets all the attention instead of Mastodon.

Despite being "open source", if you want to run your own Personal Data Sever, to join the network you'll need to join Bluesky's AT Protocol PDS Admins Discord server:

Bluesky is centralised and funded by VCs. It plays at being decentralised because people can bring their own hardware to the party and plugin to the Bluesky network, but if Bluesky (the company) turns it off, then Bluesky the platform/network ceases to be usable. They also started without allowing federation with their core network, so they can easily disable it again at any time.

Bluesky is not decentralised in any meaningful way, which means its at risk of the same bullshit that has driven most of us away from reddit, twitter, facebook etc

Don't give the VCs any ideas!

Two different questions.

They are a gateway to federated material as any other (like Lemmy), and those controls are at the platform. They can gatekeep federated content very simply.

There is nothing stopping them from leaving it all open aside from costs though. Hosting is very expensive, and I'm not sure how they plan to support their platform aside from advertising, at which point you may be stuck in a spot where you shut down certain intersections to appease advertisers.

I don't know about that. The big issue, for me, is that it isn't actually decentralized.

Instances are run through a central "relay" which is controlled by Bluesky HQ, so it isn't decentralized like, say, Mastodon is.

There’s not that many bots yet and people are big into blocking (and you can subscribe to block lists so it’s automatic). I’m sure as it grows, bot traffic will too — it’s seemingly inevitable — but 20 million users isn’t really that much compared to legacy platforms. I think is mostly news because lots of people are fleeing X due to the election.

Seems likely to be very low so far.

Although it's getting enough attention lately that this may change.