1w ago

X's idiocy is doing wonders for Bluesky.

htxt.co.za X's idiocy is doing wonders for Bluesky - Hypertext

BlueSky has seen massive gains on the back of X removing the block function.

165 comments

we've been seeing these "twitter's in biiiiiiiiig trouble now!!" headlines for how many years now?
yet people refuse to just delete it
i can't wait for the day i can go a full 24 hours without twitter shit showing up on every feed
- I deleted Twitter as soon as Space Karen took over.
  However, my friends and so many people I follow on other platforms still link their Twitter profiles. For some there needs to be something solid to make a real and consistent migration. I was overly hopeful that Threads (yes, another evil) would have buried Twitter.
  
  Threads stood as much chance as Google Plus had against Facebook.
  Zuckerfucker using a somewhat similar strategy to artificially boost Threads membership (login with instagram once, you can't delete your threads account without also deleting the instagram one) speaks volumes.
- we've been seeing these "twitter's in biiiiiiiiig trouble now!!" headlines for how many years now?
  this time it's for realsies.
  yet people refuse to just delete it
  Many journalists want to feel connected, and since many politicians have a presence on Twitter, they feel like they can't. That means Twitter gets referenced way more than necessary in news stories, which feeds its popularity.
  
  I honestly don't think twitter will ever go away until all of a majority of all major sports teams and leagues, a majority of legislative body members, and major news and wire services have a sustained and active presence on bsky. it right now is literally coasting on everything that made it useful pre 2022 and every stupid fucking thing elon has done to make the twitter experience worse hasn't done enough to cause a critical mass of people to jump.
  once you see major popular twitter accounts like rex chapman, mark hamill, taylor swift and the like (and I say this not because of their politics but because of their massive follower base) regularly post on bsky you can probably start closing the book on twitter.
- I've deleted it ages ago, but another friend that actually knows and cares about the insanity of twitter still refuses to get away from it because "it's where the kpop community is", nowhere else. It's fucking sad.
  
  Now that is an interesting target to get tons of people off twitter. If all these K Pop labels like Hybe and JYP suddenly started publishing on BlueSky their fans would immediately follow suit
- I feel like I'm the only person who never signed up for Twitter.
  
  i installed it while i was bored in a doctor waiting room, thought it was the dumbest most pointless thing ever. deleted after 5 minutes and went on with my life
- Many people have deleted it. There just Right wing trolls and bots on that platform

Whelp, did mastodon got something out of this screwup?
- Mastodon struggles a bit to pick up pace.
  Found this:
  https://www.makeuseof.com/why-people-leaving-mastodon/
  It explains some pain points.
  
  Basically it’s “I can’t get ✨ engagement ✨ on Mastodon”
  People want big amounts of likes and reposts you don’t get that on Mastodon, the system is too distributed for that.
  Bluesky gives them the big numbers
- BlueSky has the one thing Fedi doesn't: a large advertising budget. Hate to say it, but we have lost.
  
  What are you talking about man?
- Non of my IRL friends are on mastodon. So there’s that.
  
  Chicken / egg

Bluesky is decentralized only in its name. And media storage.
- Better than the burning garbage inferno that is xitter.
  
  but for how long?
- This isn't necessarily true. Just because their architecture is harder and not a simple server host does not strip away its decentralization.
  They have decentralized the following:
  App access (can build your own or show openProto posts in your platform
  Algorithms
  Relay (backend albeit rumored to be expensive)
  More if you consider the domain name hosting stuff and media storage control. Also moderation is planned to be decentralized.
  
  Isn't the only thing that really matters decentralised control?
  Open protocols and APIs seem pretty meaningless to me if there's a single point of control for the brand.
  If everyone migrates to bluesky and then bluesky says "of we're not doing that open thing anymore because of this new embiggened thing we're doing" everyone will still be on bluesky.
  
  Relay (backend albeit rumored to be expensive)
  Not even rumored, so much as explicitly expected.
  The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers.

Taking a page out of Valves book.
Doing nothing and let the competition drive customers your way.
- Not really what Valve did. Valve kept doing cool things that benefit the customer, while the competition actively drove them away.
  I don't follow social media. Is BlueSky feature rich and only getting better?
  
  The biggest thing that valve did that kept them in everyone's good graces is that steam's core functionality hasn't had any major changes in years. Dare I say, more than a decade.
  It's a platform where you buy games, download them, and play them.
  In the early days you still had to deal with all the bullshit, including third party launcher installs and crap to get things going, and over time, valve simplified all of that, making it easier than ever to take advantage of the core function of steam: buying, downloading, and playing games.
  Literally the only improvement I can absolutely, positively credit them for, is making that entire process, easier, simpler, and quicker, than ever.
  Sure, you can chat to people, track achievements, comment on your profile, comment on your friends profiles, buy and sell cosmetics on the market thing, even voice chat and I think they have a way you can stream your game to friends.... Not sure on that last one.
  It's like Facebook, FB marketplace, FB messenger, discord, Twitter... And a bunch of other services, all huddled together to make a bastard child with the entire PC video game industry.... That's steam.
  But the core mechanic that was always the main reason why steam was great, remains the same.
  
  It's a lot of art, cats, and big tiddy cartoons. I haven't found anything too onerous in its UI, the community has a somewhat toxic level of positivity but that's certainly better than the general toxicity of most of the web these days.

I'd say mastodon is a better choice, mostly so that you're not beholden to yet another profit-focused tech corporation. I'm sure Bluesky is fine right now, but once they have their userbase they will shift to monetization - and you may regret letting yourself become entrenched in the world they control. They're not doing it for your benefit.
That said, I've come to understand that a lot of people kind of like having their content feed controlled by others. When they only see what they ask for, they get bored. So I'm expecting Bluesky to always be bigger than Mastodon.
- It's all cyclical anyway. No social media company will reign forever. We've already seen a number of them rise and fall. It's kinda like how different civilizations gained and lost dominance throughout history.
  
  Toys-R-Us fell...nothing is forever.
- mastodon blew it by attacking people who had legitimate concerns about the service during the first migration.
  
  Yep. And also, like I said in https://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmosphere-fediverse/
  For one thing, most of the people who came to Mastodon in late 2022 didn't have good experiences ... so didn't stay in the Fediverse.6 Flash forward to 2024, and Mastodon still hasn't addressed the reasons why.
  Bluesky, by contrast, has put a lot of work into onboarding and usability – as well as giving people better tools protect themselves and others, and find and build communities ... So today, BTS ARMY and millions of Brazilians, and everybody else looking for a Twitter alternative are more likely to have a good experience on Bluesky than Mastodon.
  
  Mastodon isn't a person. So I don't know who you are talking about when you say 'mastodon was attacking people'. I certainly didn't see anything like that. Perhaps you have an example link for context?
  
  that and the whole "learn in your own" part of it.
  I use bSky quite a bit more than my mastodon account, it made more sense to operate and had better documentation/help getting started, so I could use existing muscle memory on it and loo kthimgsu p if needed
- The plan for bluesky to for people to start their own instances and decentralize.

I've been on Bluesky and Mastodon but I'm seeing people pretty happy with how less toxic it is on Bluesky.
- Just wait until enough sane people have left Twitter; it'll then implode and the fascist Nazi shitheads will migrate.
  They don't want an echo chamber- they want to be able to shout their slurs and right-wing bullshit at you while you can't respond. It's exactly why places like Voat and that shitty T_D knockoff crashed. Once the ratio of right-wingers to non-right-wingers on Twitter hits a critical amount, they'll start looking for other places to infest.
  
  At least Blue Sky supports community block lists. You can block every nazi with the click of a button
  
  Just wait
  Dude. It's been 2 years. The people who were going to leave because of Elon already left.
  I'm not saying the current twitter userbase 100% fully believe in his views, but I am saying that they're not leaving the platform over it.
  Either they don't know about bluesky/mastodon, or they don't care enough to leave.
  
  Yeah bro I wish they would keep to their own echochambers so they can become more and more radicalised and end up causing even more harm in the long run rather than at least having some if minimal exposure to normal fucking people /s
  
  Dude. Isn't truth worth billions?
  I guess you're mostly right, but the exception is that they need one safe space in which to congratulate each other and wank about NFTs and what not.
- I mean at some point elon will buy bluesky, too
- How? I'm mostly following mlp-related accounts on mastodon and don't see any toxicity.
  
  I haven't seen any toxicity on the server I'm on (https://mastodon.gamedev.place ) either. But I've seen people I follow complain about it in the past, and I trust them. Especially considering they left for Bluesky.
  I think Mastodon users are more technical and blunt, drawing from the same stereotypes that people have always been (often fairly) thrown at nerdier people. We just need to keep that in mind. And maybe a good ad/explainer, given how many people bounce off the concept of federation and different servers.
- Toxicity drives engagement. Engagement means more ad views.
  As long as profits are the motive it's a flawed design.

Glad to see people leaving X. I look forward to it’s end.

I'm on Bluesky. I have seen a drama increase in followers in the last few days since Twitter let blocked people see content that were blocked from.
It's a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.
I had to decide if I was going to Mastodon or Bluesky. I picked Bluesky because after reading Mastodon's integration problems with itself I wanted nothing to do with it. It couldn't scale unless each instance played nice and in the years since it went live they had refused to do that and showed no signs of even moving in that direction.
- I have seen a drama increase in followers
  If there's one thing a social media site loves, its a drama increase.
  It’s a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.
  Honestly, more than anything, it feels like an indictment of Threads. That was supposed to be the big party spot for creatives, journalists, and D-list celebrities following the burn out of Twitter. But modern Threads just feels like the worst kind of Hype-House crossbred with LinkedIn.
  BlueSky feels a lot more like a vintage '00s social media site, which is all people really wanted. Hope it survives its own popularity better than Twitter did. But for now, life is good.
  
  I'm leaving the drama typo. You made it too good to take away
- Mastodon is scaling fine though? I've been using it for years, and it's great, and still growing. User base is a bit tech focused, could be more general, but I think it'll get there eventually.
  
  Are instances federated or rag-tag islands?
- What are the Mastadon Integration problems?
  
  I'm pretty sure they're referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.
  Bluesky is ""federated"" in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there's basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.
  To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it's an irritation.

Go to your favorite content creators and ask them to create a profile on Bluesky. If you don't ask them, how are they supposed to know?
- I'm still on the fence about that...I think it'd make more sense for many to drop social media and opt for their own site with RSS feeds. A lot of social media for some is little more than a noisier RSS reader. Sometimes even literally with those with auto-playing videos. 😬
  
  Y'all are delulu/out of touch with normal people if you think they're gonna set up an RSS feed
  
  But how would the bots reply? That's what generates foot traffic, which is what brings ads, which is what is not enough to pay for the bills!
  Perfect business model, I had a VC review it and got high marks
  
  RSS is kinda a pain to set up though, not everyone wants to go through that.
  
  As a counterexample to this comment, if any of my creators switched over to an RSS feed I probably would stop getting updates from them because that's more hassle than when I can just go to one service and see everything in one place
  
  They should know they have options at least. Then they can make the decision for themselves.
- The problem with this at least in my circle of content creators is that they're all millennials or older(no offense to millennials I'm one myself) but because of that, they either have a I'm not putting more effort into make an additional social media platform or they take their handle on blue sky but then actively participate in the mainstream Services more, neglecting BSky. I've only ever really seen artists use that platform so the other forms of content creation hasn't followed

Is Bluesky federated?
- Theoretically, yes. Practically, the way their model is set up, it costs a lot to host a federated server so no one is doing it.
  
  Wait really? I thought cost were relatively low since a lot of people do it themselves
- you can also follow bsky users on mastodon and mastodon users on bsky using bridgyfed.

The wolf ate our babies, let's go see hyenas.

I love that a Twitter founder founded Bluesky and the logo went from the outline of a white bird on a blue background to the outline of a white butterfly on a similar shade of blue background.
- jack didn't found bluesky he was just on a board which provided some early funding; he had no role in the development.
  and the butterfly was partially due to the community. https://bsky.social/about/blog/12-21-2023-butterfly
- blueskys previous logo was just a real sky fun fact till they change it to butterfly

At the rate we're going all that will be left on X is EM and his 200 sockpuppets.

bsky is currently the only social network with a woman of colour ceo, which is pretty awesome imo (i hate how people always try to incorrectly say jack dorsey created it when it erases jay's work)
- Great point. And Jay won the power struggle with Jack, which almost nobody gives her credit for.

Its just an opinion piece, I’d take this with a grain of salt
- This user is a troll FYI.

That's the same Bluesky that Dorsey abandoned.
- I wonder why though
- dorsey left because he wanted to moderation and for it to be the wild west like twitter though....

I run a few bots on Bluesky and absently check it occasionally on a personal account. Anecdotally I can say that I'm seeing a lot more engagement even just over the last week.

I remember putting in so much effort into my MySpace page… and then it was replaced by Facebook… and I had to start over. That’s the only reason why people are staying in the shitter…

165 comments