1mo ago

Bluesky hits 20 million users

www.engadget.com Bluesky hits 20 million users

Bluesky has reached a new milestone as the decentralized service gains momentum.

120 comments

I just.. I could never comprehend twitter (or Mastadon, or bluesky for that matter).
The whole structure of the conversation feel like people shouting into an open auditorium. And everyone is shouting at once.
I just do not see the appeal.
- 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.
  
  Yea. Used it for four things. To keep up to date with creators I like, to keep up to date with friends, to keep up to date with a bunch of webcomics and to randomly rant into the void when I felt like it.
- 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.
  
  Usenet to me seems more like Lemmy than anything else. All conversations are groups by topic, just like Lemmy. Although they are all just "text posts".
  
  I follow some economist guys, they are always sharing some graphs and chart data that help people to invest efficiently on the local stock market. Some talk to them and I follow the conversations as they are really interesting. But I don't talk to them.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  Thats a job for ‘journalists’ these days.
  
  How are these interactions beneficial for all? What a load of crap.
- I thought it was a great idea for official statements. Kind of like a new type of RSS feed.
  Local transport companies can advertise delays, meteorology organisations can advertise natural disasters, police can post active missing person alerts, etc.
  But it seems like it is just vapid narcissists thinking other people give a shit about their random thoughts.
  
  Why does an RSS feed need a "new type" tho? Normal RSS can be hosted by anyone and can be read on so many different readers...
  
  I agree. I followed a couple of theaters, music venues, and bars to see what events were coming up and when happy hour was. I never understood the idea of following people just to hear what they were thinking every 15 seconds.
- 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 love it for sports stuff. This player is out today. Player was injured in the game and out for the remainder of the game. Records, stats, things like that are great for these mediums.
- Agree, it’s like I had a feed for reading only instagram/facebook comments. No, thanks
- 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?
  
  What I find interesting is the seeming need to replace it with something similar. Why?
  Oh yeah. Why? Yeah.. yeah I could never imagine leaving one toxic social media and then trying to find a similar replacement..
- 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?).
- Depends how you use it. I follow artsy people and game devs and my feed is mostly just art and game dev related posts.

Anyone try the bridge? Seems a bit convoluted.
Anything that gets people off Twitter is a good thing. And it means more potential mastodon users later on ;)
- Yeah it works fine. My mastodon account has gained 40 followers from bluesky even though I have a bluesky account too!
  
  Nice. I went and followed via Mastodon but I cant seem to follow anyone other than the default users. Im using https://fed.brid.gy/ is there a better bridge out there?
- 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.
  
  Your reply is there? Did it just take a while to go through?
- 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.

Is there anything in Bluesky's design that prevents the company from attracting a critical mass of users and then restricting federation, or cutting it off entirely?
- 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.
  
  I'm not even sure what the word is to describe that mentality. The closest I think of is "willfully ignorant", but that's not quite it.
  Basically people like you are blind to the reason as to why bluesky and not mastodon is getting all the twitter runaways.
  And you're blind to it, not because you're incapable of seeing the reasons. You're just unwilling to accept that those reasons ARE the reasons it's happening this way.
  Basically the 95% of society don't give a shit about federation. It's not a selling point, it's a scary confusing distraction. Many of them probably went to sign up for mastodon, as they had heard of it......but then they found out:
  "There are thousands of mastodons, and if you sign up on one, you can't sign up on the other, and you can only talk to the people on your mastodon......oh, bluesky is just one service. You sign up, and you're done. Oh, it's even asking me if I want to connect with mastodon. So that means I never needed to connect to mastodon! And this one is just like twitter. I know this. The other one is scary. This one is what I like."
  And then you come in, correcting every wrong aspect of what they just said. You start using terms like fediverse, and instances, and federate, and they just give you blank stares.
  They don't give a shit about that. At all. At allllll. At allllllllllll.
  I'm going to include a picture here. I took a picture of my wall while I was watching a hockey game. You'll notice their twitter handles. But those handles are also accessable all across the net. That's how the fediverse should work.
  TonyBrownpxp. You'll notice they don't put the X logo in that graphic. They just put the handle, and assume the audience knows what to do. Now, Tony Brown isn't a celebrity. He's a hockey announcer for a Cleveland based AHL hockey team, the Cleveland Monsters. AHL is the farm system for NHL. So this is minor league hockey.
  Hardley someone who anyone would instantly know the name Tony Brown. However, if you're watching hockey, and you see the handle @TonyBrownPXP with no other context, as shown in this photo, you know how to contact them.
  But, if he were to say, have a mastodon, it would have to be @TonyBrownPXP@mastodon.social
  And furthermore, if @TonyBrownPXP@mastodon.world exists, that means you can't just throw @TonyBrownPXP on the screen with a mastodon logo, because which @TonyBrownPXP IS it???
  And so now your screenis just FILLED with text, all because handles aren't handled universally on the fediverse. I'm personally signed up for 3 diffeeent fediverse services, all using Lost_My_Mind, but on 3 different instances. What if a 2nd person signs up Lost_My_Mind on a 4th instance? I have no way to prove that's not me. And I don't think anyone gives a shit enough about me to investigate if it WAS me. So anything they say, would in the minds of humans, be assosiated with me.
  And while I won't call TonyBrown a celebrity, it's the same for celebrities, and guys like him. He encourages fan interaction during hockey games, and he refuses to call it X. He always says "Send your thoughts or questions to me on twitter, or I guess they call it X now, which is a stupid name, but send your questions to @TonyBrownPXP and we'll address the best ones during game breaks and intermission!"
  Says almost the same exact thing, almost word for word, always with the snide diss of twitter, every game.
  Now I've never signed up for loops, or pixelfed, or peertube, or a lot of services. But when I signed up for the fediverse, it should have had me pick a username. Lost_My_Mind. Ok, now when I sign up to any service, Lemmy, or Pixelfed, or peertube, or anything else, Lost_My_Mind should be my handle.
  And if someone ELSE tries signing up for Pixelfed, on a different instance, they can't use Lost_My_Mind. Even though I don't have a registered pixelfed account. Even though I don't have an account on that other instance.
  I'M Lost_My_Mind. Not you on another instance. But that's not how the fediverse works. And because people don't understand, or give a shit about any of that, they just go with what they know.
  Right now, we're in the early days of the fediverse. The experience should be centralized, while the underlaying services and protocols should be decentralized. Because right now, the whole thing isn't decentralized. It's fractured.
  
  Mastodon is fine, but I burned out on it pretty quick. There's not an intuitive way to find new content on there. I'm sure the content is fine, but Bluesky can get you up and running really quickly.
  
  Mastedon and the Fediverse need to get their shit together and make it easy for hyper casual basic people to use and understand.
  Bluesky doesn't have any of that.
  
  Not quite true. You can host your own personal data store (PDS), run your own labelling service, and you can host your own feeds.
  The big relays and app views are the only thing that aren’t really supported by the official app yet.
- 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:
  
  Using discord for this is such a bonehead move.
  
  That would effectively lock participation behind Discord's terms and conditions. No thanks.
  (But thanks for sharing that info. :)
  
  I don't know how old this document is, but I created my own PDS this weekend and it's not have to join their Discord server to do so.
- Don't give the VCs any ideas!
- 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
  
  Nothing is truly decentralized. If your Lemmy instance shuts down your account is gone too.
  
  It’s not centralized, it’s also not a federated network like AP. It’s just a different design.
- 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.
  
  They currently have no plans for advertisement.
  On what they're currently planning to bring in money:
  https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24278666/bluesky-working-on-premium-subscription
  That could change at any time, but seems likely to be true for now.
  I would guess things will be fine at least up until they either IPO or they get bought by a VC firm or some public corp. That's the point in the ensuing to fixation cycle to move to something else (unless something unexpected happens like they really do nicely federate before then or something else that may save the platform).
  So I'm guessing probably at least a couple years that it'll be good, and it's 10000x better than Xitter.

The urge to act like an asshole on another platform is just too much.....
Twitter was a cesspool long before trump, and it was made such by the same people trying to distance themselves from it now.
"Ohh.. I wasn't a cunt on Twitter, I'm one of the people moving away from it".
- Twitter, where the response to “I like Hot Dogs” is “Why do you hate Cheeseburgers????”
- All that matters is the cesspool that isn't going to make Musk any money

I won't be joining in until I can actually run a real instance on my own.
I don't plan on doing that, but the important part is knowing that I could.
- Instances are run through a central "relay" which is controlled by Bluesky HQ, so it isn't decentralized like, say, Mastodon is.
  
  I know.
  ATproto has some interesting advantages, and eventually the idea is for anyone to be able to host any microservice component of the network, including relays other than the one run by Bluesky.
  The relays don't need to be centralized. They are indexers that provide functionality to others parts of the ATproto network.
  The problem is that there isn't really any incentive to do so... Any additional instances or new apps running ATproto can just rely on the one big indexer provided by Bluesky, instead of running each microservice component themselves.

Right-wing crypto funded.
- I don't know about that. The big issue, for me, is that it isn't actually decentralized.
  
  It is, however, de-elonized
  
  They posted about the crypto investor (who is also on their board of directors now)

Damn I sure hope they're gonna pay compensation for all the users they hit

Such a letdown, I had hoped that with the downfall of Twitter people would finally kick their addictions to 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
  
  And so am i
  
  Here we all are, not just you

I just "secured" my handle there. It's unlikely I'll become a frequent user/poster, but who knows...
- No need to secure a handle, you can use a domain name you own as your handle.
  
  Didn't know that. Thanks :-)

Interesting choice for the thumbnail picture. That was pre-butterfly logo. That picture is several months old.
- The butterfly logo is one of the greatest things about that company, especially after Bad Man #2 decided to kill the beautiful bird logo. What an absolute waste that was.

Tried it, still prefer Mastadon. The amount of shitposts or unrelated posts is incomparable to that of meta's threads, but still quite high to my taste.

What percentage of those are bots?
- 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.

Congrats to Bluesky.

Yay, I finally jumped on the bandwagon at the right time!

Can I interact/follow bluesky user from mastodon? I run mastodon instance, don't want to run bluesky as well.

120 comments