Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day
bsky.jazco.devOn the topic of Bluesky stats, I just learned that blocks are effectively public via the API, so there's a hall of shame ranking the most blocked users on the site: https://vqv.app/blocks.html
> a hall of shame
Usually that's the opposite that happen with these kind of people. They are going to look forward on being the at the top of the leaderboard, like a child doing stupid things only to get noticed by its parents.
Assuming blocks themselves are never childish. Jordan Peterson is on the list and he doesn't even use the site: https://bsky.app/profile/jordanbpeterson.bsky.social
It has an "Impersonation" tag: "Pretending to be someone else without permission." Dunno if that's accurate though.
But let's be real: Jordan B. Peterson on Bluesky is not going to be a different Jordan B. Peterson than he is anywhere else. If you don't want to interact with Jordan B. Peterson on e.g. Twitter, then you probably don't want to interact with him on Bluesky either.
To an extent, I agree. In particular, I will not seek out that guy.
However, feels virtue signal like to block someone that isn't there. Might as well block "random jerk." What is the value of blocking people by name that may not exist?
He likely just appears on a lot of imported Twitter blocklists.
Ah. That is a fair point.
Seems odd to be one of the most blocked with zero posts
There was a script I once saw for Twitter where it blocked all users within some follower/followee radius of a set group of people.
For public discourse, I wonder what the right level of agreeable "echo-chambering" is.
I don’t use Bluesky. How is it childish? If Peterson has no presence then how is a block possible? If a block requires presence then blocking Jordan Peterson seems like a reasonable thing for a person to do.
It's not even the real Jordan Peterson apparently.
Top 100 BlueSky accounts Hall of fame https://www.graphtracks.com/1h
A lot of Brazilians there. I guess it makes sense that they are a large portion of the user-base after Twitter got banned.
I wonder what the backstory to two different Brazilian Taylor Swift fan accounts getting onto the most blocked list is...
Probably no fault of the feed, so not really a hall of shame. People you follow repost the feeds because they want to share with the world, and the posts end up in your timeline. You block them if you are not interested or if it is overwhelming, without having to unfollow anyone.
i have a feeling by being on the list, it fuels more blocks, the rich get richer
Kind of shows the echo chamber. Looks like the Jordan Peterson account, which has never posted anything, is around number 14.
Highly recommend folks check out Mastodon as well - fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.
It is continuing to grow steadily and has tons of activity compared to a few years ago.
I appreciate Mastodon and wish it were growing steadily. Unfortunately, activity metrics (see the second chart on this page, for example [0]) suggest that it's on a steady, slow decline.
I see a plateau after a bunch of churn from large waves of migrations. Would be surprised if this won't be the case for bsky.
Regardless of MAU count, there's plenty happening there to keep me active, and you get to see Threads users who speak ActivityPub as well as Bsky users via a bridge.
I joined Mastodon in the big post-Elon user exodus. It’s great for geeky stuff, but Bluesky is much better for entertainment and news (i.e. what I mostly used Twitter for, pre-Elon).
If geeky stuff is what you’re interested in, you can build that community on Mastodon easily. But if you want more popular content and users, they’re on Bluesky.
I wonder how the world would change if ads just disappeared
I get things have to be sold but damn it's out of control
Life without Pihole and a blocker is just grim.
Every so often I get exposed to that world. It’s awful.
I would use PiHole, but them using Github is just a nonstarter (notably because that might be one of the websites I'm considering blocking, catch22 for blocklist updates). Or have they finally moved somewhere else less morally bankrupt ?
A lot of free services would disappear if they were unable to make some sort of ad-based income. Some people would be unable to do anything except whatever was provided by their government without ad-supported services (thinking Google products, YouTube, etc.) It would eventually go back to the way it was in the old days - a few actually-useful-but-struggling sites, a few paid-for services that might or might not survive, a passel of vanity sites and some incoherent cranks and weirdos (Time Cube, etc.).
Heaven for some, but mostly boring for everyone else after an hour.
that is fair, it's amazing how YouTube can eat a big file for free so you can have other people watch it, no storage cost concern
edit: I'm more talking about the influence on people's minds whatever the ad is in particular the bad ones/narrative
It's not like storage is particularly expensive unless you start to have hundreds of hour-long videos...
Speaking of, one of the things that the 2012 Twitter APIpocalypse killed off, was Flattr 1.0 (with its buttons on websites to Flattr stuff so at the end of the month the sum of money you set away would be spread over all the Flattrs you made).
Federated and no control just means it’s going to be overrun by trolls at some point?
Probably not. Each server has its own moderation, and servers that tolerate bad behavior from their users get blocked by most other servers.
I'm not sure the current model would do well against a large coordinated manipulation campaign, but it handles isolated trolls at least as well as corporate social media.
No corporate control. Server admin block nodes they don't want to see, so it is important to join a server with similar views as your own, or run your own server.
They already had 8 years to overrun it.
It's probably a bit more work than a lot of trolls are willing to put in. Trolling doesn't require a lot of thought or creativity, but setting up the infrastructure does.
You don’t get trolls unless you have a lot of people on there already.
They already had millions of people to troll.
I signed up to Fosstodon and then followed a bunch of Python and Django folks. This has been great so far, and my feed is full of relevant, interesting posts. I see a lot of posts complaining about Mastodon and pointing to its decline, but for my use-case, I get a lot of value from it and am pretty happy. I'm not sure what benefits I would get by moving over to Bluesky?
why isn't mastodon one of the winners like bluesky?
Because you can go to Bluesky and click “Sign Up” without a confusing explanation about instances.
Mastodon has a big honkin' "Join mastodon.social" button both on joinmastodon.org and in the mobile apps to solve this exact problem.
Good solution. Problem is they have chosen a 'default instance' in the app which goes against the idea to encourage federation of the platform and instead accelerates centralization and there was backlash over that change. [0]
mastodon.social will only get more centralized and is the only one that is benefitting from that change.
But the fact they still have this perception of confusing sign-up means they were too late.
This. Nostr could learn from this too.
Mastodon is confusing for non-technical users, while Bluesky is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Twitter.
I consider myself a technical person, perhaps not social media savvy anymore, and Mastodon confused the hell out of me. I don't think it stands a chance with regular Joe.
And beyond that, the federated aspect makes it very different from a global site like twitter. It was aimed at having control but in doing so you feel disconnect IMHO.
Good question. When you say Mastodon, my answer is 'which one' or 'which instance'?
That basic hurdle is the reason why it is a barrier to many potential new users and it has traded complexity over ease of onboarding when trying to sign up new users (who are not techies or sys-admins).
One solution is to set a default instance. I.e 'mastodon.social' and tell users to sign up there. Again, that increases the issue of centralization. To prevent that, you close sign ups and tell users to sign up elsewhere. Then the issue continues on other instances.
Along side other issues, that is why new users just went to Bluesky or Threads instead.
Its fundamental design lacks the ability to provide features that many people want, because the developers see those features as anti-features to be avoided.
Bluesky's AT Protocol was developed specifically to address what they saw as shortcomings with the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and other similar services.
It's fundamentally reasonably capable of things like full text search and better discovery, which its lead dev and much of the community see as anti-features. There has been some recent progress on search, but being searchable is opt-in only because many users are opposed to search.
I think decisions like that are an active choice not to become popular.
My impression from conversations here is that the AT protocol largely came from the developers being unaware of how they could've achieved the same thing with no or minimal extensions to ActivityPub. There may or may not be actual benefits to the protocol, but they could have achieved a far smaller delta and largely kept interoperability without any major sacrifices.
> fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.
No one owns it so there’s no team of well paid professionals trying to make it grow.
This isn't the most important reason, but compared to similar web sites, Mastodon's user experience is awkward.
Try using it, it has extra steps and decisions that add friction and are annoying / challenging for end-users.
It's not idiot-proof. Common-denominator platforms where you're expecting the general population need to be intuitive and work like people expect them to. Mastodon doesn't and their federated model is a pain in the behind.
It did see a big surge in popularity when Musk bought Twitter, but user numbers right now are not growing significantly.
They probably are, but they don’t have a marketing team like BlueSky does
It's a worse experience for posters for two major reasons: blocking is not as effective (blocked people can still read and respond), and there are too many weird scolds who yell at people for not adding content warnings for trivial things.
I don't post so it doesn't affect me directly. It affects where the people I follow choose to post.
Don’t forget nostr!
mastodon is federated, not decentralized
federation is a form of decentralization
The infrastructure has been rock-solid. I’ve never seen a service grow this fast without any noticeable outages. The architecture and execution are obviously informed by serious experience at Twitter, but it’s also clear that management is giving them everything they need to do the job right.
> The infrastructure has been rock-solid. I’ve never seen a service grow this fast without any noticeable outages. The architecture and execution are obviously informed by serious experience at Twitter, but it’s also clear that management is giving them everything they need to do the job right.
The world has changed quite bit. If you have deep pockets and you can use AWS etc., it isn't a major problem anymore. However, if they indeed run it on their own data centers, that is impressive.
> it isn't a major problem anymore
This is not true at all. The hard part isn't cloud vs. on-premise, it's the architecture.
Most sites can either put all their data in a single massive database, or else have an obvious dimension to shard by (e.g. by user ID if users mostly interact with their own data).
But sites where the data is many-to-many and there's a firehose of writes, of which Twitter is a prime example, are a nightmare to scale while remaining performant and reliable. Every single user gets an updated live feed of tweets drawn from every other user -- handling millions of users simultaneously is not easy.
> But sites where the data is many-to-many and there's a firehose of writes, of which Twitter is a prime example, are a nightmare to scale while remaining performant and reliable. Every single user gets an updated live feed of tweets drawn from every other user -- handling millions of users simultaneously is not easy.
It is definitely not easy. But the core problem of this has been discussed since the release of Facebook. There are very obvious architectures which you can follow and then fix the bottlenecks with money. The cost is still the most relevant problem, which I wanted to say. The current cloud enables much higher optimization threshold and error margin.
bingo. this problem is known and will soon be offered as a fully managed service - 1 click to have your own private social network.
> Every single user gets an updated live feed of tweets drawn from every other user -- handling millions of users simultaneously is not easy.
This is a trivial approach, which works but is suboptimal (you can cut down on the IO with various optimisations):
Shard by id. Treat it as messages queues. Think e-mail, with a lookup from public id -> internal id @ shard.
Then, additionally, every account that gets more than n followers are sharded into "sub-accounts", where posts to the main account are transparently "reposted" to the sub-accounts, just like simple mailing list reflector.
(the first obvious optimization to this is to drop propagation of posts from accounts that will hit a large proportion of users, and weave those into timelines on read/generation instead of writing them to each user; second is to drop propagation of posts to accounts that have not been accessed for a while, and instead take the expensive generation step of pulling posts to create the timeline next time they log in; there are many more, but even with the naive approach outlined above this is a solved problem)
I'm not so sure about this when not even 24 hours ago Netflix has streaming issues running on AWS infrastructure, and existing social media sites still have outages.
Netflix runs core services in AWS, but streaming goes via Open Connect, which involves appliances in the networks of major ISPs.
The Open Connect Wikipedia page [1] currently claims 8,000+ Open Connect Appliances at more than 1,000 ISPs as of 2021, and OCA's in over 52 interchange points.
Netflix is shuffling data at a scale nobody outside maybe a dozen other companies globally needs to deal with, and I doubt any of the social media sites come close.
> Netflix has streaming issues running on AWS infrastructure
I think the performance of Netflix is highly dependent of ISP's data centers [1].
But yeah, there are still limits where the cloud won't help you.
If you whole infrastructure is designed to serve "historical" content instead of streaming, some bottlenecks cannot be avoided if you want to server low-latency sports stream. This came by surprise for me, but apparently betting has still significant role for the viewers.
They moved from AWS to on-prem sometime in the last year or two: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/bluesky
And I don't care how many resources you have available to throw at it, plenty of sites would still fall over with the kind of growth they're having.
Deciding to use a cloud provider or not has very little do to with the quality of the application and infrastructure architecture.
You can make an app that scales beautifully on AWS or you can make one that chokes.
I've had quite an opposite experience. I wanted to give it a chance, but the loading times for almost any kind of navigation were too long, so I automatically stopped visiting.
The performance is really good. Searches and general navigation.
It’s definitely a whole different platform now, compared to when the first exodus happened. I’m loving it!
The “starter pack” feature is great. There’s also this website where you can browse created starter packs for groups/interests you care about: https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
As someone who never used Twitter, I made a Bluesy account and it was okay. I learned that I have no idea how to engage with that style of social media.
One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter. I hope they can move past that.
Blue Sky feels like a cocktail party where half the guests are knitting sweaters for their cats, the other half are debating how to save democracy, and I’m just standing there wondering how I got invited.
It’s like scrolling through a group chat where everyone forgot the topic but kept texting anyway.
Honestly, it’s impressive how they’ve managed to create a platform that feels simultaneously too niche and too random.
Idk, I spent a few hours over a few days trying to find something cool about it, and couldn’t.
The astro pictures are neat. Everything else ... less so.
Lol, I got curious about nostr, and it's the same thing, with an extra layer of "crypto currency will save the world"
Same - it was actually technically impressive how fast I got crypto spam upon joining nostr.
I joined twitter like 3 years ago, so also quite late to this type of game. Compared to forums, hn, reddit etc it's quite difficult to get your voice heard in the beginning. Anything you post is just shown to no one when you have no followers. Takes some time interacting with others and hope they follow or repost to get some traction.
> One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter. I hope they can move past that.
Judiciously using the muting features is required to have a good time in social media. Add "Twitter" to muted words to move past that on your own.
People talk about what’s on their minds. Most of the users just moved in the past week or two so that’s the hot topic. But it’ll change soon enough.
This, it happens for a while after every big exodus moment and chills out after.
> One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter
That was a huge turnoff with Mastodon for me. Seemed almost everyone was just saying “wow, isnt it so much better here than on Twitter?” over and over and having everyone agree. By comparison Bluesky isn’t so bad, at least right now anyway.
I hope so too. I had to leave threads because my wall was 90% people talking and complaining about Twitter and Musk and memes about the same stuff. Dude, I was here _precisely_ to avoid this, but it's even worse!
Yeah, I followed a bunch of game dev "starter pack" account collections and 90% of it was screenshots of tweets from Elon.
That's still 80% of Mastodon's content so I don't expect much from Bluesky.
They have, the front page is all about how terrible Trump is right now.
What is "the front page"?
Scrolling through the first couple dozen posts on my following feed, I see a selfies, science educators, artists, makers, a couple naked people, a complaint about days getting shorter, and a few people talking about health conditions they've gotten under control. If you don't want to see people talking about Trump, follow people who don't talk about Trump. Or add "trump" to your list of muted words.
What you see is up to you. If you don't like what you see, there are a ton of levers in your control.
Open https://bsky.app/ in incognito mode and you get to see the front page.
Currently the top post on the latest refresh is:
>I'm honestly surprised he hasn't started selling stool samples. His followers have been buying his BS for years, so it seems like a natural next step...
https://bsky.app/profile/calltoactivism.bsky.social/post/3lb...
This is not a network I want to join if this is the popular content. We've been told to curate our own garden for reddit, twitter, mastodon, etc. It never works because people who see that and like it join by the millions and those who don't don't.
You can quite literally write your own algorithm for Bluesky.
That's nice. It doesn't change the fact the default feed is amplifying the same posts that made twitter a toxic wasteland.
Serious question here, I use Twitter all the time but I still don't understand this. What do people mean when they say Twitter is toxic?
You seem to be advocating going to a party where the lobby is full of people yelling about something annoying, and then pushing past them to some separate room where those same people are talking about something else, for the moment.
I’d rather pick a different party.
Except there's not really "a" lobby. It's a building with equally sized entrances on the red light district, wall street, silicon valley, and capitol hill. A lot of people happen to be coming in from capitol hill at the moment, because a pretty significant event just happened. Just because you know there's an entrance to the building on capitol hill, doesn't mean that's where you're coming from when entering the party. As soon as you have an account, you never need to acknowledge that entrance again.
It just seems weirdly petulant to make a stand based on that. Even more so considering the post about Trump winning was similarly a front page post here, and that thread got more votes and comments than almost any I've ever seen here. And here there really is only one "front page".
What do you call the place where everyone has to go through to get to every other place?
The lobby.
This is a UX decision that the blue sky team made to make signing up more streamlined and its one that's very poorly thought out. Given its the same people who almade twitter it's no surprise they are making the same mistakes.
No surprise as to why Bluesky is taking off, despite calling it years ago. [0] Now it has 18M+ users with 9M MAUs and 3.3M DAUs [1] after removing the invite system.
The familiarity is easily transferable for a migration from Twitter / X. If you know how to use Twitter / X then you know how to use 90% of Bluesky.
No need to 'choose an instance' or some admin shutting a server down due to 'other reasons' unlike with Mastodon or an arbitrary blackbox algorithm that limits / hides your posts found in Threads or needing a Meta account.
Bluesky has learned from the mistakes of others to start first with a default server approach, you choose your own feed + algorithm and a search functionality that (works) can find accounts across the platform.
Simple.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185
[1] https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
And I’ll call it right now back to you now. It will go the way less than mediocrity of threads and mastodon.
Gratz to the blue sky team, it’s very hard getting a social media app to gain traction.
However, after messing around with twitter and mastodon, I really do not get the appeal. All the incentives are not to have meaningful conversation, rather it is all about engagement.
It’s way too much noise and not for me.
It strictly depends on who you follow. Follow people who have something to say, and you'll have meaningful conversation.
You could be right but these platforms have not historically been about long form discussions, rather quips and glib remarks to drive clicks.
Follow serious people and you can have serious conversations.
If I follow only serious people, can I see their posts in chronological order (aka algorithm free), and without anything extra "recommended"?
Yes (Following tab)
Yep!
Does anyone know any good makers I can follow on there? I'm mostly interested in making stuff, less in monetizing stuff, so I don't want to follow so much entrepreneurs (ie people who like making stuff to make money) as makers (ie people who like making stuff for its own sake). Any good lists?
If anyone wants to follow me on there, I'm @stavros.io.
I have a Ruby hackers starter pack at https://bsky.app/starter-pack/bradgessler.com/3laa47lbuwb2r
—
Edit: replaced cable modem link with starter pack link
You might've pasted the wrong link! Although damn, this modem looks good too, worth thinking about.
Do I have to buy this modem to view the Ruby hackers starter pack??
Here's the actual link to the starter pack: https://bsky.app/starter-pack/bradgessler.com/3laa47lbuwb2r
This looks like a really nice modem, but I have fiber :(
Do...do I open the modem and read the link off a piece of paper inside, kinda like a fortune cookie?
hahaha.... oops, I had to send that to Comcast because they're now thinking if I restart my modem for the third time, it will fix the problem.
Back in the news net days, there used to be a parable about a Berkeley hot tub. The owner would give out the code to people, and it would be a good party with a rotating cast of characters for a while, until eventually a few people ruined the party. Then the code would change, and a different crew would start coming through.
Pre-Elon, it seemed that Twitter was doing a pretty good run of keeping a single social network running for a long time. As has Facebook.
But for lots of dedicated communities, the new owner has such direct contempt for them and has focused on ruining the party.
Bluesky will work for now. Already science Twitter is having a huge renaissance now that links are no longer suppressed and discussion has lower noise:
Aha, so it was real too? For the past few years I have not been able to find the old text that I used to, and I'm sure my memory has shifted a bit over time too.
Once upon a time...
These starter packs sound like a good idea, but I have a hard time using them to find interesting people to follow.
When I look at at the "People" tab, they look like pretty impressive people (academics, etc), and then I look at the "Posts" tab and it's the usual noise: cat pictures, politics, etc. Not a lot of signal.
Maybe I've just been starved on Twitter/C for so long, but the signal was real for me, but in science there's been a sudden exodus to Bsky and an outpouring of joy that people are able to find new papers again and discuss conference talks live and post whatever they're cooking in their kitchen or lab. It's like the old days of Twitter are back, but it does take a lot of work to find that corner.
I mean, academics are allowed have cats, too.
I've had an account for a few months now, it always felt very dead, but something feels like it's shifted.
Agreed. I was on twitter to discover, share, discuss articles and talks in my field of research. A couple months ago I had trouble finding good accounts and content; but now I am starting to find some of the PIs I was following over on twitter.
Biosci twitter -> BioSky?
Because there was a certain geopolitical event about two weeks ago that was a primary reason many still used Twitter/X and now that said event is over (and whose outcome will likely cause Twitter/X to further degrade) there is no reason to stay.
The exodus is not happening randomly or in a vacuum.
This plus the fact that starting Nov 15 tweets become by default training material for their language models: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/x-is-using-y...
All posts on bsky are public and subject to use for training machine learning models. So a lot of people either don't care or are going to be very disappointed.
In view of this news, the story becomes even funnier: https://fortune.com/2024/11/14/grok-musk-misinformation-spre...
Or possibly, once the event was over, the users in question had the idea that Twitter/X affected the outcome in the way they didn't like and they decided to boycott Twitter/X?
My niche moved there summer of 2023, took some time to get going, some cross posting for a while etc, but by the end of the year it was almost exclusively on bsky.
But have noticed the uptick, gained like 400 followers the last week. But it's a bit weird, as it's a Norwegian community, no relation to American politics.
I guess it also can feel dead because it doesn't have a viral algorithmic feed like Twitter. But for me that's not an issue, ad even on Twitter I followed few enough people that I always used the chronological view.
But I do like the custom feeds of bsky. Like a search/hashtag on steroids, making it easy to discover others discussing the same theme I'm there for.
Am I missing something, or is the heading misleading. Where is the 1M gained users a day? I see statistics on likes, followers etc. Nothing here shows gain in 1M user accounts a day.
I was confused on that, too. At the top, says 18m users total. So, for how many days did the headline mean? Was it <10 recently?
Last 3 or 4 days has been 1m/day
I joined yesterday. And I was never an enthusiastic Twitter user. I did have an account, however. One by one my followers (admittedly, just a few people, and all friends) were sending me a note to say they were dropping Xitter and not just unfollowing me.
Related ongoing thread:
We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159454 - Nov 2024 (62 comments)
Also:
Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159713 - Nov 2024 (153 comments)
The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156907 - Nov 2024 (48 comments)
Consuming the Bluesky firehose for less than $2.50/mo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42152362 - Nov 2024 (58 comments)
Maybe Bluesky has "won" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42150278 - Nov 2024 (743 comments)
Watch Bluesky's explosive user growth in real time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147497 - Nov 2024 (11 comments)
How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147430 - Nov 2024 (50 comments)
1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144340 - Nov 2024 (124 comments)
Ask HN: Bluesky is #1 in the U.S. App Store. Is this a first for open source? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129768 - Nov 2024 (44 comments)
Ask HN: Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129171 - Nov 2024 (13 comments)
Visualizing 13M Bluesky users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118180 - Nov 2024 (236 comments)
Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42112432 - Nov 2024 (168 comments)
How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086596 - Nov 2024 (79 comments)
Bluesky's AT Protocol: Pros and Cons for Developers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080326 - Nov 2024 (60 comments)
Bluesky Is Not Decentralized - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952994 - Oct 2024 (194 comments)
Bluesky Reaches 10M Accounts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550053 - Sept 2024 (115 comments)
Hard not to think this is a lot of bots, though? I had an account, but didn't make the jump from Twitter. May succeed next try, though.
Could they even mitigate bots without tying accounts to government ID? You’re gonna get bots anyway. I like it that at least it’s an open platform.
World token or whatever the Altman thing was was an attempt.
I'm torn. Agreed that allowing machine accounts is good. Not keen on jumping into a bot filled ecosystem. Especially with no way to see reputation that is more grounded in at least a presumably human element.
That is, if you allow bots, how do you limit bots signal boosting each other?
I suspect the same.
Why isn’t there an app that just posts to blue sky mastodon and twitter? I find it annoying that companies and some gov depts post on twitter only and for some reason I keep needing to verify my account so I can’t ever see a chronological timeline
There are a few that do this but most don’t do X because of the exorbitant cost of API access
I was skeptical but I just opened it and the UI does look cleaner and less bloated than X. However, UI is fixable and what matters more is content. There needs to be a compelling reason to switch, and I don't see one yet.
finding the same ppl on bluesky needs work, and it's not a job i'm going to do. if twitter decays, good; i will get rid of my last social media app.
Not all that much work: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...
I found most of my twitter sports follows pretty easily.
before elon banned the api, there were tools to automate this
It doesn’t matter much how many users Bluesky is gaining, it matters how many of them will be using Bluesky in a few months. We will see.
What happened on Oct 17? I can't really find anything that would cause such a dramatic uptick on that day specifically.
that was the day they officially announced the change to how blocking worked, notifying all users (the owner had mused about it a month earlier)
That was the time we learned about the changes to the block feature.
That, and the TOS update which now requires users to give X blanket permission to use their posts for AI training (previously you could opt-out). Not that AI companies really care whether they have permission right now, but if legal precedent doesn't go their way then coercing users into "giving permission" by burying it within 50 pages of TOS legalese will be the fallback plan.
A bigger jump seemed to be Aug 28 - Sept 7 (daily likers 200k => 1M+). I wonder why. (also some days are missing there, so maybe something changed in the data collection).
Brazil banned twitter
Got to be a podcast or something popular that Donald Trump appeared on
How do we know the stats are real?
The entire data stream is public. Personally, I've encountered zero bots or spam so far and am finding hoards of real people in my field joining so it seems real from my tiny tiny corner of the data stream.
Threads is seeing similar growth. So it stands to reason that we are seeing a large exodus of users from X and people are trying out both platforms to see which one suits them best.
Does anyone else have issues with the data privacy side of things? I'm not really feeling the "everything is public" aspect of the AT protocol.
I'm a 100% lurker and it's such a nicer experience before any enshitification. It probably won't last forever, but no ads or spam, and simply seeing a feed of accounts I follow is all I want.
What is the alternative to AI twitter? Is there some incumbent where it moves?
It depends on if you define AI Twitter as AI researchers or AI hypesters.
Many of the former have indeed migrated.
One million accounts per day, and all of them making posts about their X.
So odd that a pseudo-decentralized centralized company gets so much attention when Nostr is actually decentralized but never gets mentioned.
I think most people wouldn’t care plus most who know wouldn’t make the mistake of trusting jack again.
While Nostr is well designed, it’s unfortunately closely tied with the cryptocurrency community.
Because people don't care about decentralization, they care about vibes and the vibes of Nostr are "right wing grifters and crypto scammers"
What happened to Threads ?
It's about ~300m MAU and also hitting 1m users a day:
No one has called me a shitlord, cuck, idiot, or otherwise implied I’m stupid for the entire time I’ve used it. It’s great. The tech community on there is really solid, at least insofar as my interests go.
What happens when they do, are you going to leave?
Isn't that the implication? If you're on a platform with a lot of low quality bitterness and another one pops up with less of that, just move. If it happens again, move again. It's not team sports, you shouldn't feel loyalty. The only problems are practical, rather than psychological.
I’ll have to complain about it and have a big cry first, but yeah.
I’m not actually opposed to people disagreeing with me or thinking my ideas are bad. It’s just pointless chaos and no functional or constructive discourse. That’s more so what bothers me about it.
Even in relatively tame topics there tends to be some devaluing interjection of some sort. It gets tiring trying to find interesting content but only finding that, over and over.
It has pretty good blocking/custom moderation tools.
Zuck dropped the ball bad.
I wouldn't count out Threads yet. But, in my limited use, something seemed off with Theads, but am liking Bluesky. YMMV.
By building a service that went from 0 to 275 million active users in a year (compared to Bluesky's 18 million)?
He’s not the right person for the job of democratizing the interchange of information without bias.
Threads was the fastest growing app of all time and now has ~300m MAU, 1m new users a day and is on track to being larger than X in about a year. And then once they switch on advertising will be printing tens of billions a year.
Hard to see how they've dropped the ball on this one.
> And then once they switch on advertising will be printing tens of billions a year.
I’ve seen this said before, and I guess it might be true, but I don’t really get why people would use Threads once there’s advertising on it — isn’t it being a better experience their main value proposition? And they’ve just spent the last few years teaching people how easy it is to migrate between these basically-interchangeable services…
X has ads. Bluesky will inevitably have ads.
So which platform do you see them moving to ?
heavily censored
People blocking jerks isn’t censorship. Do you have a source that there’s any kind of censorship going on stronger than other social media networks?
They removed a bunch of Palestinian journalists
evidence?
I can’t find it now, but in one of the other HN threads, someone had shared a link to some lawyer defending women’s rights for sex-segregated things (like who gets to play in women’s sports). That profile had a label of “Intolerant” at the top, and nearly every post of theirs also had that same word “Intolerant” in a box in the body of each post, in place of the actual content that would be there. A little informational message indicated these labels were applied by an automated system. You would have to click the button to uncensor and view the message anyways, but it makes it much harder to consume their feed since you have to do that for each individual post, every single time you view the page. Someone else pointed out that you can opt out of the default moderation/censorship scheme that applies this labeling but the fact that it is on by default is problematic in terms of offering a politically neutral platform, since that is what most people will get.
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As opposed to extremely dishonest far-right grifters like Twitter is now?
No worries friend, many of these signups are us on the right going to troll. We don’t plan to support it for long.
What?
False dichotomy doesn’t bring anything to the conversation. However it it true that the far left is the main motivated to quit X, and the progressive views Silicon Valley were also dominant on HN.
Just something to accept and think about. Do not blame the messenger.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say.
Both extremes on the left and right have their own 'extremely dishonest grifters' and that issue is not exclusive to Twitter / X.
Nope. The Left simply does not have anywhere near the same number of grifters as the right. There simply is no equivalent of Alex Jones on the left.
The far-right thinks the far-left is dishonest and vice versa. They're both correct. It's all so tiresome.
Nope. What is tiresome is constantly seeing how much the right lies and then lies about how much they lie. Trump told over 30,000 lies while President the FIRST time and still got re-elected.
Do you sincerely think the left doesn't lie also?
Not NEARLY as much as the right. Lying on the right has become an entire industry.
Oh, and this "everyone lies all the time so we can't know what is true" is a very Russian narrative called The Firehose of Falshoods.
Whichever side you think lies the most depends on which echo chamber you spend time in. I can think of numerous lies from the left. The Biden laptop thing, Trump said he wants to off Liz Cheney, the fine people thing, etc. If you think one side monopolizes lying you are lost.
Notice how there is not an equivalent of Alex Jones on the left? The right is fundamentally more gullible. That is why there are so many wealthy grifters on the right like Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, etc. And they just don't seem to care as much about what is objectively true and false or about logical consistency. It is immensely frustrating.
This article is a good explanation of why this epidemic of grifters has taken over conservatism in the US.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/08/05/joe-conason-on-how-...
Deception is central to the contemporary right for two reasons. One is that they’ve discovered, over a long period, that it is highly profitable to mobilize people’s fears and resentments around mythical issues. You can pull in vast sums of money from the right-wing base. The second reason is that facts don’t work for them. It is very hard, at this point, to make arguments on behalf of their positions that are fact-based. They push lies, conspiracy theories, fantastical inventions that support their ideological positions. To take one example, there is an idea that the minimum wage costs jobs. Not true. It’s been debunked. No respectable economist believes it. Or if you cut taxes, you’ll generate economic growth. Not true. It’s been disproven over again. So, they rely on falsehoods. Now, it is the “global elite” that is responsible for our problems—the faceless people at Davos. There is a large cohort of Americans who you can deceive with these myths.
Your two examples of "lies, conspiracy theories, fantastical inventions" were that minimum wage wage costs jobs and that tax cuts generate growth. You are under the impression that there is broad economic consensus on these assertions to the point that they are "proven" false. Just from some cursory searching this doesn't seem to be the case. For instance:
""" Steve Kaplan of Chicago Booth strongly agreed that raising the wage would adversely affect the unemployment rate: “A $15 minimum wage rise makes entry level/low wage jobs very expensive. It would move the US to be more like France, Italy, etc.”
David Autor of MIT disagreed: “I don’t think the evidence supports the bold prediction that employment will be substantially lower. Not impossible, but no strong evidence.”
And Oliver Hart of Harvard was uncertain: “I worry that it will, but we don’t know enough. Firms may raise prices and the Fed may accommodate some inflation. But the change is large.” """ [1]
And from NPR on tax cuts: """ Many — but by no means all— economists believe there's a relationship between cuts and growth. In a 2012 survey of top economists, the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business found that 35 percent thought cutting taxes would boost economic growth. A roughly equal share, 35 percent, were uncertain. Only 8 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. """ [2]
It doesn't seem like these things are as proven as you think they are. I encourage you to step out of your echo chamber and challenge your ideas more, and try to be less partisan in your analysis.
1. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-economists-think-ab... 2. https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/30/45290...
I really hate the fact that we live in a world where people object to raising the $7.50 minimum wage while a single man is worth more than $200 billion.
Well that is something we agree on. Minimum wage should be livable and pegged to inflation, and the reason its not is because the rich have too much power.
Pegging minimum wage to inflation would cause a feed back loop. I think it should be set to average rental prices in the city the job is in. 40 hours of after tax minimum wage wages should be 1 month's rent for a one bedroom apartment.
With the Dang moderation? And PGs vision?
Can't wait to join!
And what is PG’s vision?
Is it better than Mastodon? I signed up for that then gave up quickly.
but i'm already on X, I just can't make a move just because of decentralization or "toxic" environment everyone talks about. It has a lot more content and the people I follow are all here.
What's preventing everyone from putting their faith in another broadcast medium just to have it sold to Elon again? It's hard to trust social media these days. They have 0 incentive to be "good" from a variety of perspectives not just political.
because it's not centralized and you can self host it.
if everyone is in practice using the same instance, they can just un-decentralize it at any moment they want, though
> They have 0 incentive to be "good"
Yes they do.
X has shown the more trusted and safe your platform is the better it is for advertisers and your bottom line.
Why would I want to be on a platform that is friendly to advertisers?
Ads are the only price most users are willing to pay.
I don't like Bluesky because I feel it's a whole lot of pointless Not Invented Here vs. improving on ActivityPub, but it is still far more resistant to that than X/Twitter because people can migrate more easily.