So soon, all the democrats will be on BlueSky and all the republicans will be on X/Twitter?
Meanwhile us foreigners will have to maintain an account on both platforms to understand what our global overlords have decided for us today ;p
As an aside, my country has banned Twitter... yet everyone in the government, from the prime minister to the junior bureaucrat, uses twitter to issue announcements. They all use VPN. The whole thing is hilarious and sad. And I have to use VPN to find out if the road I'll go out yet is blocked or if we will have electricity today.
Basically, the international market is unlikely to move to BlueSky, then again I could be wrong.
Once funny people and porn completely migrate to BlueSky, it might gain proper adoption. Gotta keep in mind $10/month will keep away a good chunk of demographics, if without it your posts/replies are basically unseen.
Bluesky is a decentralized service similar to Mastodon, so you don't need to maintain an account on the US service if you don't want to. I don't know if they're actually connected or not.
I don't care who owns it, social media is a cancer. Decentralized social media is actually worse because it fragments information, which makes it harder to access, harder to collaborate on, hides subtle knowledge, and creates further in-groups and echo chambers.
What gets highlighted is almost never what is more intellectual, moral, factual, important, or curated. Instead it's whatever is entertaining, angering, scary, validating. It's a machine for capturing people's baser instincts and biases and weaponizing them to make people stupid and reactive.
And it's designed to be addictive. This isn't even just the "big" social media sites. Anything with a "feed" or "endless scroll" is designed to hook you, keep you there, keep you engaging. Cigarettes may not be your drug of choice, but TikTok may be.
Go ahead and quit social media. You know what people almost universally report? They feel calmer. Happier. Healthier. Less scared. They have more free time. It's a weight off their shoulders. Now imagine the opposite of all that, affecting nearly everyone connected to the internet. Imagine what that does over decades.
This machine is eroding society. In the future, we're going to find out that social media was worse than cigarettes. The addictive habit that slowly destroys lives - even nations - over decades.
I'm not the only person who has had friends have nervous breakdowns from social media. This is a pubic health emergency, but we're treating it like its politics. Politics is just a symptom of the greater disease: an epidemic of manipulation machines designed to ruin our health for clicks. The machine doesn't even know it's doing this to us. It's just doing what it was programmed to do. And we lap it up, like so many flies wandering into the fly trap.
While I agree for the most part, I have an observation and a question:
Social media, specifically microblogging networks like old Twitter, were uniquely effective at delivering near real-time breaking updates in ways that left older news delivery systems in the dust. I could do without the vapid comments, but this one aspect has real utility and I don't really know of a way to replicate that in other systems. I say this as an outsider that would only occasionally use the site to search for breaking news that hasn't hit other outlets yet.
My question is about where you draw the line on what constitutes a social network as the edges get blurry. Are comment sections social media? Are sites like Reddit and hacker News? Blogs? Blog networks with social features like Tumblr?
Old Twitter was phenomenal for news discovery. I quit news cold turkey, and got my current events from Twitter for years. Despite what you might think, the results were actually less biased and more accurate than mainstream news. They key is being very selective about how you follow, and staying of the “For You” algorithmic feed.
That ended with Elon’s acquisition. Not because of anything nefarious, but rather Elon just didn’t understand what he bought. He saw it as a meme and shitposting service. Which it was for a subset of users, I guess. But the changes he brought massively undermined its utility for elite and connected microblogging, and it became far less useful for that purpose. Now that he is incentivizing content creators, it has become a text version of instagram or TikTok—nothing but vapid influencers chasing engagement.
Personally, I was also very picky about who I follow, and also only use “Following” (never “For You”) and the only difference I felt with the Elon acquisition is less censorship — which is both good and bad — and makes it more useful as a news source.
>Social media, specifically microblogging networks like old Twitter, were uniquely effective at delivering near real-time breaking updates in ways that left older news delivery systems in the dust.
IRC did it long before some worthless derp even dared to coin the term "social media".
I think celebrity media sites are a trap. More so if you are able to post advertising. Social, itself, isn't necessarily bad. Social that is monetized is almost certainly a race for what makes money, though. Not what makes people social.
HN is a social media and was designed as such back when it was a smaller group of tech founders an angel investors sharing knowledge and opportunities. That it has since grown into what is essentially a mix of various Reddit STEM subsides or whatever they call them doesn’t exactly make it any less of a social media.
I think one of the few things that has kept it at least a little safe aside from the massive work of Dang is that you need a certain level of “karma” before you can interact with a lot of the functions. Still, if you look at the content and the discussions today they are very different from what they were. I haven’t used my original account for several years because it was associated with my real personality and that became toxic with the increase of Reddit users who would actively stalk you.
It doesn’t have doom scroll, but it does have doom update.
> Decentralized social media is actually worse because it fragments information, which makes it harder to access, harder to collaborate on, hides subtle knowledge, and creates further in-groups and echo chambers.
Yeah, probably. But I hadn’t posted to the IPO garbage site since ~2013-ish. I enjoy my preferred replacement. There are actual dialogues. It’s missing a lot of great content for niche topics, but I consider the intimacy a strength.
True, I’m off all non-tech/science internet at the moment for mental wellbeing (USA citizen and I need less information about our current events, not more). And yes, that’s deliberate and it’s helped my state of mind. I’m reading more books and got back into a game I like.
I just don’t think decentralization is all that bad. Echo chamber? Yes. But who on FB or the shitty bird site hasn’t self-selected for that?
Twitter at it's peak had less monthly active users than Facebook Stories.
Outside of the journalist and media class, nobody used twitter. 300M+ people are a huge number, but barely scratches the surface in the Social Media world. What can bluesky do different to attract normies?
Why do they need to, except for letting them read postings and follow selected users/entities?
To avoid the cesspool effect, Bluesky should just charge publishers (anyone who wants to post) a high monthly fee, and make user accounts for reading free. Then governments or companies or anyone else can just use it as their announcement service.
People who want to chat can use Reddit or whatever.
> To avoid the cesspool effect, Bluesky should just charge publishers (anyone who wants to post) a high monthly fee
So they should become a subscription-based press release distribution channel? That doesn't sound too different from the "verified" account practice at current Twitter, just more expensive.
Non-verified accounts on Twitter can still post, respond to posts, etc. I'm proposing that they don't allow this, and in fact simply disable replies altogether. It should just be a one-way announcement service.
> Outside of the journalist and media class, nobody used twitter.
??? What???
Twitter has basically been the place for artists to share their stuff. It's a huge place for game and tech discussions and sharing knowledge. It lets absolute normies share stuff with thousands of people.
Meanwhile, facebook stories is much more limited in reach. People sharing pictures of their baby and vacations with family who'll click a thumbs up just to show they know you exist but don't care about the content. Instagram, facebook's other child, is for people to pose and post pictures of their lunch in an exotic location and pretend they just casually decided to eat 10000 miles from home because they're rich and spontaneous like that.
Twitter has been huge for creative types, and the content that thrives on Facebook-style platforms struggles there. A lot of them are currently migrating to bluesky due to various problems recently. Tumblr still kind of has a thing going on, but it's for much more niche art/fan fiction type stuff. But they're all for normies to go and see cool shit and not have to stare at endless feeds of "Me and my baby. Did you know I have a baby? I have a baby btw" type stuff.
I don't know the same artists you do then. Agree with the rest, but wether it's sound designer, musician or graphic artist, most of the talented ones I know weren't on Twitter. I know one who is but honestly half her work are memes, and the rest isn't that good. Artstation/deviantArt in the other hand, that's where you can discover _very_ good art (and some bad one).
Nearly artist who has an account there has a bsky/twitter account as well.
Artstation and deviantart is where people who make art go to look at other art. Twitter and bsky are places where everyone, including non-artists, goes to find art.
Maybe they found it so confusing that it wasn't even an option to bother signing up to?
Tells you all you need to know about why there wasn't any long term migration from Twitter / X to Mastodon and I already called it for Bluesky to be the real Twitter alternative years ago. [0] [1]
Seems like we know that Bluesky is going to just keep growing from here.
Government entities should post to their own Mastodon instance first, but then also syndicate to other social media sites.
That way they always maintain control of their main outlet (even if not many people actually access it there) and not have to worry about who controls other sites in the future.
Well… any form of serious organisation should frankly house their own Mastodon instance so that they are not moderated by a big tech company.
I’m Danish, I’m not a fan of right wing politics but at the same time I find it absolutely insane that an American tech company can ban our elected officials from the “town square” if they say something horrible. Of course this is more a failing of our own institutions than anything else. The EU has hosted their own mastodon instances for their organisations and personnel for a while now, but here in Denmark our institutions have been too addicted to the popular platforms in my opinion. I think media companies should really do it as well, both to “own” their content but also to not give over their business to social media.
Anyway, I don’t see the issue with “which one” since that part is one of the main features.
Worth checking out, for me at least. But honestly enough people seem to have moved on from this type of platform that the combination of fragmentation and just less overall participation means there probably isn't enough critical mass and excitement any more.
Pretty tired of this rhetoric. Mastodon functions basically identical to email and damn near every normies has figured it out. Pick a server, sign up, share your handle(email address) with your friends. Type in box zoom zoom.
Content wise it's a timeline so you, by default, only get who/what you follow. Sure local server timeline and global is an option but then it's no better or worse than the random crap X's algo throws, uncontrollably, in your face.
And even back in the day, during the main growth phase, people didn't really pick email servers. They picked an ISP (like AOL) which gave them an email server. And there really was very little choice.
> share your handle(email address) with your friends.
People don't use twitter to talk to their friends. They use twitter to hear from people they don't know. And they won't know which server people they want to follow have signed up for.
Now they need to figure out how to search for them across all servers.
People don't adopt "tech", they adopt "solutions". And everyone I hear about that tries Mastodon says it's tech, maybe even good tech, but nobody says it's really a one click solution.
Make Mastodon adoption as familiar and easy as Bluesky is and it would will growth faster.
Saying "you just have to understand these 3 things" isn't how to get adoption. And saying how easy they are to understand doesn't help either. Figure out how to make it so they have to understand 0 new things - that's how to grow adoption.
But, like email, there is a discoverability issue.
I want to find person X's email/mastodon. I know their name and they use that name attached with the account, how do I do it without leaving the application?
With Twitter, Threads and Bluesky, I can just search and find the person.
The CEO of Bluesky is Jay Graber. (Who despite the name is a Chinese woman.)
Jack got mad that people were making fun of him for being into crypto, left for another decentralized service Nostr, did too many psychedelics and fried his brain, then moved back to Twitter.
Meanwhile us foreigners will have to maintain an account on both platforms to understand what our global overlords have decided for us today ;p
As an aside, my country has banned Twitter... yet everyone in the government, from the prime minister to the junior bureaucrat, uses twitter to issue announcements. They all use VPN. The whole thing is hilarious and sad. And I have to use VPN to find out if the road I'll go out yet is blocked or if we will have electricity today.
Basically, the international market is unlikely to move to BlueSky, then again I could be wrong.
So pretty sure it was an easy for them to move on from X.
What gets highlighted is almost never what is more intellectual, moral, factual, important, or curated. Instead it's whatever is entertaining, angering, scary, validating. It's a machine for capturing people's baser instincts and biases and weaponizing them to make people stupid and reactive.
And it's designed to be addictive. This isn't even just the "big" social media sites. Anything with a "feed" or "endless scroll" is designed to hook you, keep you there, keep you engaging. Cigarettes may not be your drug of choice, but TikTok may be.
Go ahead and quit social media. You know what people almost universally report? They feel calmer. Happier. Healthier. Less scared. They have more free time. It's a weight off their shoulders. Now imagine the opposite of all that, affecting nearly everyone connected to the internet. Imagine what that does over decades.
This machine is eroding society. In the future, we're going to find out that social media was worse than cigarettes. The addictive habit that slowly destroys lives - even nations - over decades.
I'm not the only person who has had friends have nervous breakdowns from social media. This is a pubic health emergency, but we're treating it like its politics. Politics is just a symptom of the greater disease: an epidemic of manipulation machines designed to ruin our health for clicks. The machine doesn't even know it's doing this to us. It's just doing what it was programmed to do. And we lap it up, like so many flies wandering into the fly trap.
Social media, specifically microblogging networks like old Twitter, were uniquely effective at delivering near real-time breaking updates in ways that left older news delivery systems in the dust. I could do without the vapid comments, but this one aspect has real utility and I don't really know of a way to replicate that in other systems. I say this as an outsider that would only occasionally use the site to search for breaking news that hasn't hit other outlets yet.
My question is about where you draw the line on what constitutes a social network as the edges get blurry. Are comment sections social media? Are sites like Reddit and hacker News? Blogs? Blog networks with social features like Tumblr?
That ended with Elon’s acquisition. Not because of anything nefarious, but rather Elon just didn’t understand what he bought. He saw it as a meme and shitposting service. Which it was for a subset of users, I guess. But the changes he brought massively undermined its utility for elite and connected microblogging, and it became far less useful for that purpose. Now that he is incentivizing content creators, it has become a text version of instagram or TikTok—nothing but vapid influencers chasing engagement.
Personally, I was also very picky about who I follow, and also only use “Following” (never “For You”) and the only difference I felt with the Elon acquisition is less censorship — which is both good and bad — and makes it more useful as a news source.
IRC did it long before some worthless derp even dared to coin the term "social media".
IRC did it on an incredibly small scale, IME.
I think celebrity media sites are a trap. More so if you are able to post advertising. Social, itself, isn't necessarily bad. Social that is monetized is almost certainly a race for what makes money, though. Not what makes people social.
It certainly _feels_ categorically different from the algorithmically suggested endless scroll sites
I think one of the few things that has kept it at least a little safe aside from the massive work of Dang is that you need a certain level of “karma” before you can interact with a lot of the functions. Still, if you look at the content and the discussions today they are very different from what they were. I haven’t used my original account for several years because it was associated with my real personality and that became toxic with the increase of Reddit users who would actively stalk you.
It doesn’t have doom scroll, but it does have doom update.
Yeah, probably. But I hadn’t posted to the IPO garbage site since ~2013-ish. I enjoy my preferred replacement. There are actual dialogues. It’s missing a lot of great content for niche topics, but I consider the intimacy a strength.
True, I’m off all non-tech/science internet at the moment for mental wellbeing (USA citizen and I need less information about our current events, not more). And yes, that’s deliberate and it’s helped my state of mind. I’m reading more books and got back into a game I like.
I just don’t think decentralization is all that bad. Echo chamber? Yes. But who on FB or the shitty bird site hasn’t self-selected for that?
Outside of the journalist and media class, nobody used twitter. 300M+ people are a huge number, but barely scratches the surface in the Social Media world. What can bluesky do different to attract normies?
Don't. Threads already has that market locked up as it is now about ~300m MAUs.
Bluesky should focus on its current strengths i.e. news, politics, science and less mainstream content.
Between the two it should relegate X to just being a Truth Social competitor.
To avoid the cesspool effect, Bluesky should just charge publishers (anyone who wants to post) a high monthly fee, and make user accounts for reading free. Then governments or companies or anyone else can just use it as their announcement service.
People who want to chat can use Reddit or whatever.
So they should become a subscription-based press release distribution channel? That doesn't sound too different from the "verified" account practice at current Twitter, just more expensive.
??? What???
Twitter has basically been the place for artists to share their stuff. It's a huge place for game and tech discussions and sharing knowledge. It lets absolute normies share stuff with thousands of people.
Meanwhile, facebook stories is much more limited in reach. People sharing pictures of their baby and vacations with family who'll click a thumbs up just to show they know you exist but don't care about the content. Instagram, facebook's other child, is for people to pose and post pictures of their lunch in an exotic location and pretend they just casually decided to eat 10000 miles from home because they're rich and spontaneous like that.
Twitter has been huge for creative types, and the content that thrives on Facebook-style platforms struggles there. A lot of them are currently migrating to bluesky due to various problems recently. Tumblr still kind of has a thing going on, but it's for much more niche art/fan fiction type stuff. But they're all for normies to go and see cool shit and not have to stare at endless feeds of "Me and my baby. Did you know I have a baby? I have a baby btw" type stuff.
I don't know the same artists you do then. Agree with the rest, but wether it's sound designer, musician or graphic artist, most of the talented ones I know weren't on Twitter. I know one who is but honestly half her work are memes, and the rest isn't that good. Artstation/deviantArt in the other hand, that's where you can discover _very_ good art (and some bad one).
Artstation and deviantart is where people who make art go to look at other art. Twitter and bsky are places where everyone, including non-artists, goes to find art.
Maybe they found it so confusing that it wasn't even an option to bother signing up to?
Tells you all you need to know about why there wasn't any long term migration from Twitter / X to Mastodon and I already called it for Bluesky to be the real Twitter alternative years ago. [0] [1]
Seems like we know that Bluesky is going to just keep growing from here.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35831893
That way they always maintain control of their main outlet (even if not many people actually access it there) and not have to worry about who controls other sites in the future.
Which one?
I’m Danish, I’m not a fan of right wing politics but at the same time I find it absolutely insane that an American tech company can ban our elected officials from the “town square” if they say something horrible. Of course this is more a failing of our own institutions than anything else. The EU has hosted their own mastodon instances for their organisations and personnel for a while now, but here in Denmark our institutions have been too addicted to the popular platforms in my opinion. I think media companies should really do it as well, both to “own” their content but also to not give over their business to social media.
Anyway, I don’t see the issue with “which one” since that part is one of the main features.
Not simple enough for normies. Not enough people. Who wants to be on the 10th largest social media? Full of sketchy content.
Content wise it's a timeline so you, by default, only get who/what you follow. Sure local server timeline and global is an option but then it's no better or worse than the random crap X's algo throws, uncontrollably, in your face.
Except nobody picks email servers really anymore.
And even back in the day, during the main growth phase, people didn't really pick email servers. They picked an ISP (like AOL) which gave them an email server. And there really was very little choice.
> share your handle(email address) with your friends.
People don't use twitter to talk to their friends. They use twitter to hear from people they don't know. And they won't know which server people they want to follow have signed up for.
Now they need to figure out how to search for them across all servers.
People don't adopt "tech", they adopt "solutions". And everyone I hear about that tries Mastodon says it's tech, maybe even good tech, but nobody says it's really a one click solution.
Make Mastodon adoption as familiar and easy as Bluesky is and it would will growth faster.
Saying "you just have to understand these 3 things" isn't how to get adoption. And saying how easy they are to understand doesn't help either. Figure out how to make it so they have to understand 0 new things - that's how to grow adoption.
I want to find person X's email/mastodon. I know their name and they use that name attached with the account, how do I do it without leaving the application?
With Twitter, Threads and Bluesky, I can just search and find the person.
Jack.
https://littlesis.org/org/429239-Bluesky_Social
Jack got mad that people were making fun of him for being into crypto, left for another decentralized service Nostr, did too many psychedelics and fried his brain, then moved back to Twitter.