I notice that the stat the article repeatedly quotes is MAU for usage of the mobile app, but one of the things I love about Bluesky is that you don’t need to use a mobile app to have a good UX. I use the mobile browser to access it, so I’m not in that MAU number. Perhaps bsky has a larger number of active users that don’t use the app?
So you didn’t read the article, made an assumption about its content, question someone who did, then blame Adblock for your confusion, instead of just following the conversation?
No I was confused that they wouldn’t count the browser users when there is no good reason to when they try to eval their user base? MAU commonly includes web users as well.
I blame TechCrunch for creating a website that I can’t read but yea fair criticism I didn’t read the article.
I didn’t question GP i asked if they knew why web users aren’t counted.
Do they explain in the article why they would only count mobile users as MAU?
Not having the app installed but being a monthly active user, not just someone who's driving by because they clicked on a link on mobile seems like an edge case and I'm pretty sure it won't make a difference to the numbers.
It's never about the technology or if it's theoretically feasible but that tracking, push notifications and ad blocking are much better handled in mobile apps for most platforms.
More, as you have the advertising identifiers from Apple / Google on mobile and you are also not able to block tracking scripts / tracking ads like on mobile web (At least not without more effort or installing additional software or a vpn).
This is not true. I’ve worked in this space. Whenever users had the choice, they chose native iOS about two thirds of the time, native Android about a quarter of the time, and web about 10% of the time. This is across all platforms, including desktop, so the actual user preference for web was even lower than that. We didn’t care which platform people used and weren’t pushing people onto native.
Users genuinely prefer native apps. People don’t seem to have any problem accepting this when you compare things like Electron to desktop apps. It matters even more on resource-constrained mobile devices.
> native apps are only made to the benefit of the companies, not the users.
We literally built the apps because people wanted them. The whole reason the App Store exists is because when Steve Jobs told everybody that to build iPhone apps you should build web apps, people revolted and demanded native apps. The preference for native apps over web apps predates the App Store.
I have no idea how Bluesky works as native app, always used the mobile Web version.
Same applies to every other social media web sites I use, and yes I need to click away the banner that regularly asks to install the native app, which would anyway be Electron for mobile.
My problem is usually that I bookmark in the app, but then forget about the bookmarks as they are in the walled garden. I've built something for that a few years ago (https://getbirdfeeder.com) that just sends me my Bluesky (And X, Mastodon etc.) bookmarks straight to my email inbox once a month.
I only install games, apps that are required by specific services in the country, and the streaming apps due to the download capability, everything else is mobile Web.
Same. With the exception of Reddit (which I use a different client for anyway), I tend to just use the sites themselves.
Part of it is just not wanting those apps to invade the rest of my life. I know I can turn off notifications and things, but for some weird reason it helps me stay a bit more detached from social media when I'm forced to rely on the site.
The other part is privacy. I don't want the Facebook app on my phone. I don't want to have to worry about what permissions it wants and whether I've unchecked the right things. Using the web is easier for me in that respect.
To be clear, since the mobile app users are decreasing, what you would actually need to claim is that "web users are more likely to continue using the app than mobile users are", not just that "there are a lot of web users", since the base assumption is that web and mobile users use the site in similar ways. I don't really see any reason to believe the former, and actually having worked on social media extensively I think there's a strong chance that the opposite is true, that if mobile users are declining web users are declining even faster. There's a reason sites push mobile apps so much and it's because retention is normally far better.
A cursory search of bluesky web vs. mobile (surprisingly) suggests that the web experience might actually be better and users seems to recommend it over the app.
This is rare but does suggest a possible effect where users realize this over time and switch.
Not only that, part of the point of the whole "atproto" business is to allow alternate frontends and backends. The official mobile app is kind of bad. A number of people have migrated to Blacksky (alternate backend) following a moderation fallout as well.
Here’s another site that tracks monthly active users based on people posting or other activity such as liking a post. It also shows a decline in activity. Scroll down and it looks like a decline of about 40% over a year.
Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
The distinction is that Mastodon doesn't have to grow, and Bluesky does. There's an extent to which Bluesky is viable because its venture-funded owner pays for the infrastructure it operates on (Mastodon communities generally have to stand on their own two feet). If there's no path for Bluesky to grow into a viable business on its current financial runway, the funding for the infrastructure will end.
It also feels like people running ActivityPub instances are in it for "the culture", it's grass roots, moxie, free, hacker, whatever. ATProto doesn't have the same vibe.
ATProto infrastructure is mostly open and there are folks operating pieces of it independently even if the landscape is dominated by the Bluesky PBC. It's true that Mastodon grew bottom-up without centralized funding so the shuttering of the PBC will be a big deal for the AT ecosystem but it's all independently doable.
I imagine the ATProto infrastructure would survive. Declining activity would be bad for BlueSky, but running a firehose is not that expensive. Many people could fund it themselves. Also, it would get cheaper to run as traffic declines.
Also, the firehose is not strictly necessary either if you’re willing to give up seeing replies from anyone, anywhere and just see the feeds you subscribe to, like an RSS reader.
The hard part is moderation and keeping up with changes in regulations, not the infrastructure itself. Also, continued funding for new development is good. I’m interested in seeing what the permissioned data proposal [1] turns into.
Mastodon isn't trying to compete anyway, it's not a Product(tm) driven by desire for profits, so the people who use it don't care if it "wins" or becomes more popular than whatever other platform. We're all just hanging out socializing and stuff, sharing neat things and discussing things like communities do. It's not easy to accurately estimate active Mastodon/Fediverse users, but then again, I'm not sure anyone really cares either way? lol
I've never been a fan of the "Product driven by desire for profits" line because it simplifies too much into too little imo. The reason people like scale is that it brings a diverse set of interests. For better or for worse, most Mastodon servers I've seen have a pretty similar set of interests. They're really the same constellation of interests I've seen heavily represented on internet forums since the late '90s. There's nothing wrong with that, but between IRC, web blogs, web forums, Reddit, HN, Discords, and conventional social media, I don't think you'll find a shortage of folks interested in those topics.
Meanwhile there's a lot of topics where a critical mass of fans only really exists on Big Tech Social Media and maybe the occasional subject subreddit. The hope of an open platform at scale is to expose those niche interests to open infrastructure.
That also is intentional. You join a server that suits your interests and follow people from other servers to broaden your feed. The goal is to form interlinked communities
Notably, Mastodon servers are genuinely independent servers. The federated experience is third-class. The same-server experience is first-class. It's not trying and hasn't succeeded to build one giant interlinked network the way BGP has for IP addresses.
I am on several socials, personally I like the crowd on Mastodon the best but they all have their charms. I mean friends, furs, family, people I take street photos of, local radio personalities and people who look up to my character can be found in many places.
I'd love to see similar plots after you remove the primary servers in each! To give you a rough idea: 78% of the people I follow on Mastodon are not on the primary instance, and over 80% of my followers are not either.
> Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
It likely is the default of Twitter refugees, but as a Mastodon user none of this is relevant to me! I don't care how many more users a network has, as long as the one I'm on has a healthy number. Very few of the people I follow are likely to leave Mastodon.
I have an account, but nothing draws me back. Classic Twitter had value from really being the "town square." Notable figures (politicians, celebrities, business leaders) were on Twitter and shared their thoughts directly, no PR team.
Of course we were naïve--verified accounts had their own system so they didn't need to interact with us plebs. But in the pre-LLM, pre-bot farm, pre-social media team era, Twitter still represented a genuine public commons. Obama got elected in 2008 due to grassroots activism via social media. Trump got elected through concerted social media manipulation informed by Cambridge Analytica. No matter your political persuasion and opinion on the outcome, the differing methods demonstrate how fundamentally Twitter changed in the interim.
I feel like Bluesky is closest to that original Twitter, except stripped of the notable and influential public sphere. Like if all I wanted to do was interact with my knitting and basket weaving peeps, it's perfect. But Twitter is where the Osama bin Ladin assassination was unwittingly live-tweeted by some guy in Abbottabad. "I get my news from social media" is a negative thing today, implying you are fully captured by the algorithm and manipulated by the people that run bot farm. "I get my news from Twitter" used to mean that you were very well informed and knew what was going on before even the 24/7 news networks. That's not going to happen on Bluesky.
Bluesky is built on the open ATProto federation protocol just like Mastodon is built on ActivityPub, why do you think one is not open source or decentralized?
That seems like comparing apples to oranges. I switched to Mastodon in order to avoid the inevitable enshittification of every service that has anything to do with a corporate entity. I learned my lesson and I am not about to repeat it. And having spent considerable time on Mastodon now, I'm quite happy with the value I'm getting from it and the people I follow. I do not need everybody in the world to be on it. In fact, I actually prefer that many people not be on it.
Blue Sky has 'enough' for me. I don't care if it's the biggest platform. It's got local elected officials, it's got bike racing content and people, it's got software people, and by using it I'm not supporting the white nationalist owner of Twitter, so I'm happy with it. I occasionally post a bit to Threads when I need some more 'reach'.
I don't know what you're seeing in those stats. Bluesky has been shedding users since the inauguration. Mastodon is virtually a hobby project consisting of private servers that could run indefinitely as long as somebody finds it useful for communication in their community.
Neither have any shot of being a twitter replacement. Bluesky has a culture problem and a dishonesty about being p2p problem, and mastodon is too slow/heavy and has a mod problem that is intolerable without a better story about user mobility between servers.
Twitter may just die by itself if somehow a better way for people to publicize their work comes into existence, but all traditional means have been rolled up into big opinionated gatekeeping conglomerates who simply ignore things that compete with any of their interests or threaten any of their advertisers or owners. But even if twitter dies, people aren't moving to bluesky or mastodon.
Just look at the total post stat. It's declining. I don't know if it means total daily or total in past x days, or actual cumulative total, but I don't think it's supposed to be that flat.
On Mastodon, I following hashtags instead of people, which is great because I quickly found lots of interesting things to see and instead of seeing everything those people post, I only see things they post that is a topic I care about.
I wanted to like bluesky, I really tried, but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself, it's off-putting.
I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things.
It'd be like if 90% of twitter was talking about twitter the platform, it's an odd thing to focus on.
When was this? Other than posts from official the Bluesky account (bsky.app) my feed is roughly 0% about Bluesky itself. There was more discussion about Bluesky itself early on, when the contrast with Twitter was more topical.
And I actually wouldn't mind seeing more discussion about atproto. I'm mildly curious about whether anyone is doing anything with it.
And a whole bunch of other stuff about whether people should even be on bluesky, or should be instead on other federations, and it all just feels so meaningless to me.
It's as if someone has invented a few different ways to print, and there's a million interesting things to write about, but everyone in my echo chamber is talking about whether we should be using A4 or letter sized paper.
And to be clear, this is the "for you" feed even after some shaping, the official discover feed is so much US politics it's straight unusable. Plenty of politics still leaks through to "for you", but it's a manageable amount.
There's a dotnet feed I follow too, but honestly it's hard to find any real people to follow between the dotnet foundation reposts, the linkedin grade BS, and the lost musicians. ( Not their fault, the feed picks up any mention of F# as being dotnet! )
Like I said, I want to make bluesky work, it ought to have less engagement bait, and less lock out of anonymous users, but there's a still a lack of critical mass of real people.
I prefer to just stay in the Following feed unless I'm specifically looking for new people to follow. It feels like an easier way to get see the kind of posts I want to see.
If Meta had put Threads on the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub, things could have been so different... maybe there's still time. The engineering philosophy for AT / Bluesky is incredible, being able to develop your own timeline algorithms, distributed moderation agencies, etc. But whenever I give Bluesky a try unfortunately I just can't find people talking about my interests. This seems like a scale problem, which Threads solves.
Nothing is stopping you from building your own AP algorithm either though, right? An "algorithm" is, ultimately, a ranking model that ranks a set of incoming posts based on some criteria no? Nothing stops someone from building their own ranking model for themselves.
I agree that the Bluesky userbase doesn't really talk about the topics I care about and I think the audience is a big factor.
Threads indeed could have used AT protocol to bootstrap Threads audence, but it's likely that a corporate sponsor would not want their brand associated with Bluesky's audience.
There are too many bots on BlueSky. Atleast in the niche I post within (game development). There are lots of automated accounts out there meant to like, repost, and signal boost. I appreciate the gesture but when all your engagement comes from these accounts it’s frustrating. I don’t want retweets and likes, I want people to engage with what I post.
Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives? The most insidious bots are those that leave replies based on keywords in your post. It looks legitimate until you go to their profile and see they are cranking out replies every second to posts in a topic.
Concern about engagement is IMO the root cause issue going all the way back to Twitter. Somewhere around 10 years ago people started focusing on "engagement" instead of just interacting with people organically. Worrying about how to improve their engagement. Not wanting to post on a site if they didn't good engagement. How to monetize engagement. And so on.
Twitter was at its best when it was just a bunch of people figuring out what the fuck it was in the first place. Posting into the ether. Responding to random strangers. Chatting with friends. Whatever.
These sites need less focus on driving engagement, less tools to direct attention to one's post, and more of a focus on organic posting.
The article is about Bluesky, but what I find hard to believe is that Threads has almost twice the MAU compared to X?.. I’ve never met a person that uses Threads in any capacity. Never even heard anyone mention about anything on Threads.
We have ample evidence that platforms whose goal is to shove everyone you've ever met into the same room isn't a good thing. Modest growth and a healthy community that doesn't have to include everyone to succeed seems like a good thing.
Sure, but not if you've taken venture funding. We already have a public, community platform for building slow-growing tight-knit communities: Mastodon/ActivityPub.
It's not one platform. It's a set of independent platforms that sometimes federate. The M/AP federation experience is a third-class experience. Cool kids don't federate, they're already on the server with the people they talk to.
The only promising social network to me was that browser extension that let you comment on every single page, but it was shut down when people freaked out that it (obviously) sent the URL of every page you visited to their servers. I've wanted something like that for so long. There just isn't enough thread-based discussion happening online. It's all buried in what are essentially darkweb chatrooms (unindexed Discord chats)
Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
Interesting, because X is able to work the same. When an obvious bot follows an X account, the user can simply block the bot. Also, your X feed can be configured to show posts only from accounts you follow in chronological order, so if you're following a bot, that's on you. Oh, and X hides replies that are probable spam from bots, though you can view them if you'd like. With my X account, they're around but definitely not on my front porch. It seems like you've been given some pretty egregious misinformation; perhaps people report bad experiences with bots because they don't know how to correctly use the platform?
I’ll pass on using a platform owned by a white nationalist who’s betrayed his daughter, openly admitted attempting to rig elections, raided our government of life saving appropriations, destroyed public records, stolen social security data, and makes nearly all of his profits on government contracts while never paying taxes.
They're charging on windows like hordes of zombies attracted to smell of flesh leaking from a bus as it inches forward. It's a horrible sight.
They're all paid accounts mostly claiming to be from poorer ex-Commonwelath colonies and some deep South Asia, slowly spreading eastward. Many are obviously pasting LLM generated responses, sometimes even leaving in "here are response ideas for such tweet" parts. They're slowly giving up on trying to say anything relevant to Twitter trends and resorting to cultist Islamic or biblical something, but they're still operating in some crazy numbers. Blocking or reporting makes no difference since they never get banned anyway and the accounts are constantly rotated. You can't block 10m acccounts manually.
It just makes no sense that this is even a naturally occurring problem that can be mitigated by some tips and tricks. Clearly it's organized, connected, with a lot of money and effort poured in.
Why would bots be limited to twitter? Wouldn't Bluesky be just as susceptiblle.
I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me.
I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 50.
It's not about susceptibility, it's about actuality. When you open your home page, do you see an army of bots or an army of non-bots? That's what matters.
There isn't an infinite pool of bots out there seeking to get into anything they can. There are like, at most twenty bot actors and they're focused on the most lucrative targets.
Remember when the entire car insurance phone spam in the USA turned out to just be one guy with an army of proxies. There are surprisingly few people at the top of the worldwide spam operations.
Twitter is having bots and spams actively injected rather than them simply existing as a phenomenon. There are not many possible explanation for that other than that its owner is likely wanting them.
The only way in which BlueSky is preferentially catering to the left is by existing as an alternative to X and specifically providing tighter control of what is in your feed; and this is only “catering to the Left” because of the groups towards which X either has weakened or stopped enforcing its policies against harassment towards.
(In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)
X no longer makes the "people dogpiling conservatives is consequence culture" vs "people dogpiling far leftists is harassment" distinction, but BlueSky still does.
Perhaps the asymmetry has something to do with the fact that the conservatives are sharing memes about immigrants eating cats, and similar quality takes, during a profoundly fascist moment in American history, but what do I know? I'm just another snowflake
Everyone is sharing everything. If you only focus on a few extremists (and only on the side you don't like) doing things you don't like, you can prove anything.
Twitter has right wing and center/apolitical people on it, bluesky just has left wing people. They "cater" to them by not clamping down on those people harrassing anyone who joins who doesn't agree with their politics. A smart move, because if they did then the leftists would leave too and they'd have nobody. But the result is they can't even get the centrist/apolitical people to move.
Didn't they immediately ban JD Vance on his first completely innocuous post on the platform?
That's aside from the blatant echo chamber nature of the platform. Both the left and the right post on Twitter. Only the left post on BlueSky.
This probably contributes to the decline, but I think the biggest contributor is the lack of interesting content. If you wanted to gorge on leftist viewpoints wouldn't you just read a leftist subreddit?
"Catering" to the left is too generous, even pandering isn't strong enough. Anyone with dissenting views is group blocked at best and banned at worst. Most of the user loss is thanks to bans, I would bet.
In a way it's good: X is now much better that the more radical Bluesky types went away.
Anecdotally, 90% of the interesting tech/art/gamedev people I’ve followed have moved to Bluesky or Mastodon at this point, and they’re never coming back.
> So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
Maybe the "trick" is to have inertia and network effect. Facebook somehow has 3 billion monthly active users despite literally everything.
Loads of politicians, governments, sports figures, and social media stars set up accounts back when Twitter was just a conversation platform, before people were yipping about "catering" to left or right (whatever that silly nonsense means), and the amazing stickiness of the network effect means they're still there.
As an anecdote, I switched a year or two ago along with most everyone I followed on X.
It’s nothing like the vibe on old Twitter. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ideologically siloed. I’m quite left of center, but everyone on bluesky seems to be a caricature; the blue-haired loonies the right memes about. People there are seriously intolerant of anything other than their perceived orthodoxy. I don’t know what made it this way but it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
A lot of people on Bluesky are pretty normal and if you make a point to block on the first bit of political NPC behavior you can find people that are interested in cat pictures and software and such.
I find it interesting that most conversations about Twitter or Bluesky is about the "political vibe".
Why is that so important?
On Mastodon, if someone keeps posting political stuff to the point where it's a big chunk of my feed, I merely unfollow. As a result my feed has very little politics. Can't you simply do that on Bluesky?
Of course, if you actively want politics, but want just the right kind of politics, then you've dug yourself into a hole.
> it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
You are describing X here. It kind of turned into a very toxic political platform. The exodus to Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky happened for a good reason. After Elon Musk took over it didn't exactly improve.
I'm on still on X, and on Bluesky and Mastodon. For my network of perfectly normal people, most of them did not delete their X account but just aren't very active there any more. Quite a few showed up on Bluesky in the last year or so (30-40%) and some also on Mastodon (~20%). But that just leaves a long tail of random accounts I followed on Twitter that I don't really miss that much. Many of them have gone silent in any case.
I actually don't mind Bluesky. I pretty much ignore algorithmic feeds and just consume content from people I happen to follow in the order it is published. If what you see is blue-haired loonies, might I suggest following less of those.
Organizing people in lists is helpful as well. Mostly the people I follow are the same people I used to follow on X. Their political leanings didn't really change and they still talk about the same kinds of topics. It's just that the noise of random nut bags that I wasn't following to begin with dominating my X feed is completely gone. I don't miss that at all.
In terms of politics, yes. It's a bit like the worst of reddit. Nobody reads the article, everybody gets outraged in the same cliché way. If you try to provide nuance you get derided or blocked. (Blocking seems to be held in high esteem, which I think is also part of the problem.)
Unless you want to expose yourself to the constant inundation of piss that social media has become, you have to curate and block aggressively. Shared block lists that you just subscribe to are one of the few useful innovations Bluesky has made and they need to be standard for all social media in the future.
Blocking is way too harsh a mechanism. If they wanted to innovate they should have invented some soft-block feature.
Thanks to those lists I am blocked by 165 people. I don't insult anyone, I don't even swear. I suspect I get on these lists simply by being a white male (which is I guess obvious from my posts).
>Thanks to those lists I am blocked by 165 people. I don't insult anyone, I don't even swear. I suspect I get on these lists simply by being a white male (which is I guess obvious from my posts).
The reason is obviously not being a "white male" - because there are plenty of white males on Bluesky. If these are the kind of comments you make there it's no wonder people block you.
I don't know what a "soft block" would be, either someone is blocking you or they aren't. Anything that makes curation difficult is doomed to fail because bots and assholes scale exponentially while my time is precious, linear and all too limited. Harsh general mechanisms are sometimes necessary, and no one owes you their time or space.
Apparently I'm blocked by two people. I have absolutely no idea why - maybe it's because I follow Hank Green and he's being cancelled? I barely even use Bluesky. But they have every right to do it and they don't owe me an explanation.
I am very left leaning. You might think I would like Blusky, but I hate it.
I, politely, corrected some people who were posting factually inaccurate anti-AI misinformation.
I was mocked and insulted, called transphobic by someone I had no way of knowing was Trans, accused of mansplaining, and called misogynistic by people I didn't know (or care to know) were women. None of them bothered to discuss the original issue.
It's like arguing about geo-politics with the dude who sleeps in the dumpster behind the liquor store. Even if I win... What was the point?
Reddit is dominated by the left, but there are other voice audible.
Twitter has plenty of leftists. They are very, very, very easy to find, as is every other shape and size of political, ideological, or spiritual thought; far easier than, say, a non-leftist viewpoint on the worldnews or politics subreddits, which because of their default status are much more inescapable than any one Twitter account.
But it could be worse. Bluesky has block list dissemination (à la how, if you make one comment in a "wrong" subreddit, a whole bunch of others will automatically ban you despite never having even heard of them), but I don't think even it ever gets so bad as individual Mastodon instances' ability to self-destruct in spectacularly amusing fashion. mastodon.lol example over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As rvz said in the link,
>This is just one of many Mastodon instances which are undergoing an extinction event which involves: turning against themselves and destroying each other. This time, it is over a children's video game.
That said, I suppose that such self-immolation might be a good thing; sort of an immune system-like response. There are many, many mentally ill that steep far too long in Bluesky (and 80% of Reddit)'s ever-boiling toxic soup.
What does this comment even mean? Substitute "left" for any other adjective, like "purple" or "embobulated" and it's equally meaningless: "There are very, very few non-embobulated people on Bluesky."
no. The person saying there are few non left people is clear, as is the person pretending they can’t understand what that means. You would know that from the lack of enquiry in the comment you responded to.
How, when according to you, they're dominating Reddit and Bsky?
Baring the possibility that people on the left use all the platforms, and people on the right don't for some reason, an excess on one platform has to mean a shortage on another.
"For Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities."
Bluesky and Threads both have a fundamental issue in that their entire pitch is "We are like Twitter, but we are not run by Elon Musk, a Republican." Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones that were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place. When you whole pitch has zero appeal to 95% of people, its dead.
Yeah, I agree. It's the inverse of the problem Scott Alexander has observed in the past: when you make an alternative platform based on the premise of "we won't ban people based on having unpopular views", you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views. It turns your platform into an awful place that nobody wants to associate with, even if they agree that it's bad to ban people for having unpopular views.
Not sure what to say about Threads. I mean, if you have an Instagram account they’ll try to give you a Threads account and photos I post to Insta automatically go to Threads so I am probably in the top 5% of Threads posters though I hardly ever log in. I am happy if people see my photos on Insta or Threads or LinkedIn or Nextdoor or wherever.
Thread’s notifications are just plain weird like it is usually clickbait where you can’t tell if they love Trump or hate Trump and if the one sexy cosplayer/alt fashion model I follow because I know her in IRL did something provocative with her friend who has tattoos from head to toe, Threads thinks this is front page news.
Musk is not just a republican, he's pushing far-right parties everywhere else in the world (plus, the "roman" thing). He's the textbook definition of why social networks should not have recommendation algorithms other than "chronological view of who you actively chose the follow".
He can say whatever he wants, but buying one of the biggest social network to push his ideology onto billions leaves "freedom of saying whatever one wants" territory to enter "let's buy elections by controlling what enter people's feeds".
yeah im pretty fucking hard left wing, i would still have probably used twitter in this current day if it hadn't just become a total cesspool. i used bluesky because my friends moved there and tbh the custom feeds are a great feature. could not care about the owners political leanings as long as they are not being actively and outwardly malicious... pretty much most of my social media usage went down the hill when they just became outrage/outwardly racist/ai infested cesspits. i neeeeeed something more than my small local groups to keep up with my hobbies so i use reddit. but in 2025 i deleted my account and made a new one from scratch that was highly tailored and streamlined vs my 2011 account that had soooooooooooooooo many shitty subs still subbed.
Twitter's fundamental issue is that it's entire pitch is "You can say the most outrageous things on the planet, share race-baiting videos, and be a scumbag as long as it doesn't anger Elon. Also, we're down with child pornography"
Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones who were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place.
Bluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen. Hands down. I can't imagine anyone enjoying it unless they're 1) super into the US politics/domestic issues AND 2) politically aligned with the main user base of Bluesky.
But somehow the devs of Bluesky never thought of making it the default tab. They should be making a better Twitter but what they're actually building is just Truth Social for the left.
If you are careful about who you follow and you click on “less like this” whenever you see hysterical stuff about politics the “discover” feed is pretty good, in fact back when I was concerned about this I found it has 30% as much hysterical stuff about politics as my “following” feed.
Until your thumb slips while trying to hit the dots, the post gets focused, and now you're spending the next three hours telling the algorithm to stop showing you diaper kink artwork because it thinks you must be into that since you looked closer at it.
Almost as bad as tiktok repeatedly showing you promos for the same product because you didn't swipe away in less than five seconds.
FWIW I find much more politically motivated posting outside of the big social media platforms than on it. I suspect it's a combination of algorithmic downranking and just the fact that more politically motivated users are going to be on alternative social media.
My socials (FB(not much)/Insta/TikTok) have fantastic algorithms, I they uplift my mood, have been responsible for positive changes in my mindset and life, etc. When I used X or bluesky or Reddit they have a noticeable negative impact on my mental state. Hackernews is 50/50.
So I think social media which is content/image based can be more positive than the discussion based media.
However we're getting more and more AI slop and AI generated art and reels and while people for the most part destroy it in the comment section, it would be nice for them to never show up in my feeds.
Whenever I point out (in agreement with your statement) that the idea that the left and the right are somehow equally bad is a kind of fantasy on HN I usually get downvoted. People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong. Yeah, often things are more complicated than they appear, but I find it almost hilarious how often you can't do that in American politics. And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines.
> People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong.
> And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines.
Seems like you've fallen to the same fallacy within the same paragraph, which is quite ironic.
the thing is that the "left" in the US (and then on HN) have almost no political representation. The Democrats aren't left, just the leftest available. They aren't better than the Republicans at all.
This is exactly the kind of thing the parent poster was talking about.
The Democrats certainly aren't left, and they're not great, but we live in a world where the Republican party ranges between refusing to condemn and openly supporting white nationalism, gloats about making trans people's lives worse, encourages police to use unnecessary force, etc. even before we get in to the impacts of their economic policies.
Despite being a massive disappointment as far as actually making positive changes, one is still obviously miles better than the other because they're not trying to drive the car the wrong way as fast as possible. Claiming that the two major US parties are no different requires willfully ignoring a lot of bad stuff that one party does for which there is no comparison on the other side. There are absolutely specific issues on which there is often no meaningful difference but as a whole there is a universe of difference.
Showing my age, about 35 years ago, someone (wish I remember who, but google probably knows), wrote an article in Analog magazine called "The Dogma of Otherness" that spoke to the tendency of a certain demographic to always try to understand different perspectives, even when those perspectives were objectively hostile.
Some people just can't not think in shades of gray.
I have a lurking account and follow some other accounts, but I’m not interested in “liking” or “reposting” any posts. I want to keep my usage and engagement as low as possible. The “For You” feed doesn’t work for this need because it relies on signals like liking content.
I agree that the Discover feed sucks (why does it show posts from people I’m following when there’s a dedicated tab for that?). But I’d rather have a better Discover feed than me having to do more work on the “For You” feed.
'show more/less like this' should work[0] with cowboy's for you feed. 'more/less' was proprietary for discover but they've rolled it out to other feeds now[1].
I think it's part of an interactions object passed to the feed operator. You can see what's potentially passed here[2].
How is this post, which fundamentally misunderstands Bluesky, the top post in the thread? The default tab on Bluesky is a chronological feed from just the people you follow, with no algorithm, just how most people want it.
The false equivalency is so funny, you mean a platform where the president sells private access to his massive lies ahead of time so that you can front run the market?
The one where war crimes are directly equivocated and WW3 is regularly threatened?
The one where anti-vax conspiracy is gospel, up is down, and black is white?
Get the biggest pile of hippy dippy bullshit together and you'll never compare to the toxic waste dump of "Truth" Social.
I hope against hope that people started to realize that the problem isn't the platform, it's the entire approach.
Who am I kidding, people just realized that Bluesky wasn't going to be the next big thing and so it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
What does success look like? I get what I want from Twitter/X through a pull through cache. I get to read the folks I follow on Bluesky. Works for me? My feed as a utility is working as expected. I keep what I want to read, and mute and block that which I do not. I remain in control of my data and experience of the firehose. If someone I'd like to see on Bluesky is not yet there, I ask them to be. If there is data on Bluesky not yet there but that might have value to others, I pipe it in via a PDS and pub sub automation.
How would email and RSS be the next big thing? Because that is what https://atproto.com/ is, and to some extent, here. A private entity or individual cannot capture the AT Protocol network as happened to Twitter/X, it has already succeeded.
Certainly, this is a different perspective than "What metrics can we use to value this entity we're going to attempt to flip to someone else?" Worst case, the public benefit corp is converted to a non profit and tax deductible donations are used (potentially with a foundational fund built to operate in perpetuity, think Wikipedia) to fund the underlying storage and distribution infrastructure and labor costs for operations, similar to Signal and many other tech non profits.
I think there are two things going on. After launch, there was an exuberant group of users who believed the purpose or aim of Bluesky was to be a recreation of Twitter in terms of user base and impact. They were lead on by the icon a bit and lots of rhetoric. And I think many believed it would destroy X. By their standards, Bluesky is an epic failure.
But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.
Given what Musk did back at the time - member him carrying a sink? Randomly unplugging servers? - it was not that much of a stretch to assume the BS would eventually catch up with him and Twitter would enter the FO phase of FAFO.
Unfortunately, for unfathomable reasons Twitter is still alive somehow, despite being a cesspit of Russian propaganda, far-right propaganda, general trolls and a ton of porn sellers... I frankly assume the porn is what keeps a lot of people on there instead of Truth Social or one of the countless other attempts.
This is a very... Hacker News viewpoint that I think is quite popular in tech circles, and literally unheard of for most beyond. I don't think this is a matter of raising awareness either, it's the usual disconnect between people who take pleasure in learning about and using technology, and the average person who wants to minimize friction and inputs between them and tuning out.
I don't think that Bluesky is a success as an app or site, I think it's an example of ideological stagnation and evidence of an online political culture that's come unmoored from reality, which seems to be the trend for social media. It's not a very good place to be, and the most active parts of it are frankly really boring and thoughtless just like the rest of the social media landscape... albeit with a left-of-center flavor. As for the protocol... great? I've been hearing about the next big thing in fighting centralization and corporatization here for a loooong time, and it really feels like Charlie Brown kicking at the spot where a football used to be, over and over.
If the point is to come up with novel solutions to a problem in service of a tiny minority represented here... then great. It's a success. If the point is to ever compete with something on a different scale then this seems like treading water to me.
I think there's some truth there, but the bigger shift IMO has been that companies, politicians and institutions have begun to notice that volume on social media doesn't translate to irl opinions. Left or right, social media is dominated by the loudest, most dedicated extremists with the most insane focus on single issues. You and I have lives, we can't compete with someone who pulls 12 hour days editing Wikipedia, cranking out Tweets, spinning up bots to vote and sock puppets to react.
It's a lesson I think we all need to learn over and over: the loudest are not really the most representative, they're just the loudest. Online I'd add that they're often the craziest and least able to compromise.
The surest thing in tech for the past couple of years is that bluesky has fewer users than it did last month. It's entire life is due to lib slactivism. It started under the conceit of being a p2p public service, took VC, and its founder bailed and badmouthed it. It's entire existence is ideological, which is why its boosters sound like evangelists.
This is just media promotion, hopefully to bump up user numbers for a week or two, but really so the people who work at the VC firms that put money into this dog have something to show to their bosses.
I'd disagree with that, I'd say its entire life is due to the shittifying of Twitter. People, like myself, sought to recreate the experience of what Twitter used to be like and (after trying and not being satisfied with Mastodon) it's the next best thing. The problem is that a social network of this kind relies on having a large enough population to feel "live" and Bluesky has never got there.
There have been glimmers of hope... during the NBA finals and the World Cup Bluesky felt like a genuine destination for live sports. But it might be too little too late.
I agree (in a way), but I don't think that people who went to Bluesky were trying to recreate twitter, they were trying to silence twitter. The past they are pining for was a past when people they didn't like weren't allowed to speak, and they were hoping (in a non-userlike, political way) that bluesky would threaten twitter, and force it to behave in the way that they preferred or to shut down. Then they would all be able to go back to the ideologically-pruned twitter of their dreams, or twitter would go bankrupt (the bankruptcy narratives were endless) and everyone would move to bluesky.
They were hoping that twitter would go the way of Digg. It's very similar to the fantasy that they had about Reddit after the API shutdown. Slacktivism.
The fact that twitter is as active as ever is why they slink back. I'd bet 90% of actives on bluesky also have twitter accounts that are more active. Twitter didn't care when they walked away; in fact it was a relief. A great many of them were extreme trolls and reply guys who spent the rest of their time mass-reporting people for disagreeing with them.
And for the few people who thought of this as the p2p answer to twitter (an obsession among programming p2p nerds - including me - for a long time) it has to be a disappointment that the company obviously has no intention of relinquishing control of a thing.
I feel like some folks who don’t use Bluesky, evidently yourself included, have this very distinct notion of what a Bluesky user is. All I can tell you is it doesn’t match at all with the experience I have on the service.
You are projecting a lot on this imaginary Bluesky user. You’ve crafted an entire narrative in your head about how egotistical they were and how crushed they are at Twitter still being around. I don’t really know how to respond to creative fiction.
My friend on Bluesky openly said he wanted Twitter gone and he’s been hoping it would die. He’s also a big fan of reporting people on the app.
I’m not put off by his desires but I’m mildly surprised you’re denying him and others existence. Ironically, it feeds into the GP’s “silence” narrative
Anyone can pick a single example of an extreme user. I could pick a virulent antisemite, racist X user and say it represents X as a whole, would you agree with that? I suspect not.
I haven’t. Bluesky gives me enough of the old Twitter content to satisfy me so I don’t really see a reason to, especially when my dislike for Elon Musk’s politics is strong enough to dissuade me from giving money to him when I can avoid it.
I tried Bluesky after Threads because the ads were getting to me.
I reposted one picture of my favorite bird, the albatross, and then my feed was 100% bird pictures. I'm not interested in birds generally, just albatrosses specifically. But they were nice enough pictures so I kept using the app.
Then I tried telling it about my other interest which was robotics, and so I started liking posts about autonomous cars. Specifically, one day I liked a picture of some guy filming in in his car some other guy sleeping in his Tesla while it was driving autonomously on the highway.
After that my feed was flooded with selfies of dudes in their car. Like, "goodmorning sunshine, off to work, here's a quick selfie of me". Every time I opened the app it was just a parade of bird pictures and selfies of bearded dudes in their cars. At least on Threads the thirst traps were thirsty!
Bluesky had no idea what my interests were. On Threads we used to do a thing like "Hey @algorithm, send me people who are interested in X Y Z" and that worked. Actually first it didn't and then Threads made it official after so many people did it. But even still when it wasn't official it still seemed Threads was able to provide a better feed than Bluesky.
So I quit. Congrats Bluesky, tough feat but you've somehow found a way to be more annoying than ads.
These algorithms are supposed to be helping me discover new interests, but instead they make me cautious about what I click on. I watch two seconds of some video I ultimately don't care for and then get my feed chockfull of THAT shit forever.
I so miss the days when the Internet was more random. It's not really nostalgia - it WAS better.
I tried Threads a tiny bit but its algorithm seemed obsessed with trying to rage-bait me. Like I get that it is one way to drive engagement but everything was just bad takes about my interests with lots of replies correcting them… It was never an enjoyable platform to use because of that.
I ended up finding a good group of people to follow on Mastodon so didn’t end up even trying Bluesky (although I do follow some accounts from there through the bridge)
This thread is primed for shitting on Bluesky, but the level of discourse among the people I follow has only grown over the past few years. In no way does it feel like a dying platform. (Same for Mastodon, actually.)
You can tell who here doesn't use bluesky. They're self reporting. It's like going to chicago, seeing a homeless person act crazy, then leaving and telling everyone that it's a crime ridden shit hole. They're just parroting the same shit everyone else who's never used it are parroting
It has improved a lot since the acquisition. Before the bot purge X was basically crypto shillers or scammers. X now actually feels more organic than, Facebook. Sometimes I see content on X before they eventually gets reposted on Reddit.
You cannot be serious. On the rare occasion that I do open it up for whatever reason, I'm immediately stunned by the cesspit that greets me. I refuse to believe that's not like 90% bots.
Bluesky's problem isn't technical, it's all about network effects. I begrudgingly read twitter because everyone I follow is on twitter. Bluesky is far more pleasant to use too!
Define "far left". In comparison to MAGA? The Overton window of the US has shifted so far right that universal healthcare and free education are seen as one step removed from communism.
I had the exactly opposite experience. I'm even selfhosting my own (non-reference implementation) PDS, and going in I was fully expecting to encounter weird consistency issues, but there were none at all.
I notice that the stat the article repeatedly quotes is MAU for usage of the mobile app, but one of the things I love about Bluesky is that you don’t need to use a mobile app to have a good UX. I use the mobile browser to access it, so I’m not in that MAU number. Perhaps bsky has a larger number of active users that don’t use the app?
You aren’t logged in on the browser when you use it?
The figures used don't count browser users at all, signed in or not
Weird why not? I can’t read the article due to some nightmarish anti Adblock software they use wtf
So you didn’t read the article, made an assumption about its content, question someone who did, then blame Adblock for your confusion, instead of just following the conversation?
No I was confused that they wouldn’t count the browser users when there is no good reason to when they try to eval their user base? MAU commonly includes web users as well.
I blame TechCrunch for creating a website that I can’t read but yea fair criticism I didn’t read the article.
I didn’t question GP i asked if they knew why web users aren’t counted.
Do they explain in the article why they would only count mobile users as MAU?
Not having the app installed but being a monthly active user, not just someone who's driving by because they clicked on a link on mobile seems like an edge case and I'm pretty sure it won't make a difference to the numbers.
A website being used in a web browser seems to you like an edge case?! Really?
If that's really a common view, we really did lose the plot.
For a social media site on mobile, yes.
We really lost the plot, then. None of the user-facing and user-benefiting features of the social media apps need native-specific capabilities.
It's never about the technology or if it's theoretically feasible but that tracking, push notifications and ad blocking are much better handled in mobile apps for most platforms.
I'm not sure I follow. Do you think that someone using the Twitter app is more or less tracked than someone using their mobile web browser?
More, as you have the advertising identifiers from Apple / Google on mobile and you are also not able to block tracking scripts / tracking ads like on mobile web (At least not without more effort or installing additional software or a vpn).
Then we are in agreement: native apps are only made to the benefit of the companies, not the users.
This is not true. I’ve worked in this space. Whenever users had the choice, they chose native iOS about two thirds of the time, native Android about a quarter of the time, and web about 10% of the time. This is across all platforms, including desktop, so the actual user preference for web was even lower than that. We didn’t care which platform people used and weren’t pushing people onto native.
Users genuinely prefer native apps. People don’t seem to have any problem accepting this when you compare things like Electron to desktop apps. It matters even more on resource-constrained mobile devices.
You are talking about their choices over distribution channels. I'm talking about who gets to benefit about the features offered by these platforms.
> native apps are only made to the benefit of the companies, not the users.
We literally built the apps because people wanted them. The whole reason the App Store exists is because when Steve Jobs told everybody that to build iPhone apps you should build web apps, people revolted and demanded native apps. The preference for native apps over web apps predates the App Store.
I have zero social media apps installed. Nobody in my family has social media apps. We are not the majority, but we do exist…
I have no idea how Bluesky works as native app, always used the mobile Web version.
Same applies to every other social media web sites I use, and yes I need to click away the banner that regularly asks to install the native app, which would anyway be Electron for mobile.
One of the main reasons I don't use the app is that it makes it harder to bookmark.
My problem is usually that I bookmark in the app, but then forget about the bookmarks as they are in the walled garden. I've built something for that a few years ago (https://getbirdfeeder.com) that just sends me my Bluesky (And X, Mastodon etc.) bookmarks straight to my email inbox once a month.
That's funny because the Bluesky app is the only social media app that I have installed. Everything else I do from the browser.
I only install games, apps that are required by specific services in the country, and the streaming apps due to the download capability, everything else is mobile Web.
Same. With the exception of Reddit (which I use a different client for anyway), I tend to just use the sites themselves.
Part of it is just not wanting those apps to invade the rest of my life. I know I can turn off notifications and things, but for some weird reason it helps me stay a bit more detached from social media when I'm forced to rely on the site.
The other part is privacy. I don't want the Facebook app on my phone. I don't want to have to worry about what permissions it wants and whether I've unchecked the right things. Using the web is easier for me in that respect.
To be clear, since the mobile app users are decreasing, what you would actually need to claim is that "web users are more likely to continue using the app than mobile users are", not just that "there are a lot of web users", since the base assumption is that web and mobile users use the site in similar ways. I don't really see any reason to believe the former, and actually having worked on social media extensively I think there's a strong chance that the opposite is true, that if mobile users are declining web users are declining even faster. There's a reason sites push mobile apps so much and it's because retention is normally far better.
A cursory search of bluesky web vs. mobile (surprisingly) suggests that the web experience might actually be better and users seems to recommend it over the app.
This is rare but does suggest a possible effect where users realize this over time and switch.
I am extremely active on Bluesky, particularly on mobile. I use the PWA instead of the app on mobile. It works better for me.
Not only that, part of the point of the whole "atproto" business is to allow alternate frontends and backends. The official mobile app is kind of bad. A number of people have migrated to Blacksky (alternate backend) following a moderation fallout as well.
> you don't need to use a mobile app
Since they're apparently tracking mobile app MAUs as a KPI, expect this to change.
I sincerely hope not. That would not have the intended effect on me: I’d stop using bluesky. I’m just not that addicted to it.
Here’s another site that tracks monthly active users based on people posting or other activity such as liking a post. It also shows a decline in activity. Scroll down and it looks like a decline of about 40% over a year.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m
90% of those disappeared users were banned for not being members of their bubble.
I've been an active user for ages now and I didn't even know they had an app! the mobile website works very well.
In fact, this is the same codebase as Bluesky uses react-native-web.
I’m probably in the minority but 99% of my bsky usage is on web desktop.
Maybe Bluesky is not quite the Twitter rival it set out to be, but it's got a better shot than Mastodon, according to the user count graphs here:
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
https://mastodon-analytics.com/
Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
The distinction is that Mastodon doesn't have to grow, and Bluesky does. There's an extent to which Bluesky is viable because its venture-funded owner pays for the infrastructure it operates on (Mastodon communities generally have to stand on their own two feet). If there's no path for Bluesky to grow into a viable business on its current financial runway, the funding for the infrastructure will end.
We already have others running infrastructure as well so if bsky goes away the platform can survive
Will it though? Where mastodon is much more distributed, bluesky/ATProto use is highly concentrated on bsky.app
ATProto needs bluesky to survive.
The only source of truth is hosted by bluesky
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1892 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/2821
It also feels like people running ActivityPub instances are in it for "the culture", it's grass roots, moxie, free, hacker, whatever. ATProto doesn't have the same vibe.
Over 99.99% of users (actual number, not hyperbole) are using bluesky's infrastructure. If it goes away, the platform dies.
ATProto infrastructure is mostly open and there are folks operating pieces of it independently even if the landscape is dominated by the Bluesky PBC. It's true that Mastodon grew bottom-up without centralized funding so the shuttering of the PBC will be a big deal for the AT ecosystem but it's all independently doable.
Everything is doable, I'm just completing the comparison the preceding comment made.
I imagine the ATProto infrastructure would survive. Declining activity would be bad for BlueSky, but running a firehose is not that expensive. Many people could fund it themselves. Also, it would get cheaper to run as traffic declines.
Also, the firehose is not strictly necessary either if you’re willing to give up seeing replies from anyone, anywhere and just see the feeds you subscribe to, like an RSS reader.
The hard part is moderation and keeping up with changes in regulations, not the infrastructure itself. Also, continued funding for new development is good. I’m interested in seeing what the permissioned data proposal [1] turns into.
[1] https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0016-p...
Mastodon isn't trying to compete anyway, it's not a Product(tm) driven by desire for profits, so the people who use it don't care if it "wins" or becomes more popular than whatever other platform. We're all just hanging out socializing and stuff, sharing neat things and discussing things like communities do. It's not easy to accurately estimate active Mastodon/Fediverse users, but then again, I'm not sure anyone really cares either way? lol
I've never been a fan of the "Product driven by desire for profits" line because it simplifies too much into too little imo. The reason people like scale is that it brings a diverse set of interests. For better or for worse, most Mastodon servers I've seen have a pretty similar set of interests. They're really the same constellation of interests I've seen heavily represented on internet forums since the late '90s. There's nothing wrong with that, but between IRC, web blogs, web forums, Reddit, HN, Discords, and conventional social media, I don't think you'll find a shortage of folks interested in those topics.
Meanwhile there's a lot of topics where a critical mass of fans only really exists on Big Tech Social Media and maybe the occasional subject subreddit. The hope of an open platform at scale is to expose those niche interests to open infrastructure.
That also is intentional. You join a server that suits your interests and follow people from other servers to broaden your feed. The goal is to form interlinked communities
Notably, Mastodon servers are genuinely independent servers. The federated experience is third-class. The same-server experience is first-class. It's not trying and hasn't succeeded to build one giant interlinked network the way BGP has for IP addresses.
I am on several socials, personally I like the crowd on Mastodon the best but they all have their charms. I mean friends, furs, family, people I take street photos of, local radio personalities and people who look up to my character can be found in many places.
I'd love to see similar plots after you remove the primary servers in each! To give you a rough idea: 78% of the people I follow on Mastodon are not on the primary instance, and over 80% of my followers are not either.
> Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
It likely is the default of Twitter refugees, but as a Mastodon user none of this is relevant to me! I don't care how many more users a network has, as long as the one I'm on has a healthy number. Very few of the people I follow are likely to leave Mastodon.
Disagree heavily.
I find Mastodon/the fediverse has far better engagement and longevity due to being open source and decentralized.
Bluesky is an island on its own, just trying to be a Twitter copy and nothing more.
Ever since Twitter lost the plot, that’s a good thing. I wish we had 20010-era Twitter back.
Bluesky is for you.
I have an account, but nothing draws me back. Classic Twitter had value from really being the "town square." Notable figures (politicians, celebrities, business leaders) were on Twitter and shared their thoughts directly, no PR team.
Of course we were naïve--verified accounts had their own system so they didn't need to interact with us plebs. But in the pre-LLM, pre-bot farm, pre-social media team era, Twitter still represented a genuine public commons. Obama got elected in 2008 due to grassroots activism via social media. Trump got elected through concerted social media manipulation informed by Cambridge Analytica. No matter your political persuasion and opinion on the outcome, the differing methods demonstrate how fundamentally Twitter changed in the interim.
I feel like Bluesky is closest to that original Twitter, except stripped of the notable and influential public sphere. Like if all I wanted to do was interact with my knitting and basket weaving peeps, it's perfect. But Twitter is where the Osama bin Ladin assassination was unwittingly live-tweeted by some guy in Abbottabad. "I get my news from social media" is a negative thing today, implying you are fully captured by the algorithm and manipulated by the people that run bot farm. "I get my news from Twitter" used to mean that you were very well informed and knew what was going on before even the 24/7 news networks. That's not going to happen on Bluesky.
Bluesky is built on the open ATProto federation protocol just like Mastodon is built on ActivityPub, why do you think one is not open source or decentralized?
That seems like comparing apples to oranges. I switched to Mastodon in order to avoid the inevitable enshittification of every service that has anything to do with a corporate entity. I learned my lesson and I am not about to repeat it. And having spent considerable time on Mastodon now, I'm quite happy with the value I'm getting from it and the people I follow. I do not need everybody in the world to be on it. In fact, I actually prefer that many people not be on it.
Blue Sky has 'enough' for me. I don't care if it's the biggest platform. It's got local elected officials, it's got bike racing content and people, it's got software people, and by using it I'm not supporting the white nationalist owner of Twitter, so I'm happy with it. I occasionally post a bit to Threads when I need some more 'reach'.
I don't know what you're seeing in those stats. Bluesky has been shedding users since the inauguration. Mastodon is virtually a hobby project consisting of private servers that could run indefinitely as long as somebody finds it useful for communication in their community.
Neither have any shot of being a twitter replacement. Bluesky has a culture problem and a dishonesty about being p2p problem, and mastodon is too slow/heavy and has a mod problem that is intolerable without a better story about user mobility between servers.
Twitter may just die by itself if somehow a better way for people to publicize their work comes into existence, but all traditional means have been rolled up into big opinionated gatekeeping conglomerates who simply ignore things that compete with any of their interests or threaten any of their advertisers or owners. But even if twitter dies, people aren't moving to bluesky or mastodon.
Just look at the total post stat. It's declining. I don't know if it means total daily or total in past x days, or actual cumulative total, but I don't think it's supposed to be that flat.
Bluesky could have been a Reddit rival, with the ability to follow topics rather than users, but they screwed it up.
On Mastodon, I following hashtags instead of people, which is great because I quickly found lots of interesting things to see and instead of seeing everything those people post, I only see things they post that is a topic I care about.
Wait, Mastodon has 10 million users and 8000 servers? That's way more than I would of guessed. So Mastodon is a real thing in the world now.
Twitter has something like a half a billion users. So it wins I guess...
I wanted to like bluesky, I really tried, but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself, it's off-putting.
I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things.
It'd be like if 90% of twitter was talking about twitter the platform, it's an odd thing to focus on.
When was this? Other than posts from official the Bluesky account (bsky.app) my feed is roughly 0% about Bluesky itself. There was more discussion about Bluesky itself early on, when the contrast with Twitter was more topical.
And I actually wouldn't mind seeing more discussion about atproto. I'm mildly curious about whether anyone is doing anything with it.
Perhaps it's the crowd I've followed and I've fallen down a niche, but I keep getting pushed threads such as this: https://bsky.app/profile/palle.eurosky.social/post/3msirglff...
And a whole bunch of other stuff about whether people should even be on bluesky, or should be instead on other federations, and it all just feels so meaningless to me.
It's as if someone has invented a few different ways to print, and there's a million interesting things to write about, but everyone in my echo chamber is talking about whether we should be using A4 or letter sized paper.
And to be clear, this is the "for you" feed even after some shaping, the official discover feed is so much US politics it's straight unusable. Plenty of politics still leaks through to "for you", but it's a manageable amount.
There's a dotnet feed I follow too, but honestly it's hard to find any real people to follow between the dotnet foundation reposts, the linkedin grade BS, and the lost musicians. ( Not their fault, the feed picks up any mention of F# as being dotnet! )
Like I said, I want to make bluesky work, it ought to have less engagement bait, and less lock out of anonymous users, but there's a still a lack of critical mass of real people.
I prefer to just stay in the Following feed unless I'm specifically looking for new people to follow. It feels like an easier way to get see the kind of posts I want to see.
The “for you” algorithm is your problem. Don’t use it.
>but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself,
Fix your feeds then. I don't have this issue
If Meta had put Threads on the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub, things could have been so different... maybe there's still time. The engineering philosophy for AT / Bluesky is incredible, being able to develop your own timeline algorithms, distributed moderation agencies, etc. But whenever I give Bluesky a try unfortunately I just can't find people talking about my interests. This seems like a scale problem, which Threads solves.
Meta's ActivityPub is very fake, it's not only off by default and functionally limited, but also has a dark pattern to get you turn it off.
It would be the same if they do ATP.
Nothing is stopping you from building your own AP algorithm either though, right? An "algorithm" is, ultimately, a ranking model that ranks a set of incoming posts based on some criteria no? Nothing stops someone from building their own ranking model for themselves.
I agree that the Bluesky userbase doesn't really talk about the topics I care about and I think the audience is a big factor.
Anything on AP or AT can bridge both ways anyway
Threads indeed could have used AT protocol to bootstrap Threads audence, but it's likely that a corporate sponsor would not want their brand associated with Bluesky's audience.
There are too many bots on BlueSky. Atleast in the niche I post within (game development). There are lots of automated accounts out there meant to like, repost, and signal boost. I appreciate the gesture but when all your engagement comes from these accounts it’s frustrating. I don’t want retweets and likes, I want people to engage with what I post.
Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives? The most insidious bots are those that leave replies based on keywords in your post. It looks legitimate until you go to their profile and see they are cranking out replies every second to posts in a topic.
> Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives?
I don't think there's anything other than - there are more people on twitter; due to first mover advantage and inertia
Concern about engagement is IMO the root cause issue going all the way back to Twitter. Somewhere around 10 years ago people started focusing on "engagement" instead of just interacting with people organically. Worrying about how to improve their engagement. Not wanting to post on a site if they didn't good engagement. How to monetize engagement. And so on.
Twitter was at its best when it was just a bunch of people figuring out what the fuck it was in the first place. Posting into the ether. Responding to random strangers. Chatting with friends. Whatever.
These sites need less focus on driving engagement, less tools to direct attention to one's post, and more of a focus on organic posting.
The article is about Bluesky, but what I find hard to believe is that Threads has almost twice the MAU compared to X?.. I’ve never met a person that uses Threads in any capacity. Never even heard anyone mention about anything on Threads.
Are these numbers skewed somehow?
I'd expect it to be cross-pollination from Instagram being tied to Threads
I suspect Meta just counts every Instagram user as a Threads user
X was popular but never had that many users, not even back in the Twitter days. This is a big part of why Twitter was so easily acquired.
We have ample evidence that platforms whose goal is to shove everyone you've ever met into the same room isn't a good thing. Modest growth and a healthy community that doesn't have to include everyone to succeed seems like a good thing.
Sure, but not if you've taken venture funding. We already have a public, community platform for building slow-growing tight-knit communities: Mastodon/ActivityPub.
It's not one platform. It's a set of independent platforms that sometimes federate. The M/AP federation experience is a third-class experience. Cool kids don't federate, they're already on the server with the people they talk to.
Toni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...
The only promising social network to me was that browser extension that let you comment on every single page, but it was shut down when people freaked out that it (obviously) sent the URL of every page you visited to their servers. I've wanted something like that for so long. There just isn't enough thread-based discussion happening online. It's all buried in what are essentially darkweb chatrooms (unindexed Discord chats)
I’ve come to think there’s no “better” social media.
People just seem to leave social media entirely.
The numbers seem to support the premise that people are leaving text-based social media.
TikTok and YouTube are still growing, while Reddit, Facebook, X and the rest are stagnant or shrinking
there's nothing you can do technically to fix bluesky.
people just hate social networks at this point in this timeline.
Is there a different timeline?
Yeah, but it's behind a cosmic paywall.
Oh my gods, this is such a fantastic line. I wish I could upvote this bit several more times
Twitter's not doing too bad: 550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates
So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
80% are bots, 10% trolls, and 5% foreign agents.
I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.
The real percentage of bots on X is a baseline of 10% and can quadruple around contentious topics; see: https://www.clickguard.com/blog/twitter-spam-bots/
Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
We get to block them. They may exist but they’re invisible.
The bots and trolls and agents on X are always on your front porch.
Interesting, because X is able to work the same. When an obvious bot follows an X account, the user can simply block the bot. Also, your X feed can be configured to show posts only from accounts you follow in chronological order, so if you're following a bot, that's on you. Oh, and X hides replies that are probable spam from bots, though you can view them if you'd like. With my X account, they're around but definitely not on my front porch. It seems like you've been given some pretty egregious misinformation; perhaps people report bad experiences with bots because they don't know how to correctly use the platform?
I’ll pass on using a platform owned by a white nationalist who’s betrayed his daughter, openly admitted attempting to rig elections, raided our government of life saving appropriations, destroyed public records, stolen social security data, and makes nearly all of his profits on government contracts while never paying taxes.
Indeed. Recent choice words from Musk:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
Indistinguishable from Stormfront. And his account (along with other far-right accounts) are the most engaged-with accounts on the platform.
They're charging on windows like hordes of zombies attracted to smell of flesh leaking from a bus as it inches forward. It's a horrible sight.
They're all paid accounts mostly claiming to be from poorer ex-Commonwelath colonies and some deep South Asia, slowly spreading eastward. Many are obviously pasting LLM generated responses, sometimes even leaving in "here are response ideas for such tweet" parts. They're slowly giving up on trying to say anything relevant to Twitter trends and resorting to cultist Islamic or biblical something, but they're still operating in some crazy numbers. Blocking or reporting makes no difference since they never get banned anyway and the accounts are constantly rotated. You can't block 10m acccounts manually.
It just makes no sense that this is even a naturally occurring problem that can be mitigated by some tips and tricks. Clearly it's organized, connected, with a lot of money and effort poured in.
Why would bots be limited to twitter? Wouldn't Bluesky be just as susceptiblle.
I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me.
I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 50.
It's not about susceptibility, it's about actuality. When you open your home page, do you see an army of bots or an army of non-bots? That's what matters.
There isn't an infinite pool of bots out there seeking to get into anything they can. There are like, at most twenty bot actors and they're focused on the most lucrative targets.
Remember when the entire car insurance phone spam in the USA turned out to just be one guy with an army of proxies. There are surprisingly few people at the top of the worldwide spam operations.
Isn't that because they are aiming for the biggest targets. Anything that became similarly successful would be similarly targeted.
Being small enough that malicious actors are not interested in you is beneficial, but by definition it is a solution that cannot be widely adopted.
It doesn't matter why, when you're talking about results.
Twitter is having bots and spams actively injected rather than them simply existing as a phenomenon. There are not many possible explanation for that other than that its owner is likely wanting them.
For reference, pinterest has roughly the same number of monthly active users. [0]
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Edison Research's "currently use Twitter" numbers for people 12+ went from 27% in 2023 to 22% in 2025.
Pew found 16% of U.S. teens used X in 2025, versus 23% in 2022 and 33% in 2014–15.
The only way in which BlueSky is preferentially catering to the left is by existing as an alternative to X and specifically providing tighter control of what is in your feed; and this is only “catering to the Left” because of the groups towards which X either has weakened or stopped enforcing its policies against harassment towards.
(In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)
X no longer makes the "people dogpiling conservatives is consequence culture" vs "people dogpiling far leftists is harassment" distinction, but BlueSky still does.
Perhaps the asymmetry has something to do with the fact that the conservatives are sharing memes about immigrants eating cats, and similar quality takes, during a profoundly fascist moment in American history, but what do I know? I'm just another snowflake
Everyone is sharing everything. If you only focus on a few extremists (and only on the side you don't like) doing things you don't like, you can prove anything.
Sounds like it, yeah.
What ever happened to the guy with the jet tracker
Twitter has right wing and center/apolitical people on it, bluesky just has left wing people. They "cater" to them by not clamping down on those people harrassing anyone who joins who doesn't agree with their politics. A smart move, because if they did then the leftists would leave too and they'd have nobody. But the result is they can't even get the centrist/apolitical people to move.
Didn't they immediately ban JD Vance on his first completely innocuous post on the platform?
That's aside from the blatant echo chamber nature of the platform. Both the left and the right post on Twitter. Only the left post on BlueSky.
This probably contributes to the decline, but I think the biggest contributor is the lack of interesting content. If you wanted to gorge on leftist viewpoints wouldn't you just read a leftist subreddit?
Even the CEO sees there's a problem with this: https://gizmodo.com/the-ceo-of-bluesky-says-he-wants-less-of...
BlueSky isn't an experience set by the owners, it's an experience set by interacting with its people.
"Catering" to the left is too generous, even pandering isn't strong enough. Anyone with dissenting views is group blocked at best and banned at worst. Most of the user loss is thanks to bans, I would bet.
In a way it's good: X is now much better that the more radical Bluesky types went away.
Anecdotally, 90% of the interesting tech/art/gamedev people I’ve followed have moved to Bluesky or Mastodon at this point, and they’re never coming back.
> So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
Maybe the "trick" is to have inertia and network effect. Facebook somehow has 3 billion monthly active users despite literally everything.
Loads of politicians, governments, sports figures, and social media stars set up accounts back when Twitter was just a conversation platform, before people were yipping about "catering" to left or right (whatever that silly nonsense means), and the amazing stickiness of the network effect means they're still there.
As an anecdote, I switched a year or two ago along with most everyone I followed on X.
It’s nothing like the vibe on old Twitter. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ideologically siloed. I’m quite left of center, but everyone on bluesky seems to be a caricature; the blue-haired loonies the right memes about. People there are seriously intolerant of anything other than their perceived orthodoxy. I don’t know what made it this way but it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
A lot of people on Bluesky are pretty normal and if you make a point to block on the first bit of political NPC behavior you can find people that are interested in cat pictures and software and such.
I find it interesting that most conversations about Twitter or Bluesky is about the "political vibe".
Why is that so important?
On Mastodon, if someone keeps posting political stuff to the point where it's a big chunk of my feed, I merely unfollow. As a result my feed has very little politics. Can't you simply do that on Bluesky?
Of course, if you actively want politics, but want just the right kind of politics, then you've dug yourself into a hole.
> it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
You are describing X here. It kind of turned into a very toxic political platform. The exodus to Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky happened for a good reason. After Elon Musk took over it didn't exactly improve.
I'm on still on X, and on Bluesky and Mastodon. For my network of perfectly normal people, most of them did not delete their X account but just aren't very active there any more. Quite a few showed up on Bluesky in the last year or so (30-40%) and some also on Mastodon (~20%). But that just leaves a long tail of random accounts I followed on Twitter that I don't really miss that much. Many of them have gone silent in any case.
I actually don't mind Bluesky. I pretty much ignore algorithmic feeds and just consume content from people I happen to follow in the order it is published. If what you see is blue-haired loonies, might I suggest following less of those.
Organizing people in lists is helpful as well. Mostly the people I follow are the same people I used to follow on X. Their political leanings didn't really change and they still talk about the same kinds of topics. It's just that the noise of random nut bags that I wasn't following to begin with dominating my X feed is completely gone. I don't miss that at all.
In terms of politics, yes. It's a bit like the worst of reddit. Nobody reads the article, everybody gets outraged in the same cliché way. If you try to provide nuance you get derided or blocked. (Blocking seems to be held in high esteem, which I think is also part of the problem.)
Building a social network with people in love with shared blocking lists is not a great recipe.
It's the worst recipe, apart from all the others.
Unless you want to expose yourself to the constant inundation of piss that social media has become, you have to curate and block aggressively. Shared block lists that you just subscribe to are one of the few useful innovations Bluesky has made and they need to be standard for all social media in the future.
No thanks.
Cool. Enjoy the golden shower then, the rest of us will be elsewhere, dry and happy.
Blocking is way too harsh a mechanism. If they wanted to innovate they should have invented some soft-block feature.
Thanks to those lists I am blocked by 165 people. I don't insult anyone, I don't even swear. I suspect I get on these lists simply by being a white male (which is I guess obvious from my posts).
>Thanks to those lists I am blocked by 165 people. I don't insult anyone, I don't even swear. I suspect I get on these lists simply by being a white male (which is I guess obvious from my posts).
The reason is obviously not being a "white male" - because there are plenty of white males on Bluesky. If these are the kind of comments you make there it's no wonder people block you.
I don't know what a "soft block" would be, either someone is blocking you or they aren't. Anything that makes curation difficult is doomed to fail because bots and assholes scale exponentially while my time is precious, linear and all too limited. Harsh general mechanisms are sometimes necessary, and no one owes you their time or space.
Apparently I'm blocked by two people. I have absolutely no idea why - maybe it's because I follow Hank Green and he's being cancelled? I barely even use Bluesky. But they have every right to do it and they don't owe me an explanation.
Well the blocklist description is "men up their own assholes acting like white boys", so what should I conclude?
Then again if racists block me it's probably for the best.
Actually it's great.
A little OT but I recall Marc Andreessen went on a blocking spree on Twitter when it was still Twitter. He would block people and then tweet about it.
I am very left leaning. You might think I would like Blusky, but I hate it.
I, politely, corrected some people who were posting factually inaccurate anti-AI misinformation.
I was mocked and insulted, called transphobic by someone I had no way of knowing was Trans, accused of mansplaining, and called misogynistic by people I didn't know (or care to know) were women. None of them bothered to discuss the original issue.
It's like arguing about geo-politics with the dude who sleeps in the dumpster behind the liquor store. Even if I win... What was the point?
You choose what you see on Bluesky. I see little politics while using it. If everyone you followed moved over, just limit it to their posts.
Reddit is dominated by the left, but there are other voice audible.
Twitter has plenty of leftists. They are very, very, very easy to find, as is every other shape and size of political, ideological, or spiritual thought; far easier than, say, a non-leftist viewpoint on the worldnews or politics subreddits, which because of their default status are much more inescapable than any one Twitter account.
There are very, very few non-left people on Bluesky. "JD Vance Becomes Most Blocked Person on BlueSky Days After Joining App" <https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-bluesky-blocked-social-med...>
Even Bluesky's top users say so.
"Bluesky is backfiring. Mark Cuban says the 'lack of diversity of thought' is actually pushing users back to X" <https://fortune.com/2025/06/12/bluesky-backfiring-mark-cuban...>
"Bluesky is not the good place" <https://www.ms.now/opinion/bluesky-elon-musk-twitter-replace...>
But it could be worse. Bluesky has block list dissemination (à la how, if you make one comment in a "wrong" subreddit, a whole bunch of others will automatically ban you despite never having even heard of them), but I don't think even it ever gets so bad as individual Mastodon instances' ability to self-destruct in spectacularly amusing fashion. mastodon.lol example over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As rvz said in the link,
>This is just one of many Mastodon instances which are undergoing an extinction event which involves: turning against themselves and destroying each other. This time, it is over a children's video game.
That said, I suppose that such self-immolation might be a good thing; sort of an immune system-like response. There are many, many mentally ill that steep far too long in Bluesky (and 80% of Reddit)'s ever-boiling toxic soup.
Huh I had no idea this is happening my entire feed is just photographers lol
Basically Bluesky is an echo chamber.
What does this comment even mean? Substitute "left" for any other adjective, like "purple" or "embobulated" and it's equally meaningless: "There are very, very few non-embobulated people on Bluesky."
> > There are very, very few non-left people on Bluesky.
> What does this comment even mean
“It’s amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.”
- Colin Robertson
Is this your attempt at pretending not to understand it?
no. The person saying there are few non left people is clear, as is the person pretending they can’t understand what that means. You would know that from the lack of enquiry in the comment you responded to.
Okay understander, why don't you tell us what it means then?
What part of "There are very, very few non-left people on Bluesky." is vague?
nobody fucking cares what mark cuban has to say.
Cuban is the #2 most-followed Bluesky user. <https://bluecrawler.com/>
> Twitter has plenty of leftists.
How, when according to you, they're dominating Reddit and Bsky?
Baring the possibility that people on the left use all the platforms, and people on the right don't for some reason, an excess on one platform has to mean a shortage on another.
Reddit is dominated by the left? We're having very different feeds...
It is clearly dominated by the left. Look at r/politics for example....
> Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app
Are they implying a causal relationship between their shrinking user base and their focus expansion? The article doesn't give any proof whatsoever.
No they aren't. All they are doing is pointing out a temporal correlation. Inference of causality is left to the whim of the reader.
Interesting quote:
"For Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities."
Code: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
Website: https://atproto.com/
Bluesky and Threads both have a fundamental issue in that their entire pitch is "We are like Twitter, but we are not run by Elon Musk, a Republican." Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones that were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place. When you whole pitch has zero appeal to 95% of people, its dead.
calling elon musk "a Republican" is such a wild understatement
Yeah, I agree. It's the inverse of the problem Scott Alexander has observed in the past: when you make an alternative platform based on the premise of "we won't ban people based on having unpopular views", you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views. It turns your platform into an awful place that nobody wants to associate with, even if they agree that it's bad to ban people for having unpopular views.
Sounds fun, sign me up. I want the bad. Moderation is somehow worse. I’m a big boy I can block the spammers myself
4chan.org here you go
Not sure what to say about Threads. I mean, if you have an Instagram account they’ll try to give you a Threads account and photos I post to Insta automatically go to Threads so I am probably in the top 5% of Threads posters though I hardly ever log in. I am happy if people see my photos on Insta or Threads or LinkedIn or Nextdoor or wherever.
Thread’s notifications are just plain weird like it is usually clickbait where you can’t tell if they love Trump or hate Trump and if the one sexy cosplayer/alt fashion model I follow because I know her in IRL did something provocative with her friend who has tattoos from head to toe, Threads thinks this is front page news.
Musk is not just a republican, he's pushing far-right parties everywhere else in the world (plus, the "roman" thing). He's the textbook definition of why social networks should not have recommendation algorithms other than "chronological view of who you actively chose the follow".
He can say whatever he wants, but buying one of the biggest social network to push his ideology onto billions leaves "freedom of saying whatever one wants" territory to enter "let's buy elections by controlling what enter people's feeds".
yeah im pretty fucking hard left wing, i would still have probably used twitter in this current day if it hadn't just become a total cesspool. i used bluesky because my friends moved there and tbh the custom feeds are a great feature. could not care about the owners political leanings as long as they are not being actively and outwardly malicious... pretty much most of my social media usage went down the hill when they just became outrage/outwardly racist/ai infested cesspits. i neeeeeed something more than my small local groups to keep up with my hobbies so i use reddit. but in 2025 i deleted my account and made a new one from scratch that was highly tailored and streamlined vs my 2011 account that had soooooooooooooooo many shitty subs still subbed.
lol
Twitter's fundamental issue is that it's entire pitch is "You can say the most outrageous things on the planet, share race-baiting videos, and be a scumbag as long as it doesn't anger Elon. Also, we're down with child pornography"
Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones who were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place.
See how that works?
Twitter's first mover advantage meant that it was the first place analogue celebs/politicians/etc went to share content with the general public.
Much of this has eroded over the years because of competitive platforms like Instagram but these initial conditions remain formidable.
I would say the erosion has less to do with Instagram and more to do with a man-child driving the platform into the ground.
Neither Bluesky or Threads actually made that pitch.
Threads was started up because of the business opportunity of Musk fumbling things, but Bluesky seemed almost annoyed by all the new users.
Bluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen. Hands down. I can't imagine anyone enjoying it unless they're 1) super into the US politics/domestic issues AND 2) politically aligned with the main user base of Bluesky.
The funniest part is that there is a better algorithm. It's right here: https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/feed/for-...
But somehow the devs of Bluesky never thought of making it the default tab. They should be making a better Twitter but what they're actually building is just Truth Social for the left.
If you are careful about who you follow and you click on “less like this” whenever you see hysterical stuff about politics the “discover” feed is pretty good, in fact back when I was concerned about this I found it has 30% as much hysterical stuff about politics as my “following” feed.
Until your thumb slips while trying to hit the dots, the post gets focused, and now you're spending the next three hours telling the algorithm to stop showing you diaper kink artwork because it thinks you must be into that since you looked closer at it.
Almost as bad as tiktok repeatedly showing you promos for the same product because you didn't swipe away in less than five seconds.
I don't want to see politics, rage bait, sexism, hate, performative superiority, whining, or negativity.
Who invented all of these algorithms? I want none of this.
I want good news, awesome things, uplifting stories, cool hacks. That's it. That's literally it.
Then follow people producing such content?
my tiktok fyp is just that.
FWIW I find much more politically motivated posting outside of the big social media platforms than on it. I suspect it's a combination of algorithmic downranking and just the fact that more politically motivated users are going to be on alternative social media.
My socials (FB(not much)/Insta/TikTok) have fantastic algorithms, I they uplift my mood, have been responsible for positive changes in my mindset and life, etc. When I used X or bluesky or Reddit they have a noticeable negative impact on my mental state. Hackernews is 50/50.
So I think social media which is content/image based can be more positive than the discussion based media.
However we're getting more and more AI slop and AI generated art and reels and while people for the most part destroy it in the comment section, it would be nice for them to never show up in my feeds.
> I want good news, awesome things, uplifting stories, cool hacks. That's it. That's literally it.
This is my actual experience on X. Find interesting people to follow. The "muted words" feature is great for filtering out political noise.
The fact that Bluesky has first class support for me to choose my own feed algorithm is proof it’s NOTHING like truth social.
Whenever I point out (in agreement with your statement) that the idea that the left and the right are somehow equally bad is a kind of fantasy on HN I usually get downvoted. People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong. Yeah, often things are more complicated than they appear, but I find it almost hilarious how often you can't do that in American politics. And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines.
> People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong.
> And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines.
Seems like you've fallen to the same fallacy within the same paragraph, which is quite ironic.
“Not the same kind of mess” breaks the comparison, so… no.
the thing is that the "left" in the US (and then on HN) have almost no political representation. The Democrats aren't left, just the leftest available. They aren't better than the Republicans at all.
Despite partial agreement, you’ve only reinforced my point as far as I’m concerned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> They aren't better than the Republicans at all.
This is exactly the kind of thing the parent poster was talking about.
The Democrats certainly aren't left, and they're not great, but we live in a world where the Republican party ranges between refusing to condemn and openly supporting white nationalism, gloats about making trans people's lives worse, encourages police to use unnecessary force, etc. even before we get in to the impacts of their economic policies.
Despite being a massive disappointment as far as actually making positive changes, one is still obviously miles better than the other because they're not trying to drive the car the wrong way as fast as possible. Claiming that the two major US parties are no different requires willfully ignoring a lot of bad stuff that one party does for which there is no comparison on the other side. There are absolutely specific issues on which there is often no meaningful difference but as a whole there is a universe of difference.
Showing my age, about 35 years ago, someone (wish I remember who, but google probably knows), wrote an article in Analog magazine called "The Dogma of Otherness" that spoke to the tendency of a certain demographic to always try to understand different perspectives, even when those perspectives were objectively hostile.
Some people just can't not think in shades of gray.
> Bluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen.
Even worse than Mastodon's?
I don't think it makes sense to think of Mastodon as having a central "discover" tab. Mastodon is much closer to the blogosphere than to Twitter.
Mastodon's is at least just scoped to your own server, so it has a small chance of being relevant (assuming you picked any instance other than m.s)
I have a lurking account and follow some other accounts, but I’m not interested in “liking” or “reposting” any posts. I want to keep my usage and engagement as low as possible. The “For You” feed doesn’t work for this need because it relies on signals like liking content.
I agree that the Discover feed sucks (why does it show posts from people I’m following when there’s a dedicated tab for that?). But I’d rather have a better Discover feed than me having to do more work on the “For You” feed.
'show more/less like this' should work[0] with cowboy's for you feed. 'more/less' was proprietary for discover but they've rolled it out to other feeds now[1].
I think it's part of an interactions object passed to the feed operator. You can see what's potentially passed here[2].
[0]:https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/post/3lxx...
[1]:https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/pull/8672
[2]:https://endpoints.bsky.app/#bluesky-app/tag/appbskyfeed/POST...
How is this post, which fundamentally misunderstands Bluesky, the top post in the thread? The default tab on Bluesky is a chronological feed from just the people you follow, with no algorithm, just how most people want it.
No it isn't. Maybe you've set a non-default preference.
It is for me, I'm pretty sure I didn't tweak anything.
thankfully, the discover feed can be unpinned to hide it unless you go look for it. it was horrid for me too.
The false equivalency is so funny, you mean a platform where the president sells private access to his massive lies ahead of time so that you can front run the market?
The one where war crimes are directly equivocated and WW3 is regularly threatened?
The one where anti-vax conspiracy is gospel, up is down, and black is white?
Get the biggest pile of hippy dippy bullshit together and you'll never compare to the toxic waste dump of "Truth" Social.
Plus, the fact that they call the posts "truths" (as in "the president truthed", "ads are sponsored truths") couldn't be more Orwellian.
Literally Pravda.
They need to solve the “bluesky” vs “bsky” destination search patterns on desktop and mobile.
I hope against hope that people started to realize that the problem isn't the platform, it's the entire approach.
Who am I kidding, people just realized that Bluesky wasn't going to be the next big thing and so it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
What does success look like? I get what I want from Twitter/X through a pull through cache. I get to read the folks I follow on Bluesky. Works for me? My feed as a utility is working as expected. I keep what I want to read, and mute and block that which I do not. I remain in control of my data and experience of the firehose. If someone I'd like to see on Bluesky is not yet there, I ask them to be. If there is data on Bluesky not yet there but that might have value to others, I pipe it in via a PDS and pub sub automation.
How would email and RSS be the next big thing? Because that is what https://atproto.com/ is, and to some extent, here. A private entity or individual cannot capture the AT Protocol network as happened to Twitter/X, it has already succeeded.
Certainly, this is a different perspective than "What metrics can we use to value this entity we're going to attempt to flip to someone else?" Worst case, the public benefit corp is converted to a non profit and tax deductible donations are used (potentially with a foundational fund built to operate in perpetuity, think Wikipedia) to fund the underlying storage and distribution infrastructure and labor costs for operations, similar to Signal and many other tech non profits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo (nsfw)
(Threads is always there for the normies until it enshittifies and Meta chases whatever catches Mark's eye next)
I think there are two things going on. After launch, there was an exuberant group of users who believed the purpose or aim of Bluesky was to be a recreation of Twitter in terms of user base and impact. They were lead on by the icon a bit and lots of rhetoric. And I think many believed it would destroy X. By their standards, Bluesky is an epic failure.
But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.
> And I think many believed it would destroy X.
Given what Musk did back at the time - member him carrying a sink? Randomly unplugging servers? - it was not that much of a stretch to assume the BS would eventually catch up with him and Twitter would enter the FO phase of FAFO.
Unfortunately, for unfathomable reasons Twitter is still alive somehow, despite being a cesspit of Russian propaganda, far-right propaganda, general trolls and a ton of porn sellers... I frankly assume the porn is what keeps a lot of people on there instead of Truth Social or one of the countless other attempts.
Two-sided networks are really something…. It’s almost impossible to kill a social network!
This is a very... Hacker News viewpoint that I think is quite popular in tech circles, and literally unheard of for most beyond. I don't think this is a matter of raising awareness either, it's the usual disconnect between people who take pleasure in learning about and using technology, and the average person who wants to minimize friction and inputs between them and tuning out.
I don't think that Bluesky is a success as an app or site, I think it's an example of ideological stagnation and evidence of an online political culture that's come unmoored from reality, which seems to be the trend for social media. It's not a very good place to be, and the most active parts of it are frankly really boring and thoughtless just like the rest of the social media landscape... albeit with a left-of-center flavor. As for the protocol... great? I've been hearing about the next big thing in fighting centralization and corporatization here for a loooong time, and it really feels like Charlie Brown kicking at the spot where a football used to be, over and over.
If the point is to come up with novel solutions to a problem in service of a tiny minority represented here... then great. It's a success. If the point is to ever compete with something on a different scale then this seems like treading water to me.
> it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
I liked Josh Barro's take: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...
Agreed. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49264162>
I think there's some truth there, but the bigger shift IMO has been that companies, politicians and institutions have begun to notice that volume on social media doesn't translate to irl opinions. Left or right, social media is dominated by the loudest, most dedicated extremists with the most insane focus on single issues. You and I have lives, we can't compete with someone who pulls 12 hour days editing Wikipedia, cranking out Tweets, spinning up bots to vote and sock puppets to react.
It's a lesson I think we all need to learn over and over: the loudest are not really the most representative, they're just the loudest. Online I'd add that they're often the craziest and least able to compromise.
Bluesky's active user base has never not been shrinking, no matter what they were focusing on.
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
The surest thing in tech for the past couple of years is that bluesky has fewer users than it did last month. It's entire life is due to lib slactivism. It started under the conceit of being a p2p public service, took VC, and its founder bailed and badmouthed it. It's entire existence is ideological, which is why its boosters sound like evangelists.
This is just media promotion, hopefully to bump up user numbers for a week or two, but really so the people who work at the VC firms that put money into this dog have something to show to their bosses.
> It's entire life is due to lib slactivism
I'd disagree with that, I'd say its entire life is due to the shittifying of Twitter. People, like myself, sought to recreate the experience of what Twitter used to be like and (after trying and not being satisfied with Mastodon) it's the next best thing. The problem is that a social network of this kind relies on having a large enough population to feel "live" and Bluesky has never got there.
There have been glimmers of hope... during the NBA finals and the World Cup Bluesky felt like a genuine destination for live sports. But it might be too little too late.
I agree (in a way), but I don't think that people who went to Bluesky were trying to recreate twitter, they were trying to silence twitter. The past they are pining for was a past when people they didn't like weren't allowed to speak, and they were hoping (in a non-userlike, political way) that bluesky would threaten twitter, and force it to behave in the way that they preferred or to shut down. Then they would all be able to go back to the ideologically-pruned twitter of their dreams, or twitter would go bankrupt (the bankruptcy narratives were endless) and everyone would move to bluesky.
They were hoping that twitter would go the way of Digg. It's very similar to the fantasy that they had about Reddit after the API shutdown. Slacktivism.
The fact that twitter is as active as ever is why they slink back. I'd bet 90% of actives on bluesky also have twitter accounts that are more active. Twitter didn't care when they walked away; in fact it was a relief. A great many of them were extreme trolls and reply guys who spent the rest of their time mass-reporting people for disagreeing with them.
And for the few people who thought of this as the p2p answer to twitter (an obsession among programming p2p nerds - including me - for a long time) it has to be a disappointment that the company obviously has no intention of relinquishing control of a thing.
I feel like some folks who don’t use Bluesky, evidently yourself included, have this very distinct notion of what a Bluesky user is. All I can tell you is it doesn’t match at all with the experience I have on the service.
You are projecting a lot on this imaginary Bluesky user. You’ve crafted an entire narrative in your head about how egotistical they were and how crushed they are at Twitter still being around. I don’t really know how to respond to creative fiction.
My friend on Bluesky openly said he wanted Twitter gone and he’s been hoping it would die. He’s also a big fan of reporting people on the app.
I’m not put off by his desires but I’m mildly surprised you’re denying him and others existence. Ironically, it feeds into the GP’s “silence” narrative
Anyone can pick a single example of an extreme user. I could pick a virulent antisemite, racist X user and say it represents X as a whole, would you agree with that? I suspect not.
> People, like myself, sought to recreate the experience of what Twitter used to be like
Have you tried X recently? My feed right now is:
- A neat tech bag
- Discussion about AI going rogue
- How fee markets on Hyperliquid work
- Someone who was ill from a viral infection talk about his recovery
- Someone from Team17 talking about the game Worms
It's very much what Twitter used to be like
I haven’t. Bluesky gives me enough of the old Twitter content to satisfy me so I don’t really see a reason to, especially when my dislike for Elon Musk’s politics is strong enough to dissuade me from giving money to him when I can avoid it.
I tried Bluesky after Threads because the ads were getting to me.
I reposted one picture of my favorite bird, the albatross, and then my feed was 100% bird pictures. I'm not interested in birds generally, just albatrosses specifically. But they were nice enough pictures so I kept using the app.
Then I tried telling it about my other interest which was robotics, and so I started liking posts about autonomous cars. Specifically, one day I liked a picture of some guy filming in in his car some other guy sleeping in his Tesla while it was driving autonomously on the highway.
After that my feed was flooded with selfies of dudes in their car. Like, "goodmorning sunshine, off to work, here's a quick selfie of me". Every time I opened the app it was just a parade of bird pictures and selfies of bearded dudes in their cars. At least on Threads the thirst traps were thirsty!
Bluesky had no idea what my interests were. On Threads we used to do a thing like "Hey @algorithm, send me people who are interested in X Y Z" and that worked. Actually first it didn't and then Threads made it official after so many people did it. But even still when it wasn't official it still seemed Threads was able to provide a better feed than Bluesky.
So I quit. Congrats Bluesky, tough feat but you've somehow found a way to be more annoying than ads.
These algorithms are supposed to be helping me discover new interests, but instead they make me cautious about what I click on. I watch two seconds of some video I ultimately don't care for and then get my feed chockfull of THAT shit forever.
I so miss the days when the Internet was more random. It's not really nostalgia - it WAS better.
Seems these days you can't even linger too long on a feed item or they flag your interest in it.
I tried Threads a tiny bit but its algorithm seemed obsessed with trying to rage-bait me. Like I get that it is one way to drive engagement but everything was just bad takes about my interests with lots of replies correcting them… It was never an enjoyable platform to use because of that.
I ended up finding a good group of people to follow on Mastodon so didn’t end up even trying Bluesky (although I do follow some accounts from there through the bridge)
This thread is primed for shitting on Bluesky, but the level of discourse among the people I follow has only grown over the past few years. In no way does it feel like a dying platform. (Same for Mastodon, actually.)
You can tell who here doesn't use bluesky. They're self reporting. It's like going to chicago, seeing a homeless person act crazy, then leaving and telling everyone that it's a crime ridden shit hole. They're just parroting the same shit everyone else who's never used it are parroting
How are the X figures computed ? Bluesky is a public network, anyone can analyse and count. What about X, held by Musk ?
Would be hard to gauge, X has a major bot problem, which Musk made big claims about combating but yet has failed to yield realistic results...
Elon bought X for the bot problem, not because of it.
Elon bought X the same reason Trump made Truth Social.
You are both right.
It has improved a lot since the acquisition. Before the bot purge X was basically crypto shillers or scammers. X now actually feels more organic than, Facebook. Sometimes I see content on X before they eventually gets reposted on Reddit.
You cannot be serious. On the rare occasion that I do open it up for whatever reason, I'm immediately stunned by the cesspit that greets me. I refuse to believe that's not like 90% bots.
Bluesky's problem isn't technical, it's all about network effects. I begrudgingly read twitter because everyone I follow is on twitter. Bluesky is far more pleasant to use too!
Can someone pretty please create a decent alternative to X?
No.
Bluesky tried. But it's not "a decent alternative" - why not?
So maybe far left echo chamber as a service is not that good of a business model after all. But then there’s Reddit.
Define "far left". In comparison to MAGA? The Overton window of the US has shifted so far right that universal healthcare and free education are seen as one step removed from communism.
Bluesky is a buggy borderline nonfunctional mess.
The fediverse does literally everything better than it. Bluesky by comparison is completely inferior and redundant.
My experience is different. I like the chronological feeds and the lists I can create to group accounts.
What ? I have no bugs on bluesky for years.
I had the exactly opposite experience. I'm even selfhosting my own (non-reference implementation) PDS, and going in I was fully expecting to encounter weird consistency issues, but there were none at all.