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I don't think there's much value in covering user growth numbers of a site several times a week.
think it's cool to do the milestones, but i agree not every time a million is added, maybe when BS hits 25m next
I tried it and lasted only 4 days. The platform feels very reactionary, with many users seemingly intent on creating a left-leaning alternative to Truth Social or X.
I was searching for an apolitical, more progressive, and intellectual space, but this didn’t meet those expectations. A significant number of users appear to spend their time copying and pasting tweets to comment on them without engaging directly on X, which I find odd.
For context, I’m not a Truth Social user, and I haven’t used X for several years. I prefer to keep my political views private, confined to the voting booth. My goal was simply to find a platform for sharing and discussing ideas.
> apolitical, more progressive, and intellectual space
What does 'apolitical' mean, though? At some level, everything is political. Like, unless you want to restrict it to entirely cat photos, I'm not sure how this would work.
I think it’ll keep improving as more folks move over. This is just a temporary artifact of X refugees being the first to migrate.
> My goal was simply to find a platform for sharing and discussing ideas
Which makes it all the stranger that you're complaining about others doing the same.
The "algorithm" aspect of the platform has improved for me. Here's what I did -- I artificially liked a non-trivial number of posts of topics I liked (say CS theory, systems programming, NFL, Soccer etc). Now the "Discover" feed is good (not great but this is a start).
A few days back when I was starting out, the Discover feed was mostly random.
I don't see what's preventing you to discuss "ideas" on Bluesky, or Twitter.
I don't discuss politics either, but i had good interactions on both of these platforms.
> I was searching for an apolitical, more progressive, and intellectual space
This is a concept I struggle with. HN tries to be culture and politically agnostic, but culture and politics drive everything. I think it's intellectually lazy to suggest that this shouldn't be a place for smart people to discuss important issues because the reality is that those places are woefully uncommon.
Begging for forums and content to be apolitical is just willfully wearing blinders. It may be great for mental health, but it's probably not great for society. It's on the same philosophical slope of "I don't want to be political, I just want to make great bombs for whoever."
I gave "bsky" a whirl just a couple of weeks back but unfortunately the impression was not very good. I ticked only tech-ish topics as my main interests, but practically nothing in my auto-generated feed fell into those topics - the overwhelming majority of what I received was just babble of a clear sociopolitical nature, like an unpleasant case of opinionated force-feeding. Anyone else with the same experience? Do I need to follow a bunch of other users (in the tech sphere) for the "algorithm" to even start leaning towards my preferences?
I tried it a few days ago. I'm European and more aligned with the US left than the right. Even then, having almost all of the posts in the entire platform be one-sided political screeching is just too much noise. And it's a pity because Bluesky has better filtering options than Twitter, but the content is so bad that they're pretty much useless.
I could never get into Twitter because to me the signal to noise is just abysmal, and Bluesky seems to be more of the same.
The discovery feed is indeed pretty shit. You need to find your favorite hashtags / people to follow, like a bunch of things and then it starts getting better. Also you need to change the language in your settings. I'm German and also got a bunch of weird German politic topics despite I never reacted on any non-tech topics. After I removed German in my settings it got much better.
I would give it a try again, it's quite different in only two short weeks. Also, find feeds to subscribe to on places like reddit (r/webdev had a thread IIRC)
Yes, you do. There are a number of tech focused starter packs out there. You could also look at one of the custom feeds that are curated for tech conversations.
Yeah, got the same impression, is just the /leftypol/ version of /pol/, just another extremist echo chamber...
One of the best features of Bluesky is that it just looks like Twitter. Much easier to explain to people that it's just Twitter with a different name.
Over the weekend a lot of journalists in my country (Austria) moved over to Bluesky (Including one with > 600k followers) and with the "starter packs" on Bluesky (Curated list of people you can follow with one click) it was possible to adopt it very quickly and have an active and useful feed without a long onboarding time to make it your own.
And blocks/ignores work the way you expect.
Apparently there are shared block lists too, but I haven't tried those yet.
Without sarcasm, I’ve never been able to understand how or why real people use Twitter or similar platforms. Do actual human users genuinely scroll through and read all that noise? What motivates someone to do that? Is it comparable to the TikTok trance, where users get hooked by a dopamine rush?
Just talking about my own usage, I follow lots of people in the tech space, indie hackers, AI researchers, etc. By checking Twitter from time to time I learn about new tools, libraries and models, check out cool stuff made by others, etc.
It's literally the same reason behind reading HN. A HN with a higher ground noise but much more real-time, interactive and orders of magnitude higher bandwidth.
You just need to curate things very hard so make sure you keep enough signal above the nose to be worth it.
Same here, tried following a few people in the field, half of the content I saw was still off-topic, memes or personal stuff.
Signal to noise on Bluesky is about as bad as on Twitter, I think it's just that the type of platform and the format are not conductive to good communication. It's the equivalent of panning for hours and hours to find a tiny bit of gold, it's just not worth the time you waste on it.
If you're prudent about who you follow it can be an enjoyable experience. Just make sure you only follow people you really want to hear from, and make sure your feed is set to 'following'.
It's mostly become a marketing tool for individuals
I view it as a community notice board.
Twitter was great for getting intermittent announcements. Not so great at facilitating a respectful dialogue.
It vaguely resembles socializing and makes you feel less lonely.
I have never used this kind of platform before. I tied BlueSly out of curiosity, thinking it would be useful if I selected a topic like "programming". I deleted my account within an hour. Every post that approaches anything technical quickly turns into something worse than lunchroom talk except it's with people you have never met. Furthermore, most posts are the equivalent of selfies with the main subject remotely in the background. It is for people who have time to spend sifting trough huge amounts of low effort posts to find something to react to.
For anyone who loved Tweetdeck, there is Deck.blue:
App password seems like a pretty bad idea that could easily confuse users and lead them to having their credentials stolen.
A lot of people in this thread are expressing that their main use case for using any social network is to follow experts in their field.
Allow me to improve your life by freeing up massive amounts of time.
For any given field, say AI or programming, find the best weekly newsletter. Subscribe to a few of them, read them for a few weeks, and cut them down to the smallest number possible.
Anything of any importance in the field will be in that newsletter. Designate a fixed moment in your weekly schedule to read/skim them and be done with it. You can now delete the social media app.
I used to spent 2 hours per day "following tech news" and such. It's mostly noise and you'll be tempted to hang around and hate-read the social outrage of the day.
Somebody has sifted through all that garbage for you and put the gems in a newsletter, for free. Make use of it.
I think this medium already proved that it doesn't work.
A new social media model needs to emerge - we shouldn't try to rebuild the same old with a fresh coat of paint.
Bluesky is the first time users have control over their social networking, and that's exciting & so so different. There's 3rd party feeds, algorithms, moderation, & labels that are all open ended tools we've only just begun to put into people's hands to try out.
The data architecture starts eith a personal cryptographic data store. Which can have endless different types of data in it. So for example you can have SmokeSignals Events in your feed or FrontPage reddit like in your feed. https://bsky.app/profile/smokesignal.events
And it's all open data. So we can analyze thr network & try to spot & root out large influence campaigns, find patterns of behavior that bad actors and sometimes state sponsored actors are pushing on the network.
There's so many open possibilities here. I can get how on the surface this looks "the same old with a fresh paint of cost," but the techies are moving here en masse because we believe this is so much more fertile a ground with so much more potential & possibility, we believe it will be a place we can put in energy & ongoingly iterate & improve social networking.
And the team has very explicitly designed the system to assume that someday BlueSky may become the problem. It's not fully tested at scale but we have the technical ability to walk away, & keep the social network going, if the BlueSky corporation ever loses our trust.
It's sad that there's such a fatalistic nihilistic air about, that judgements are so quick to be called. It's still early days for the AtProtocol/BlueSky, but we already see the protocols not platforms decisions here enabling experiences so far beyond what BlueSky corporation alone could ever hope to provide, and that ever-richening interconnection & potentiation is incredibly alluring & a chance unlike any we've seen in a generation.
Go build your vision, I think it’s clear though that the market demands this specific product.
I'm very happy all of you dudes in these comments that tried and left Bluesky aren't there
More interesting to know is how many viral posts (external to itself) are created. Plenty of mainstream stuff comes out of X for better or worse.
Also funny that mastodon seems to be losing to a company. IMO amount of users is irrelevant.
> Also funny that mastodon seems to be losing to a company.
There's value in both, I could see Bluesky as a Twitter alternative (jouralists, brand accounts, viral posts etc.) while Mastodon is like the oldschool blogs that you follow for very specific niches.
That's how I currently use it and it works well. There's enough space for multiple platforms, I wouldn't say Mastodon is "losing".
I think this shows the value of a central focus point for casual users to embrace. Everyone complains about having to choose a Mastodon instance.
And here, due to the nature of the already corporatized nature of Bluesky, there is one such central funnel where people can converge.
I wonder what kind of money is being thrown at them right now, or in the near future.
Am I way off thinking that there would be?
This has been heavily covered
https://www.finsmes.com/2024/10/bluesky-raises-15m-in-series...
How many are bots vs real people though
grain of salt. There's a lot of ppl just kind of 'over there'... posting....but with varied amounts of substance. Then break down some of those to just posts about 'isn't it great here' because they aren't getting any angry bot replies yet. Meanwhile, some niches might have activity but alot also do not. Not getting engagement on a number of interests and no major accounts over there..... Yes, a handful of journos and news outlets are trying it out, and science ppl.... but who knows without any kind of view counts etc if anything is anything. (pros to that of course)
It's just all up in the air. And on top of that still requires a bunch of effort to build up followers again because the 'algorithm' won't start working until you do. (also a lot of misinformed users seem to think it's 'algorithmless' yet Bluesky mentions it right off the start encouraging following and liking to 'teach it'. Feeds & 'starter packs' are nice takes on lists and getting reach but it's like 2010 Twitter all these grifters just making large collections of users with questionable quality control. Sigh. Anyways, still giving it a chance but wary. Like Doctorow wrote a few weeks ago, putting effort into a centralized thing only to have it enshittified later is a tough sell.
Oh oh, also as mentioned in another thread, API openness sure is fun, as it was in early Twitter.... Already ported some bot type accounts over with ease. But that's about it. Fun hobby type stuff. We've been here before.
Beware of the enshittification though, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42182271
This was in the front page but suddenly isn't.
It seems that bluesky will be the political left's version of twitter going forward. The same way truth social became a right-wing echo chamber from its inception. I see the world(the US in particular) drawing lines and further devolving online discourse in a time where what we need most is mutual understanding and respect.
Echo chamber
People on HN keep spamming and upvoting mundane Bluesky related stories like user counts. It seems like many are trying really hard to make this platform happen as a reaction to the election. The whole thing looks like running away to an echo chamber. When I peeked at what was going on there, it was a bunch of rants against Elon Musk and Trump. I do not use Twitter but this definitely didn’t look like something pleasant to use either.
I don't think X or Musk cares. X served it's purpose by nudging the election in it's own small way.