Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day(bsky.jazco.dev) |
Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day(bsky.jazco.dev) |
Usually that's the opposite that happen with these kind of people. They are going to look forward on being the at the top of the leaderboard, like a child doing stupid things only to get noticed by its parents.
It is continuing to grow steadily and has tons of activity compared to a few years ago.
Regardless of MAU count, there's plenty happening there to keep me active, and you get to see Threads users who speak ActivityPub as well as Bsky users via a bridge.
If geeky stuff is what you’re interested in, you can build that community on Mastodon easily. But if you want more popular content and users, they’re on Bluesky.
I get things have to be sold but damn it's out of control
Every so often I get exposed to that world. It’s awful.
Heaven for some, but mostly boring for everyone else after an hour.
I'm not sure the current model would do well against a large coordinated manipulation campaign, but it handles isolated trolls at least as well as corporate social media.
That basic hurdle is the reason why it is a barrier to many potential new users and it has traded complexity over ease of onboarding when trying to sign up new users (who are not techies or sys-admins).
One solution is to set a default instance. I.e 'mastodon.social' and tell users to sign up there. Again, that increases the issue of centralization. To prevent that, you close sign ups and tell users to sign up elsewhere. Then the issue continues on other instances.
Along side other issues, that is why new users just went to Bluesky or Threads instead.
Bluesky's AT Protocol was developed specifically to address what they saw as shortcomings with the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and other similar services.
No one owns it so there’s no team of well paid professionals trying to make it grow.
I don't post so it doesn't affect me directly. It affects where the people I follow choose to post.
The world has changed quite bit. If you have deep pockets and you can use AWS etc., it isn't a major problem anymore. However, if they indeed run it on their own data centers, that is impressive.
This is not true at all. The hard part isn't cloud vs. on-premise, it's the architecture.
Most sites can either put all their data in a single massive database, or else have an obvious dimension to shard by (e.g. by user ID if users mostly interact with their own data).
But sites where the data is many-to-many and there's a firehose of writes, of which Twitter is a prime example, are a nightmare to scale while remaining performant and reliable. Every single user gets an updated live feed of tweets drawn from every other user -- handling millions of users simultaneously is not easy.
And I don't care how many resources you have available to throw at it, plenty of sites would still fall over with the kind of growth they're having.
You can make an app that scales beautifully on AWS or you can make one that chokes.
The “starter pack” feature is great. There’s also this website where you can browse created starter packs for groups/interests you care about: https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just talking about Bluesky vs Twitter. I hope they can move past that.
The familiarity is easily transferable for a migration from Twitter / X. If you know how to use Twitter / X then you know how to use 90% of Bluesky.
No need to 'choose an instance' or some admin shutting a server down due to 'other reasons' unlike with Mastodon or an arbitrary blackbox algorithm that limits / hides your posts found in Threads or needing a Meta account.
Bluesky has learned from the mistakes of others to start first with a default server approach, you choose your own feed + algorithm and a search functionality that (works) can find accounts across the platform.
Simple.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185
[1] https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
However, after messing around with twitter and mastodon, I really do not get the appeal. All the incentives are not to have meaningful conversation, rather it is all about engagement.
It’s way too much noise and not for me.
If anyone wants to follow me on there, I'm @stavros.io.
—
Edit: replaced cable modem link with starter pack link
Pre-Elon, it seemed that Twitter was doing a pretty good run of keeping a single social network running for a long time. As has Facebook.
But for lots of dedicated communities, the new owner has such direct contempt for them and has focused on ruining the party.
Bluesky will work for now. Already science Twitter is having a huge renaissance now that links are no longer suppressed and discussion has lower noise:
When I look at at the "People" tab, they look like pretty impressive people (academics, etc), and then I look at the "Posts" tab and it's the usual noise: cat pictures, politics, etc. Not a lot of signal.
Biosci twitter -> BioSky?
The exodus is not happening randomly or in a vacuum.
But have noticed the uptick, gained like 400 followers the last week. But it's a bit weird, as it's a Norwegian community, no relation to American politics.
I guess it also can feel dead because it doesn't have a viral algorithmic feed like Twitter. But for me that's not an issue, ad even on Twitter I followed few enough people that I always used the chronological view.
But I do like the custom feeds of bsky. Like a search/hashtag on steroids, making it easy to discover others discussing the same theme I'm there for.
We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159454 - Nov 2024 (62 comments)
Also:
Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159713 - Nov 2024 (153 comments)
The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156907 - Nov 2024 (48 comments)
Consuming the Bluesky firehose for less than $2.50/mo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42152362 - Nov 2024 (58 comments)
Maybe Bluesky has "won" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42150278 - Nov 2024 (743 comments)
Watch Bluesky's explosive user growth in real time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147497 - Nov 2024 (11 comments)
How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42147430 - Nov 2024 (50 comments)
1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144340 - Nov 2024 (124 comments)
Ask HN: Bluesky is #1 in the U.S. App Store. Is this a first for open source? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129768 - Nov 2024 (44 comments)
Ask HN: Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129171 - Nov 2024 (13 comments)
Visualizing 13M Bluesky users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118180 - Nov 2024 (236 comments)
Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42112432 - Nov 2024 (168 comments)
How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086596 - Nov 2024 (79 comments)
Bluesky's AT Protocol: Pros and Cons for Developers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080326 - Nov 2024 (60 comments)
Bluesky Is Not Decentralized - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41952994 - Oct 2024 (194 comments)
Bluesky Reaches 10M Accounts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550053 - Sept 2024 (115 comments)
I'm torn. Agreed that allowing machine accounts is good. Not keen on jumping into a bot filled ecosystem. Especially with no way to see reputation that is more grounded in at least a presumably human element.
That is, if you allow bots, how do you limit bots signal boosting each other?
Many of the former have indeed migrated.
It’s like scrolling through a group chat where everyone forgot the topic but kept texting anyway.
Honestly, it’s impressive how they’ve managed to create a platform that feels simultaneously too niche and too random.
Idk, I spent a few hours over a few days trying to find something cool about it, and couldn’t.
Judiciously using the muting features is required to have a good time in social media. Add "Twitter" to muted words to move past that on your own.
That was a huge turnoff with Mastodon for me. Seemed almost everyone was just saying “wow, isnt it so much better here than on Twitter?” over and over and having everyone agree. By comparison Bluesky isn’t so bad, at least right now anyway.
That's still 80% of Mastodon's content so I don't expect much from Bluesky.
Scrolling through the first couple dozen posts on my following feed, I see a selfies, science educators, artists, makers, a couple naked people, a complaint about days getting shorter, and a few people talking about health conditions they've gotten under control. If you don't want to see people talking about Trump, follow people who don't talk about Trump. Or add "trump" to your list of muted words.
What you see is up to you. If you don't like what you see, there are a ton of levers in your control.
I’m not actually opposed to people disagreeing with me or thinking my ideas are bad. It’s just pointless chaos and no functional or constructive discourse. That’s more so what bothers me about it.
Even in relatively tame topics there tends to be some devaluing interjection of some sort. It gets tiring trying to find interesting content but only finding that, over and over.
Hard to see how they've dropped the ball on this one.
I’ve seen this said before, and I guess it might be true, but I don’t really get why people would use Threads once there’s advertising on it — isn’t it being a better experience their main value proposition? And they’ve just spent the last few years teaching people how easy it is to migrate between these basically-interchangeable services…
Just something to accept and think about. Do not blame the messenger.
Can't wait to join!
Yes they do.
X has shown the more trusted and safe your platform is the better it is for advertisers and your bottom line.
I think decisions like that are an active choice not to become popular.
The Open Connect Wikipedia page [1] currently claims 8,000+ Open Connect Appliances at more than 1,000 ISPs as of 2021, and OCA's in over 52 interchange points.
Netflix is shuffling data at a scale nobody outside maybe a dozen other companies globally needs to deal with, and I doubt any of the social media sites come close.
I think the performance of Netflix is highly dependent of ISP's data centers [1].
But yeah, there are still limits where the cloud won't help you.
If you whole infrastructure is designed to serve "historical" content instead of streaming, some bottlenecks cannot be avoided if you want to server low-latency sports stream. This came by surprise for me, but apparently betting has still significant role for the viewers.
edit: I'm more talking about the influence on people's minds whatever the ad is in particular the bad ones/narrative
Speaking of, one of the things that the 2012 Twitter APIpocalypse killed off, was Flattr 1.0 (with its buttons on websites to Flattr stuff so at the end of the month the sum of money you set away would be spread over all the Flattrs you made).
mastodon.social will only get more centralized and is the only one that is benefitting from that change.
So which platform do you see them moving to ?
But let's be real: Jordan B. Peterson on Bluesky is not going to be a different Jordan B. Peterson than he is anywhere else. If you don't want to interact with Jordan B. Peterson on e.g. Twitter, then you probably don't want to interact with him on Bluesky either.
However, feels virtue signal like to block someone that isn't there. Might as well block "random jerk." What is the value of blocking people by name that may not exist?
For public discourse, I wonder what the right level of agreeable "echo-chambering" is.
It is definitely not easy. But the core problem of this has been discussed since the release of Facebook. There are very obvious architectures which you can follow and then fix the bottlenecks with money. The cost is still the most relevant problem, which I wanted to say. The current cloud enables much higher optimization threshold and error margin.
This is a trivial approach, which works but is suboptimal (you can cut down on the IO with various optimisations):
Shard by id. Treat it as messages queues. Think e-mail, with a lookup from public id -> internal id @ shard.
Then, additionally, every account that gets more than n followers are sharded into "sub-accounts", where posts to the main account are transparently "reposted" to the sub-accounts, just like simple mailing list reflector.
(the first obvious optimization to this is to drop propagation of posts from accounts that will hit a large proportion of users, and weave those into timelines on read/generation instead of writing them to each user; second is to drop propagation of posts to accounts that have not been accessed for a while, and instead take the expensive generation step of pulling posts to create the timeline next time they log in; there are many more, but even with the naive approach outlined above this is a solved problem)
Oh, and this "everyone lies all the time so we can't know what is true" is a very Russian narrative called The Firehose of Falshoods.
Currently the top post on the latest refresh is:
>I'm honestly surprised he hasn't started selling stool samples. His followers have been buying his BS for years, so it seems like a natural next step...
https://bsky.app/profile/calltoactivism.bsky.social/post/3lb...
This is not a network I want to join if this is the popular content. We've been told to curate our own garden for reddit, twitter, mastodon, etc. It never works because people who see that and like it join by the millions and those who don't don't.
I’d rather pick a different party.
It just seems weirdly petulant to make a stand based on that. Even more so considering the post about Trump winning was similarly a front page post here, and that thread got more votes and comments than almost any I've ever seen here. And here there really is only one "front page".
The lobby.
This is a UX decision that the blue sky team made to make signing up more streamlined and its one that's very poorly thought out. Given its the same people who almade twitter it's no surprise they are making the same mistakes.
This article is a good explanation of why this epidemic of grifters has taken over conservatism in the US.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/08/05/joe-conason-on-how-...
Deception is central to the contemporary right for two reasons. One is that they’ve discovered, over a long period, that it is highly profitable to mobilize people’s fears and resentments around mythical issues. You can pull in vast sums of money from the right-wing base. The second reason is that facts don’t work for them. It is very hard, at this point, to make arguments on behalf of their positions that are fact-based. They push lies, conspiracy theories, fantastical inventions that support their ideological positions. To take one example, there is an idea that the minimum wage costs jobs. Not true. It’s been debunked. No respectable economist believes it. Or if you cut taxes, you’ll generate economic growth. Not true. It’s been disproven over again. So, they rely on falsehoods. Now, it is the “global elite” that is responsible for our problems—the faceless people at Davos. There is a large cohort of Americans who you can deceive with these myths.
""" Steve Kaplan of Chicago Booth strongly agreed that raising the wage would adversely affect the unemployment rate: “A $15 minimum wage rise makes entry level/low wage jobs very expensive. It would move the US to be more like France, Italy, etc.”
David Autor of MIT disagreed: “I don’t think the evidence supports the bold prediction that employment will be substantially lower. Not impossible, but no strong evidence.”
And Oliver Hart of Harvard was uncertain: “I worry that it will, but we don’t know enough. Firms may raise prices and the Fed may accommodate some inflation. But the change is large.” """ [1]
And from NPR on tax cuts: """ Many — but by no means all— economists believe there's a relationship between cuts and growth. In a 2012 survey of top economists, the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business found that 35 percent thought cutting taxes would boost economic growth. A roughly equal share, 35 percent, were uncertain. Only 8 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. """ [2]
It doesn't seem like these things are as proven as you think they are. I encourage you to step out of your echo chamber and challenge your ideas more, and try to be less partisan in your analysis.
1. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-economists-think-ab... 2. https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/30/45290...