My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.
Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.
A common kind of profile on that kind of platform is: "There are good people and bad people and I'm one of the good people"
It is very easy to other people and share memes that build group cohesion while driving other people away. Really making progress requires in politics a lot of "I agree with you about 90% but there is 10% that I don't" or "Well, I negotiated something in the backroom that you'd really hate but headed off a situation you would have thought was catastrophic but you won't appreciate that I did it so you and I are both better off if I don't tell you" and other sorts of nuance, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, etc.
To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read) I have to have about 20 or so block rules.
I see some people with the same kind of profiles on Bluesky but see a lot less othering in my feed because the "Discover" feed on Bluesky filters out a lot of angry content. My rough estimate is that it removes about 75% of the divisive political junk. That
(1) Immediately improves my feed, but also
(2) Reduces the amount of re-posted angry political content (it's like adding some boron to the coolant in a nuclear reactor) and
(3) Since angry political memes don't work anymore people find a different game to play
My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable. Those who go are less agreeable than those who stay. On the other hand, a certain amount of suppression of negativity could stop it from spreading and might not even be noticed as "censorship".
The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance. I have a strong interest in interacting with cybersecurity professionals, so infosec.exchange was perfect for me, either browsing subscribed or local posts. Browsing all is something I do only when I'm bored, because many posts are not what I'd like to see. You can always migrate your account if you want.
That being said, BlueSky is simpler and easier because there's no real federation yet, and even if they have a "Discovery" algorithm, you get many options to control what you want to see. It's feels great, like Twitter before their 2012(ish?) IPO.
> The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance.
Consider using a self-hosting service, like https://togethr.party/ , to have your own instance on your own domain. Much like email, you should never be beholden to another party for your identity; your hosting service should be an invisible detail that can change without anyone interacting with you needing to notice.
I've watched several instances shut down over the years, and have never once regretted the decision to have an instance on my own domain. My social network handle is now the same as my email address, with an extra @ in front.
I regretted my decision to self host. It’s expensive (for what it is), there are federation issues with some instances, some admins don’t like smaller unknown instances, it requires a fair bit of active management to keep an instance healthy, and you can’t migrate post history.
A good self-hosting service should provide full access to extract all your data, such that you can import it into a different service later.
I'm paying ~$7/month to own my own fediverse identity, which seems cheap to me.
You're right about federation issues, though that's more a limitation of the fediverse protocols and fediverse software that really needs fixing. Fediverse instances don't automatically fetch and show all replies to posts you see, even if it knows they exist, unless your server is already fetching other things from the server hosting those posts. So it's a little harder to see other people's replies, which contributes to the problem of 20 people replying with the same answers because they can't see that other people have already replied.
Large instances work around that because everyone's already talking to at least one account on that server.
I hope those limitations get fixed someday, but for now they're fundamental to the fediverse.
> I'm paying ~$7/month to own my own fediverse identity, which seems cheap to me.
I very much agree with you in owning your identity on this sort of thing, but I wouldn't pay $7/mo in order to participate in any social network.
I have my own email domain, and I can host it myself, or have someone else host it for me, on shared infrastructure. Fastmail charges me ~$4/mo, and that's for email, something anyone on the internet requires in order to interact with online services. I think $4/mo for a communications necessity is reasonable, and there are cheaper (even free) providers if I wanted to go that route. $7/mo for a social network is nuts.
I'm not sure how services like togethr.party work, but is it safe to assume that they have to spin up a completely new copy of the server software for each domain? That seems like a big problem, and is probably why this is so expensive.
I recently set up my own Matrix instance (using Synapse) and found it to be pretty wasteful, resource-wise. This is a solved problem with email servers, where one server can host as many domains as you have storage and processing power for; not sure why the chat/social platforms haven't caught up architecture-wise.
FWIW, $7/month is a figure for running a whole server just for your domain. Mastodon absolutely sucks for single-user instances. I offer Takahe hosting for $39/year if you want to use your own domain, or Mastodon + Matrix + Funkwhale + Lemmy for $29/year if you just want an account on the communick servers.
You can extract your data, but you can't import your posts on another Mastodon instance. It's fixable, but thorny.
Personally, I think Bluesky is a mix of NIH with a dash of wanting to be a central point of control, that is doomed in the long run - anything that works well for Bluesky can be copied, but the real benefit for the Fediverse in the long run is that Mastodon is just one of many services, or types of services. Every new service gets to hook into an existing network instead of starting from scratch.
> though that's more a limitation of the fediverse protocols and fediverse software that really needs fixing
I don't believe ATProto has the same issues, and I believe it would take quite a rearchitecture of ActivityPub to solve.
> such that you can import it into a different service later
This is the key issue. There is no way to import posts in Mastodon without manually fudging the database (which I also had to do when running my own instance). As another commenter mentioned, it's a tricky issue, in large part because it's not part of the federation protocol.
Bluesky solves this by separating the storage from the other parts of the distributed system, such that you don't need to move your storage to change your identity, hosting, moderation, etc. Keeping them independent is a smart move.
I host my instance on an always free VM, don't put much work toward maintenence, and haven't had a problem with federation. Post migration is not really a thing from a shared instance, I don't think, so yeah, that sucks.
Honestly, the most expensive part for me is the domain, because I shelled out for a spiffy premium domain. But I'm weird.
Oracle Cloud Free Tier ARM instances are really good, I don’t host Mastodon on mine but I assume you can, of course you still have to pay for a domain name but you can get a cheap one
Fediverse instance software is immature. I self host lots of stuff but I've tried 3 times to self host a fediverse instance and stopped all three times. I get things running, but the amount of care and feeding software like Mastodon requires is unacceptable for someone like me who doesn't have time to babysit server software.
The user who's username is a first and last name probably worries less about people finding out their identity than someone who's username is EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK. But someone who's technically savvy and privacy conscious could buy a new domain name with crypto, one not linked to their identity, if that's a concern.
Mastodon allows you move instances with minimal effort. You can redirect your old profile to the new one in another instance, or permanently move it keeping your follows and followers.
No one there wants to hold your information hostage, you can always export it, and while it doesn't support importing, you can repost it through their API if you really want to.
> You can redirect your old profile to the new one in another instance, or permanently move it keeping your follows and followers
But you lose all the posts and interactions. Most importantly, you are not keeping your identity, but merely creating a new account with a copy of your follower/following collections.
> No one there wants to hold your information hostage,
Tell that to a friend of mine who got banned from their instance for committing the crime of being an Ethereum developer. The admin suspended his account and didn't let him go back or initiate the migration process.
> You can redirect your old profile to the new one
Is that true even when the reason for the change is because the instance operator wants to silence you? If you can't put up a metaphorical "Go Here Instead" sign, could they also stop you from "proving" that your new home is legitimate and that you're the same author as before?
"something where my identity comes from a private key that I could take elsewhere" is a literal technical description of how Nostr works. Relays/servers are basically dumb pipes. You own your data and can repost to different relays (and encouraged to do so.) Problem is if your key is lost or stolen, you're kinda screwed.
Yeah, self-hosting the whole stack can be a lot (like Mastodon). I only signed up via the Primal mobile app and left it at that. Private key stays local.
But not really. I only ever want to see people I follow in my feed. And I can follow people from wherever, not just my instance. So the decision of what instance I chose was inconsequential.
The rational thing to do for someone who (1) thinks of themselves as a human being first and something else second is to join mastodon.social and (2) cares about visibility (why else are you on social?) is to join the biggest instance you can find.
Most notably people can only follow hashtags from accounts that are on their server so if you insist on joining some micro server please save yourself the hassle of putting hashtags on things.
Okay, then don't grandstand and downvote on here and just get on some group chats instead? This is the kind of overemotional comment that degrades social networks anyway.
I don't think myself as a human being is the right thing to upload to the internet! I'll stay right here thanks.
Instead I join specific interest-related communities that offer what I can't find in real life: the one person in the world that's had and overcome the same problem with their table saw.
Eh, there are some aspects of the human condition I'd rather opt out for the time being. Strangely, I find Facebook and WhatsApp more useful to keep in touch with people I care about, and likely won't join the Fediverse any time soon.
if you care too much about visibility I think mastodon will be disappointing. They just don't want to be popular, it feels like it's designed to be antipopular.
> Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.
I think what you're saying here is not that politics are terrible on microblogging platforms, but that microblogging platforms are terrible, which is a pretty valid sentiment.
I was surprised to learn recently that Rousseau, who is usually seen as a radical egalitarian, hated the democratization of publishing. [1]
His reasoning was complex but a lot of it revolved around the simple fact that as you get more people publishing, the intellectual quality of the average published work goes down.
I'm not ready to roll back the printing press, but in retrospect the digital era has proven him right about this. For instance his position kind of predicts Eternal September - the easier it gets to post online, the more numbskulls you have doing it. Microblogging is the ultimate expression of this and frequently the content you find on microblogging platforms is the absolute worst hot takes and generally the most vile stuff the moderation rules will permit because shock value generates impressions. It's every idiot on earth competing to be as flagrant and base as possible.
We usually hold up free speech as a virtue in Western societies and there are a lot of good reasons for that, but I'm increasingly inclined to treat microblogging less like publishing, and more like alcohol/tobacco/gambling, like it's something people do but they know it's not good for them, they do it anyway because it's addictive and easy.
That’s a pretty broad sweep (mis)characterization of Rousseau’s work. He was neither a radical egalitarian or hated the democratization of publishing.
He argues for a society where people are both free and equal, but he recognized that some forms of inequality could coexist with freedom, provided they were rooted in merit or necessity, rather than arbitrary privilege.
Also, when he talked about the Rights of Man, it wasn’t a rhetorical flourishes, he did mean man.
It’s a mischaracterization too to say he hated the democratization of publishing. His own ideas gained traction precisely because publishing allowed them to reach broader audiences. His critiques of printing and arts weren’t aimed at access itself but at the unintended consequences that came with it.
I really appreciate this comment as I always try to read the original authors but what little actual Rousseau I have read was over 20 years ago. I might be relying too much on short takes and what other people say about him. He is on the list for a proper reading eventually!
It’s generally true that the literary quality of a movement goes down as it grows and gets larger —- early adopters are often better writers if not smarter than the people who follow them
From the viewpoint of a library patron, for instance, feminism is a literary movement because it has left behind a large literature frozen in amber.
The earliest authors of the second wave, say Friedan, Steinem, or de Beauvoir were good reads but in 10 years the movement becomes a lot more “vulgar” (in the Latin sense of “common”) and at its worst you find large format books, cheaply bound and typeset with illustrations that probably got mimeographed before they saw the lithography camera full of radical and sometimes hateful rants.
One of the big downsides of most microblogging platforms (and social media in general) is that they consolidate everything into one undifferentiated aggregation, rather than facilitate the creation of many distinct bounded spaces.
Traditional online communities -- BBSes, IRC channels, Usenet groups, even standard blogs -- are all self-contained spaces that have their own norms and expectations, and so preserve the ability to have communities with high standards and high-quality discourse amidst others that fall victim to the kind of regression to the mean you're talking about. HN is a great example of this (as compared to other sites), as is Reddit, where the differences between various subreddits are very apparent.
But social media lumps everything together into a single space, where each participant is looking at a slightly different subset of the whole, and this causes the rot to overwhelm everything pretty rapidly.
Not really, microblogging is great to get quick news or life updates from people you follow. Yes, if you're trying to engage in discussion then it's not that useful but that is not its only use case.
Quick news is usually poor-quality news, and "life updates from people you follow" is another way of saying "pointless trivia from people you don't know actually know".
Again, not really. News can just be links to articles, or just headlines. The quickness of the news conveyed has no bearing on its quality. And life updates can be similar, for example a creator is making a new library I'd want to use, or updates an existing library I currently use, it's useful to know that information. If that's how you feel about updates from people then I honestly don't know what to tell you.
Honestly not true. At its best, Twitter educated me on many subjects including many non-political ones. And as for journalism, well I’m not sure much that I would recognise as high-quality has survived the economic pressures of the internet in any format.
I'm not sure Bluesky filters out angry content at all, as this is what I see when I don't follow anyone or have any followers [0]. I wish there was way more filtering than what I currently see as it makes me not want to even interact with Bluesky if that's what I see as a new user.
Basically what I did is just follow some people I knew from twitter, and from that I discovered a few follow lists and block lists that I liked. Within a couple of days I had a pretty well curated and very busy feed of things I was interested in seeing and interacting with.
I don't see any of that because I've gone to the effort to Show Less on that sort of commentary in the Discover feed. None of it is in Following because I don't follow any of them.
I don't know exactly how they populate that with no following, but I can prove it's filtered by showing you this completely unfiltered view: https://firesky.tv
It doesn't show images which is likely the biggest source of angry images, as I see on my feed. My point is that as a new user, I shouldn't have to see such content as I posted, because it turns people off using the platform entirely. I shouldn't have to Show Less, it should ideally be filtered like that automatically.
> My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable.
The activation energy of moving ones home is very different from moving a social profile. I also find in some old, dead communities I was a part of, the most toxic people can't pull themselves away and stick around
That just sounds like Mastodon users, many who are academics, are more to the left than you are, and you are cleverly framing their culture as more "divisive", "performative", and/or "tribal" compared to your own arguments which arguably are also just as tribal and performative.
I would argue that people in academia or other tightly coupled bubbles where your career and thus well-being are far more reliant on how your peers evaluate you (especially in humanities where peer reviews are nearly the sole factor of success) is far more tribalist than a typical blue-collar or office environment.
That's just a lot of words to dismiss academia as an ivory tower, and to ad hominem leftism as being part of the ivory tower, which is a bad argument.
It is true that the academic clerisy is a problem and a few leftists actually argue that this social class is a block on social progress. However, sometimes their ideas are right, ranging from the sciences to social justice issues, such as racism and sexism and so on.
Nothing they said dismisses academia as an ivory tower anymore than anyone pointing out how ridiculously pervasive the replication crisis is dismisses academia or ad hominems leftism as untrustworthy.
There is no need to be defensive when how perverse the incentive structure for academia is, is pointed out. You can be a diehard leftist and also hate the present day institutions of academia.
I agree largely with what you wrote but have a small disagreement. I don't actually think the character count has that big of an effect. I've seen plenty of self-righteous posts on places like here (HN) and the LessWrong forums that just use more words to do the same thing.
I think the kind of person that's energized to comment online generally feels more strongly about the issue than most lurkers. This means that online conversations are dominated by the most passionate, most invested, and often least interested in impartiality. This post [1] comes to mind.
You’re right that people can write hateful, divisive and othering content with many words. The trouble with the short content platforms is that you can’t do anything else.
Interesting point, I'm inclined to agree. I'm curious now about how many Likes and Reposts a thread on Bluesky gets vs a compact emotional response. I run a firehose ingester so maybe I'll test this out.
EDIT: I realize you specifically called out politics here and that makes me even more inclined to agree.
You can 1/n but no one’s gonna read that. The “trouble” is not with the platform but with the reader selection it provides. The greater auditory doesn’t want to read you, because there’s too many you. That’s why it filters itself into short messaging. Too much of “hey listen to my thousand words”, all with varying depth, coherence and clariry, per reader perspective. It’s not your, platforms or readers failure, that’s how humans work. There’s a natural limit to every specific level of community. Expecting everyone to dive deep into each others thoughts at scale is too idealistic.
I think you can but you will get no interaction. No one (relatively, not literally) cares about “nice” or informative - they care about things that make them angry or otherwise emotive.
I’d also add that no one (again, relatively) reads anything, anymore. A couple of paragraphs and you’ll see your engagement drop off a cliff. But a quick, “witty” slap? A stupid pun thread on Reddit? Easy money.
I think your point is generally right - not trying to disagree, but I think these platforms are simply effective tools to mirror back their users and what their users want, rather than the inherent, specific problem themselves. That is, it’s not Twitter that’s the problem - it’s that Twitter users really like the behaviors Twitter rewards.
I agree - short form content doesn't leave enough space to have a nuanced arguement and conversely it leaves a lot of space open for misinterpretation and encourages hot takes and mic drops over expression of cohesive thoughts.
> The trouble with the short content platforms is that you can’t do anything else.
I'd agree MBP are poor media for nuanced debate but can work well for info broadcasting.
Pre-echochamber Twitter was an excellent venue for disseminating important news - news that actual news orgs were too distracted or deferential to publish.
> My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.
It's certainly a better name, if nothing else. Names like Mastodon, Diaspora, are just terrible. One sounds lika a dinosaur, the other like an unpleasant condition of the large intestine (yes I know what diaspora means).
They recently shipped some changes to Discover to make Show Less and Show More actually work. If I understood right[0], they only collected data from them until that point.
The result isn't perfect, but I do notice it's much more in line with what I want in a timeline.
[0] I should save more links! The devs talk openly about what they're working on and the changes that end up in the app and protocol, so I have the knowledge that something changed, but not always a link to the source of that knowledge since it was just another post in the timeline.
I have bluesky and mastodon accounts and I’m always surprised at how people extreme people call them. I have them just as my music/photography accounts. So the people I add are doing the same stuff. My feed is just as extreme as Flickr aka zero extremeness. Just pictures of bridges and music and normal thoughts.
Eh, the never ending cycle. People just don't seem to care about the fediverse, because... I don't really know.
I'm on a small fediverse instance and never had any politics or something filling up my feed, just wonderful graphics related content. You just have to be a bit cautious which instance you pick, that is all.
Filtering 'political tweets' on Mastodon is fine by me.
It's expecting that behavior as the default which I take issue with, and denying the specter of rising fascism. (Because yeesh, why care about a year of genocide funded with our own taxes and enabled by our leaders?)
Some people actually do care about what's happening in the world; say, for example, the UN calling out a genocide backed by Western powers with our tax money. I believe they ought to be able to discuss these things without being flagged/shadowbanned/banned etc, especially on decentralized fora.
The major platforms already suppress such discussion. If you want to avoid making custom filters, just stay on those.
Idk deleting a comment is kinda the definition of censorship. It’s not governmental censorship, but that’s not the only kind, just the worst one. Censorship is justified sometimes of course, tho I’m both sad and surprised that our two kings have decided any discussion of authoritarianism deserves this treatment. What is HackerNews? What does it mean to stimulate intellectual curiosity when legal freedom of speech is at risk for the large majority of the user base?
I guess technically Thiel is into Trump so maybe influencing Graham, but I never got the impression he dictated moderation decisions here. The more likely explanation, IMO, is that they’re just trying not to rock the boat, and “ban all serious political discussion on sight” is still their way to do that
> censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good.
(Brittanica) - note 'changing' and 'suppression', rather than 'elimination'.
> Any regime or context in which the content of what is publically expressed, exhibited, published, broadcast, or otherwise distributed is regulated or in which the circulation of information is controlled.
> The practice and process of suppression or any particular instance of this. This may involve the partial or total suppression of any text or the entire output of an individual or organization on a limited or permanent basis.
(Oxford) - note 'regulated' and 'controlled', and explicitly, 'partial or total', rather than elimination.
> Amplifying views you like
Ie, literally de facto censorship.
When every social network is owned by the yacht class, and they are "amplifying" everything except political views calling for a more equitable and less genocidal system, that's censorship. Definitevily.
Sad to see such a logical and straightforward statement being grayed out :/
Especially when the political viewpoint in question is "Guys maybe we should worry about this looming fascism, evidenced by just about every possible indicator".
* The genocide in Israel isn't just an American project. Many countries leaders and media are complicit.
* Fascism isn't just rising in America.
* American politics affects the entire world. Simply look at a map of US military bases, or the threats we level against courts and regulators and leaders.
* Most platforms heavily suppress huge swathes of political content which falls outside the current Overton window (which has, indeed, been moving toward fascism for decades across the West).
Second, Mastodon is a decentralized forum. Complaining about political content on it, in a time of historic inequality, and then asking if all platforms need to be a "frontline of American politics" is really quite silly. It would be like complaining about all the business news on HN, then asking if every platform needs to be so relentlessly capitalistic.
A year ago, Bluesky was an empty place, I wanted to use it but there wasn't anything. Now its bustling, there are interesting posts and they receive thousands of likes.
On the other hand Twitter still feels like where things are actually happening but more and more feels like they are about to start terminating anyone with eyeglasses.
I was there when the Digg exodus happened, it doesn't feel like that. It's something else. It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.
> It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.
Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."
I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.
"I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward."
How would you feel about, multiple times a day, being required to defend your core beliefs that you find trivially true? Or even being constantly exposed to folks who you tangentially know presenting a constant barrage of ideas that you find stupid and mean in ways that explicitly target you and yours?
After many years of being around that (I'm a queer/non-binary, an atheist, and politically far left) I stopped enjoying it and just started blocking folks.
I still seek out contrary opinions- that is why I regularly look at HN.
However, in my daily feed of stuff like "pictures of my nieces" and "birth/death announcements from my larger community" I don't really feel like I need to be confronted by folks who consider me to be literally demonic.
And, for the record, I don't expect those same people to be constantly subjected to my own opinions.
So it doesn't feel sad for me: if you consider places like "churches" or "chambers of commerce meetings" to be "safe spaces" for particular kinds of folks, then it just seems "normal".
I like your point and analogy about safe places being a normal aspect of society, where like-minded people gather. Perhaps you're right that it's not the end of the world to have multiple massive social networks.
Secondly, I find it so interesting that you come to HN for "contrary opinions" from your self-described "politically far left" viewpoint.
I hold a politically right viewpoint, and I come to HN for the same reason - it feels far left of my own world view.
I think it's pretty cool that HN can serve as a more neutral safe meeting place of minds.
HN is literally owned and operated by a VC company. And a lot of the conversation is absolutely celebrating capitalism. It's as far from "far left" as might be imagined.
Depends on what you mean by left. Some people, including many who would describe themselves as such, think "leftist" means things like pronouns and reparations, and are even happy to engage with capital when it supports their pet causes.
…source? I’ve literally never once met a capitalist leftist, only ones that still use the word to avoid alienating people, e.g. Sanders. No offense but I think this is a case of echo chambers in work impeding our discourse —- leftism is anti capitalism, and has been since its inception in France.
I think it's more due to political ignorance and the overton window shifting right the last 50 years. People tend to equate modern liberalism, which is very much pro-markets and pro-capital, with leftism.
> HN is literally owned and operated by a VC company
So? I have never seen instances where YC's organizational viewpoint controlled the overall discussion, and I think dang is probably the best moderator on the planet.
Sure, HN has a focus around the "tech startup ecosystem", and that may attract a certain type of viewpoint, but I've never seen that viewpoint pushed from an institutional perspective.
Speaking as someone who self-identifies as far left, the conversation here can go either way. I know it's a common trope that HN is dominated by "Silicon Valley libertarians", but in my experience that isn't really the case when you look at up- and downvotes.
I think what you're noticing is that a simple left/right along a line is a poor way to express someone's political views.
I suspect that because a huge portion of the HN crowd are educated IT workers / would-be founders, overall there's both a strong support for capitalism mixed with progressive social views. That doesn't really connect well with the political landscape in most of the western world and typically gets you labeled a centrist, regardless of how important those particular issues are to you.
What you say is partly true, but it goes beyond that. It's not that uncommon to see even straight up anti-capitalist comments here that still get upvoted, or the kind of "market solves all" talk getting downvoted into oblivion. So I'd say there's a hefty chunk of the userbase that is also leaning strongly left economically.
I don't doubt that you find HN to be left of your political position.
A lot of folks I know find all kinds of things "left wing". A lot of my liberal friends think they are leftists, though most of my leftist friends would disagree. My conservative friends don't really draw that distinction between liberals and leftists, and at the same time my liberal friends often think my anarchist friends to be about on par with literal Nazis, horeshoe-theory wise.
I suspect a lot of the Dem establishment neo-liberals (who are rapidly becoming neocons ala Rumsfield/Cheney) who make up a lot of this site see themselves as slightly left. Rationally left, but not part of the "revolutionary" left.
Which, from my position, puts them fairly close to the Reagan conservatives, if you overlook some issues about gay folks and are took the 80s conservatives at their word rather than their deeds when it comes to race issues.
However, I don't find this place to be a meeting of the minds.
I find that HN is a place where I can observe what the sociopaths who have real capital and thus material political power think about the world, or at least what the their sycophantic mandarins work for those folks might think.
I listen to what folks say here because I am genuinely curious about what their alien-to-me understandings of technology and political ethics will do in the larger world.
I listen to folks here for the same reason I listen to left-wing folks digest nazi propaganda, read a lot of history, and try to hear what conversations are happening at the red neck bars and at gun shops I hang around.
Cause that's who has no problem fucking with my world, and fuck with my world they have indeed.
HN is not a place where I think any of my actual politics will find an audience.
Though I am (likely unwisely) communicating now, I mostly just shut up when I am here, unless someone has something worthwhile to say about music.
Thanks for being open - I've learned a lot in this thread.
I honestly had no idea that anyone "left of center" felt they couldn't openly share here, as I have always mentally categorized HN as a leftist echo chamber (hopefully that's not too blunt - it's just my honest perception).
I naively assumed that it was only those more right-of-center that felt their worldviews and opinions were unwelcome here, judging from the instantly dead posts I see of anything remotely right-aligned.
From your short share, I see that the echo-chamber is unwelcoming to a much broader sphere of humans than I realized. I find that super helpful to understand - so thank you for sharing.
HN is largely US centric and largely suffers the blinkered bimodal view that the US itself mostly suffers from.
It's a problem amplified by Murdoch type media outlets who have weaponised the us-vs-them worldview for clickbait outrage and spread that dumbing down as far across the world as they are able.
For those of us not within that mindset such views seem very childlike and unsophisticated, there's a slew of nuance to the world that doesn't easily reduce to L v. R, "woke agenda" and all that et. al. jazz.
FWiW IMNotACommunist .. but I have an endearing love of this short interaction twixt Piers Morgan ( UK outrage talking head ) and Ash Sarkar for higlighting the pitfalls of not paying attention to what people actually think and believe in.
I'm not politically informed, and I don't watch traditional media, so I had to Google "Murdoch".
If I understand you correctly, you feel it's the right-leaning outlets like Fox News that have weaponized us-vs-them mindset?
The origin feels flipped to me, but regardless who started it, I see little to no actual respectful and thoughtful discourse these days - mature discourse where each side is willing to listen and acknowledge the elements of truth and assume positive intent in the other side's positions.
As you say, the media on both sides, including social media, feels extremely childlike and unsophisticated.
"Murdoch type media" outlets are those with a greater interest in pure profit, exercising influence, and serving owner interests that extend outside of media alone. The balanced presentation of news is of minor interest and a means to an end rather than a primary goal.
This, with Murdoch, harks back in a lesser way to his father, then to his expansion into the UK Fleet Street and eventual transition in US media, in Canada with Conrad Black, in the US pre Murdoch with Hearst, Pulitzer, Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick, in the UK pre Murdoch with Alfred Harmsworth and the like.
These are people who have all had large significant media outlets that have engaged in extremely partisan positions with respect to wars, the economy, favoured political candidates and dumbing down discourse.
> I see little to no actual respectful and thoughtful discourse these days
In the 1890s the fierce competition between his World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal caused both to develop the techniques of yellow journalism, which won over readers with sensationalism, sex, crime and graphic horrors.
Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" is great place for anyone wanting to learn more about the various biases that influence what gets covered in the media, and how it is discussed. It's a book, but there's also a great documentary of the same name that's half about Noam Chomsky's life, and half the ideas discussed in the book.
It's from the late 80s, but it is still relevant (and it also helps it feel a little above the current political hot-topics of today.
You're being downvoted but as a lefty European tech worker this rings true. I come to HN for interesting technical content (obviously) but I find the politics of the site by turns confusing and hard to stomach.
It is certainly the case that many well-meaning, Dem-voting Americans don't seem to know what leftist politics is (having never been exposed to it), and don't seem to realize that they are right-wing. It's an interesting phenomenon, but quite alarming when the consequences for the rest of the world are Not Good.
Strange, because I've noticed over the past few years that HN has been sliding further to the right. Or at the very least it's susceptible to brigading. To be clear, it's not "right winger equals brigade[0]", it's "oh gee someone posted a story about EU external immigration and now the comments are full of people angry about asylum seekers who think the correct solution[1] is to shut down international law and start retroactively deporting citizens".
For the sake of full transparency: I'm an open borders maniac, which makes me left wing by American standards and basically persona non grata in Europe.
[0] I live with right-wingers, so I kinda have to be tolerant of them
[1] If this had been anticipated and dealt with ahead of time, the correct solution would have been to invest in integration and have generous family visas. That's why the US doesn't have a migrant integration crisis like the EU does - we know how to welcome and inculturate people. The EU doesn't really do integration, it assumes everyone is a self-motivated tech worker who will do all the integration work themselves.
>The EU doesn't really do integration, it assumes everyone is a self-motivated tech worker who will do all the integration work themselves.
The EU consists of welfare states. Thus the incentive structure for an immigrant is totally different than in the US. Further more MENA immigration which is what Europe has most of is not the same kind of immigration that the US enjoys. The amount of state expenditure on facilitating and integrating immigrants in western Europe is insane.
Western Europe has bendt over backwards the last 50 years to accommodate people of cultures that have pretty much nothing in common with European culture, values and historically has been the enemy both culturally and religiously - the world did not start in 1945 as many on the left in Europe thinks.
That's a stretch... those welfare states aren't that universal and realistically most people in such situations would be barely above subsistence level.
But yeah, Europe generally gets people who can't get into US with all the outcomes of that.
Well yeah, I should've stated Western Europe more with regards to the welfare state, - Central/Eastern Europe hasn't been that enthusiastic about MENA immigration and they don't have that level of social security nets.
Also even the illegal immigrants that come to the US is easier to integrate than the immigrants from MENA in Europe. Culturally they are much closer, even though there has been a influx of illegal immigrants from other places than Americas last couple of years.
This is a very deep difference in immigration in EU vs US that is quite foreign to many Americans.
I feel like people's perceptions around certain topics might shift quite a bit, depending on how those are implemented.
Suppose you have a fairly open border policy. Lots of folks get to contribute to the economy, there’s some cultural exchange, it’s pretty okay.
What if there isn’t a good plan in place for making people integrate with the local culture and you end up with large groups of people whose beliefs and behaviour are incompatible with those of the local population, e.g. calls for religious rule in an otherwise democratic country and increased violence? Not the blown out of proportion election claims in the US, but rather the real question of what happens to people after they cross the border? If that detail is unaddressed then people might grow to desire more closed borders, even if the issues lie elsewhere.
It’s a bit similar to the self-described “pro-life” movement, except when you look past those strongly held beliefs, things get more complex. For example, if children are born in families that can’t really afford them, will there be enough government assistance to school and feed them? What about daycare? What about neither of the people being mature enough to be good parents? That’s setting the personal freedom argument aside for just a second, it’s like they care about the births but don’t have the rest figured out, similarly to the discourse about borders.
I think you’re correct that the right solution would involve focusing on integration.
> What if there isn’t a good plan in place for making people integrate with the local culture and you end up with large groups of people whose beliefs and behaviour are incompatible with those of the local population, e.g. calls for religious rule in an otherwise democratic country and increased violence? Not the blown out of proportion election claims in the US, but rather the real question of what happens to people after they cross the border? If that detail is unaddressed then people might grow to desire more closed borders, even if the issues lie elsewhere.
Integration is primarily a numbers game. Most people don't integrate into the local culture unless they are cut off from their own. If you have so many immigrants that you either need to build immigrant housing or fill up entire towns with them then you don't get immigrans assimilating into the local culture but rather them bringing their own culture no matter what other measueres are implemented. So yes, a good implementation of immigration needs closed borders at least for foreign cultures - these things are not independent.
>That's why the US doesn't have a migrant integration crisis like the EU does - we know how to welcome and inculturate people
I believe you got this other way around. The US doesn't have a migrant immigration crisis like the EU does, because it's a big isolated island with relatively strict immigration policy. The people who immigrate to the US are exactly the kind of self-motivated workers who do the integration work themselves.
Many here believed that investing in integration will magically make open borders policies work, and the countries did. Less people in Europe believe it now.
Another thing is, how much immigration does US get? In Europe, many countries can have a significant fraction (a few percent) of their population immigrate over a few years (for example check how big UA immigration was). That makes integration much harder.
To be clear, I'm not against immigration, but it's a complex topic and I believe you're a bit too optimistic and extreme about it.
>For the sake of full transparency: I'm an open borders maniac, which makes me left wing by American standards and basically persona non grata in Europe.
I don't get dividing people into two neat categories (left and right). And you're welcome in Europe, it would be great to have you and I'm sure you would do well here!
It’s just an objective fact that in any political thread the top comments are one of either:
1. A lazy attempt at seeming impartial while holding a subtle, elitist anti-republican opinion.
2. A not-so-subtly marxist or socialist outburst.
Under each comment the top 3 direct replies are an agreeing sentiment that pretends to add some nuance to the discussion. The fourth might be a contrarian (either right wing or conservative) opinion that gets barraged by downvotes and angry responses.
> How would you feel about, multiple times a day, being required to defend your core beliefs that you find trivially true?
Do you have to defend, or can you just ignore. I assume those statements are still being made, even if you don’t read them. So why not just ignore and move on?
FWIW, Twitter (not saying Twitter is the best or only site) allows you to have a feed of only people you follow. That probably approximates going to another site of only people who share your core beliefs.
My guess is that as a queer person, scarecrowbob gets regularly exposed to opinions that rise far beyond a mere difference of belief, and looks more like perpetual small doses of unmoderateable hatred. People who are willing to say that queer people are "literally demonic", for example, are not really offering some kind of thoughtful argument that queer people need to be engaging. But this toxicity is often expressed in ways that platforms are unable, or unwilling, to stop.
It was an echo chamber, the Tumblr Exodus made society much more leftwing overall when they moved into Reddit and Twitter, despite still using 4chan memes to this day.
People aren't built to ignore attacks on them and if they make themselves do it constantly it really has an effect on their self-esteem. See: bullying.
Twitter has systematically broken the tools for ignoring it. No more mass blocklists, no more third party clients, an algorithm designed around shoving the content of the sort of idiots who pay for self-promotion in your face… I mean, no thanks.
There's a concept of "background radiation" expressed in social spaces. Dealing with a constant barrage of people who hate you or your existence[1] is tiring.
[1] Or perhaps they claim they don't hate you in particular, just, you know, anyone like you who they don't know in particular.
That's the reason why people are moving to Bluesky: because there you don't have a make a constant effort to ignore posts.
On Twitter, I have a make an active effort to not click on the "For you" tab because I'll be bombarded with posts about Trump or "woke" games, which I simply don't want to see. On Bluesky, I can actually discover new content without having to think about my mental health when using the "Discover" feed.
So basically you don’t actually want diversity of thought. That’s fine if it’s what you want but at least be honest and admit it. Let’s not redefine standard terms please, it makes it hard to have a discussion.
no, to my mind there's diversity, and there's "there are always two sides to everything and both have to be given equal consideration". the latter is a huge mistake and is how we get climate change deniers and transphobes platformed in major newspapers.
Have you thought of potential solutions for how to appease this problem? It doesn’t look like things are trending less polarised, but more. Do you have suggestions for turning the tides?
If it’s just going to keep getting worse and worse, what’s the final destination?
the only thing I can think of to do, as an individual, is to build community with people who say "no, there really are not two sides to some issues, and we don't have to embrace the viewpoints of those who disagree on fundamental issues like human rights". also to support news orgs and other media who take a similar stance.
this is unfortunately what (mostly right wingers) decry as "bubbles" and "echo chambers", but I think if the left is going to win hearts, minds, and political power it needs to focus on engaging its own people on its own issues rather than waste time and energy endlessly fighting with the right.
also, inviting conservatives in to find common ground is largely a trap anyway, and has shifted the overton window a good deal to the right because people feel that "okay, maybe we can come to some sort of compromise". the writer a r moxon put it very well: "meet me in the middle, says the unjust man. you take a step towards him, he takes a step back. meet me in the middle, says the unjust man."
on the other hand, I've read that when people complain that their kids went to college and got "brainwashed with liberal ideas", what actually happened was that they met gay people, and black people, etc, and realised that most of what their parents were getting off conservative media was bullshit at best and hate-mongering at worst. so maybe the real solution is to welcome conservatives, but hold the line on making no space for conservative ideas and attitudes.
That would mean in this case being intolerant of leftists, as they are the ones trying to suppress ideas and debate (by "making no space for conservative ideas and attitudes").
In my experience, racism, homophobia, transphobia, slurs, misogyny, and general bigotry almost exclusively resonates from conservatives. So naturally when those opinions get filtered out that almost only affects conservatives.
There's nothing wrong with having conservative ideas and attitudes. But are you able to express them without bigotry? Are you able to be pro-life without calling women sluts and whores, for instance?
The answer for some conservatives is no, including our president elect. Nobody is required or even expected to tolerate that, and in fact tolerating it only spreads intolerance.
But there are two sides to everything and both should be given equal consideration. There are also extremes on both sides that should be recognized and rejected as such. And the only way to sift out the two and make sure you're not accidentally skewing towards one extreme is to consistently try to understand other people's perspectives.
This practice is both educational—it helps you see where you might be wrong after all—and crucial for anyone who wants to actually make a difference in the world. Rejecting the perspectives of 50% of the population out of hand is a great way to lose popular support and elections.
Explain why you feel you personally are required to entertain the idea of both of those options. This is effectively what you are arguing must be done in the context of this thread.
> There are also extremes on both sides that should be recognized and rejected as such.
"No right to continue existing" is obviously an extreme that doesn't need to be entertained. But the existence of that extreme is used to argue that anything short of full endorsement of everything labeled a right is that extreme of denial of the right to exist, which is patently false.
A less extreme formulation that regularly gets lumped in with "no right to continue to exist" is: Some people are born with various shades of physical differences that lead to different mental and emotional states. Those who are different from the majority deserve our love and support, but we should attempt to provide that support in a way that doesn't encourage people to self-diagnose with these very real diversities when they don't, in fact, have them. It's a tricky balance to maintain and one that we hope we can get right, but when it comes to sweeping cultural change it's better to move slowly and observe the outcomes carefully. In the meantime we should try as hard as possible to support those who we do identify as being truly divergent.
I'm willing to bet that a substantial number of people reading the position described above will be unable to distinguish it from "no right to continue to exist", and therein lies the problem.
> we should attempt to provide that support in a way that doesn't encourage people to self-diagnose with these very real diversities when they don't, in fact, have them
What diversities are you talking about here?
For things like autism and ADHD I see very few people suggesting that self-diagnosis is reliable.
For gender and sexuality, there isn't a test for that, what do you expect people to do? From there, being cis or trans, straight or gay is a direct consequence of gender+body or sexuality+body. Do you think there's a significant rate of false positives for trans/bi/gay? I haven't seen evidence of that being the case.
> For gender and sexuality, there isn't a test for that, what do you expect people to do?
I expect kids to be given a chance to go through puperty before being encouraged to make permanent changes to their bodies. Teemagers in general are still finding themselves and usually have opinions differrent from those they will have when grown up.
> Do you think there's a significant rate of false positives for trans/bi/gay? I haven't seen evidence of that being the case.
Perhaps that's because you have shielded yourself from it. This is exactly the problem with (social media) bubbles, both ones created urself with excessive blocklists and more systematic manipulation of what can be shared.
> I expect kids to be given a chance to go through puperty before being encouraged to make permanent changes to their bodies. Teemagers in general are still finding themselves and usually have opinions differrent from those they will have when grown up.
Nobody's doing permanent changes to kids that haven't gone through the age of puberty. Sometimes blockers are used to delay the effect of puberty itself, but those are the opposite of a permanent change.
And as far as my question goes, that just pushes the it down the line by a few years.
> Perhaps that's because you have shielded yourself from it. This is exactly the problem with (social media) bubbles
Well I've never seen someone try to put together even a couple detailed anecdotal examples either. And there are a lot of flat out lies that get spread and even get on the news so I'm not going to accept a vague claim of "it happens".
Does a person self-diagnose as Black? Jewish? Indigenous? Being gay?
Your attempt at nuanced discussion falls apart when the context is about whether people should be expected to stay somewhere by "blocking and moving on" comments suggesting they go cease existing.
What you're failing to recognize (to a point that at least appears bad faith) is that it is the extremes here.
> What you're failing to recognize (to a point that at least appears bad faith) is that it is the extremes here.
This is exactly what I'm warning against. Refusing to see that it's not that simple is why Trump's anti-trans smear campaign works so well. The best thing we can do for trans rights is acknowledge that we recognize it as a complicated issue that needs to be worked through carefully, but internet rhetoric invariably breaks it down into extremes. Given two extremes as the only options, we shouldn't be surprised when people pick the one we wouldn't prefer.
My comments here will be labeled transphobic by a lot of people, to the point where if I weren't writing under a pseudonym I wouldn't write them at all. Never mind that I'm an ally—the fact that I'm the kind of ally that calls out a counterproductive theory of change for what it is makes me an enemy in the current environment, and that is why we're seeing a regression on the national level. Cassandras like me have been warning about this for years now, and it's high time we're heard rather than pushed out of the tent.
I don't think you get to decide if you qualify as an ally, and that's maybe part of the problem here.
There are a lot of well-meaning well-intentioned people who do great harm. The adage "the path to hell is paved with good intentions" exists as an observation of this.
Agreed. A lot of people call themselves allies while actively sabotaging relationships with the 60% of the population that they need to get on board with change to actually make a difference. We just got a very visceral illustration of the harm that that kind of ally with good intentions has caused.
I've done more to advance LGBT acceptance by quietly listening to people in deep red states and then (after listening to them!) helping them to see the other perspective than 100 internet commenters raging about how everything comes down to extremes.
You can label me whatever you like, but I'm going to keep up my approach, because it's obvious that the mainstream left's approach is a total failure.
If you take off your bias googles you might see that "right to continue existing" typically actually means "right to hove everyone else forced to support them".
You can exist without
- others being forbiden from expressing opinions that you find distateful
- your personal wishes being financially supported by everyone else
- being given a platform to target children with your views
- whatever facet you define yourself with being represented in every media ever made
Framing it as the "right to continue existing" in order to make "the other side" seem more extremist is exactly the kind of thing an extremist does.
Well, not that I agree with them, but Trump's victory shows that people don't really seem to care about these things, otherwise, they would have voted.
Majorities can be tyrannical, ignorant, easily motivated by fear, etc. One election doesn't prove that most people don't care about such things. After all Obama was elected twice and he brought things significantly closer to single payer healthcare. And in 2024 some very red states made the right to abortion constitutional and dropped prohibitions on same-gender marriage.
> Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."
The issue with Twitter and a lot of social media is that you don't often encounter opposing views that are nuanced, thoughtful and constructive, but rather hot takes, rants and memes. Even when those share your same worldview they can be tiring, but when they don't, they can drain your mental energy quickly.
Perhaps people do want to live in their own bubble, but I wouldn't say we can judge that based on Twitter just because of how toxic it can be.
I found Twitter to be much better on that front pre-Elon, but the changes he introduced have really incentivized and highlighted the hot takes, rants, and memes. Twitter used to be the kind of place where I could see an interesting comment and then look at the replies to see more interesting comments and maybe a new person to follow. In post-Elon Twitter, replies are inevitably a complete cesspool of boosted blue checks farming engagement or bots. It certainly wasn't perfect before, but it's absolutely become more toxic since Elon purchased it.
I'd love a proper spectrum. But my spectrum pretty much stops when we start excusing unironic prejudice. I think "your body, my choice" was pretty much the tipping point for many people deciding to move ship.
Fortunately I do have a few other smaller hubs for a more "diverse" (in the original sense of the word) conversation, while not allowing bigotry.
When people don't vaccinate themselves they become a walking vector that affects society as a whole. Yes, personally, they might be healthy. But there's people out there who can't take the vaccines and should they get sick of COVID they could die. There's people out there who, even after being vaccinated, are still at higher risk should they get the disease (the vaccine doesn't prevent you getting sick, rather it makes it more difficult for the virus to transmit and lowes it's effectiveness and how dangerous it is for you). So people not vaccinating puts the whole of society at risk.
On the other hand, abortion is very much a familial issue. It affects the woman that is pregnant the most. The rest of the people around her are affected only tangentially, yes, the parents might want to become grandparents or the person that got her pregnant might also want to have a child. And those are inputs that are necessary when coming to the decision of performing an abortion or not.
Now, where does "your body, my choice" come into play? Do abortions cause the societal harm that vaccines cause? I don't think there's any evidence to this, it's all moral standings. But we legislate for everyone, we don't legislate for a group of people that happen to have a particular religious view of the world. Now, these people have a lot of power and influence and that's why their view is imposed on most of society.
Ultimately though, these issues are different and shouldn't be treated as mirrors of each others. I think that's a mistake.
The government did not force anyone to take the vaccine. The death count in US proportionally speaks to that.
If you're comparing walking into a store or concert (both private establishments) to your state telling your doctor thru cannot operate on you, you clearly don't understand or won't understand how freedom works.
You’re talking about a different thing. I’m strictly talking about actual forcing, and by that I mean giving legal repercussions to people who wouldn’t do it.
Private businesses can place whatever bans on whomever they want, for all I care.
> I’m strictly talking about actual forcing, and by that I mean giving legal repercussions to people who wouldn’t do it.
Where? I've yet to hear of a court case where the plantiff is arguing that they were forced to take a vaccine by a government. Bodily automomy has plenty of case studies and it'd be an easy slam dunk if any federal entity tried doing that.
>the Biden Administration implemented Executive Order (E.O.) 14043. This E.O. required federal employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by November 8, 2021, or risk removal or termination from their federal employment.
But I believe the precedent for political discrimination in the workplace is thin, at best. I don't think the Hatch Act would have much ground here. You're not owed a job for your political nor religious beliefs if it puts others in danger (there's a lot of case law on the latter with regard to rituals).
----
EDIT: Oh yea, there was the overreaching argument of the president. That one was swiftly shot down:
>Finally, our brief argued that Supreme Court precedent supports the president’s broad authority to regulate federal employees, including their out-of-office conduct, when such regulation is justified by the government’s interest in the safety, effectiveness, and security of government facilities. In one case, for example, the Supreme Court sanctioned Reagan Administration regulations requiring drug testing of government employees and prohibiting drug use outside of the workplace
You were comparing this to abortion, and I'm saying the situations are the opposite. Losing something over your choice is the exact consequences of free speech. Being unable to do something over someone else's choices is the opposite of speech.
They would be replaced, not terminated. We lost a few million people in COVID, cso firing a few people is better than the government basically having a class action launched at the United States.
There's no point in stating your opposition to something that does not exist and is not happening. That's just fear mongering and straw-manning. If nobody is doing this, you're simply building a strawman to fight against because it's easy.
I guess it depends on the definition of "forcing" someone. I was generous in my definition and cited placing legal repercussions on people who wouldn't take the shot. Now that didn't happen (to my knowledge), but people got fired, ostracized, and denied all kinds of services and access because of their choice. That's not cool, and I'd hope we learned from that experience as a society.
I didn't mean to fear monger or construct a straw man. I didn't directly address anyone's argument, I stated my own opinion on this subject confidently on this message board that's meant for just that.
> but people got fired, ostracized, and denied all kinds of services and access because of their choice. That's not cool, and I'd hope we learned from that experience as a society.
Welcome to the free market. If you would prefer a larger government to enforce this lack of ostracization, perhaps a change to the first amendment as well, feel free to advocate for that.
Companies are risk averse. They don't want to deal with people getting sick and the PR nightmare of their employees not wearing masks. So that's that, and from a business perspective it's by far the best choice. You're always free to quit your job and go work somewhere that aligns with you more ideologically.
> Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."
> I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.
It's not that I don't want to engage. I just don't want to be submerged there all the time. I want to spend most of my time surrounded by 'my people' and only once in a while peek outside.
But X for them is an echo chamber of opposite beliefs.
The premium account system where comments are not sorted chronologically but where paid accounts post first (on top of a poorly moderated platform) leads to drive-by toxicity, not intelligent discourse.
"I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."
I really don't. I know you mean this as an insult, but like, it gives this weird reverence to social media that I don't get. I am all sorts of interested in long form media that explores striking/dangerous/novel ideas that really expand my mind and help me to see the world in a whole new way, or interviews with people who have a set of beliefs that are different from mine.
I am not interested in 140 character hot takes that just pounce at my amygdala, just like I wouldn't want my Thursday night football game to cut away to a five minute diatribe on the pros and cons of abortion access, or my video games to lecture me on free market economics.
Engaging in as social network that isn't an echo chamber of my beliefs is like being interrupted every five minutes during dinner time to be yelled at by a different evangelist. Church is on Sunday, thanks.
This is exactly my take as well. The people leaving and putting out the call for others to follow them are the same ones that lost their power when the platform changed hands and the ideologies of the people who run it changed.
The amount of antisemitism in the replies of any Jewish person on X, when the topic is the technical topics that I pay attention to, is revolting.
If that pure noise, a litany of uninteresting ad hominem attacks at best, which drown out relevant conversation, is "diversity" that's required, what is gained? If not wanting to be subjected to uninteresting insults is an "echo chamber" is that so bad?
Twitter was interesting because you could have on-topic conversations with world experts and random people. By protecting the uncivil, and even elevating it with for-purchase blue checks, people find better uses of their time.
The destruction of value in the transition of Twitter to X is something to behold. The person who bought it had no clue about the value of what he bought and what drove the value. Social networks are about the people; Twitter in particular was about the specialists, the journalists, the exchange of ideas, far more than any other social network. And that was all destroyed so that more bots can spam people and so that personal attacks can be left up.
It's not that I want an echo chamber of my own beliefs. Twitter has been plenty challenging for years without an issue.
I just want to post and interact with people without getting bombarded with wishes about my death for posting that I biked to work. There is no discourse there anymore, only loads of hate.
Painting people that leave as people that enjoy echo chambers is just dishonest.
This. I don't use twitter for political discourse and since new guy took charge and made his political inclinations clear I'm being bombarded with political content and "news"/"hot takes" that skew a certain way. If wanting to use the tool for topics that are of interest to me, is me being in an echo chamber, then so be it.
Saw a post on Twitter about how Bluesky autobans for posting "there are two genders". Went over to Bluesky's subreddit to ask how they feel about it -- got banned on their subreddit too
I've never seen anyone on the Internet write "there are two genders" in good faith. 100% of the time it's rage bait, intended to boil down the conversation and to be as obnoxious as possible.
Having watched the explosion of Bluesky over the last week, and being on Mastodon for years, I have a different take on it. It's sort of consistent with what you're saying but sort of not.
The problem to me is more that whenever you have a centralized platform that's associated with a single owner, it inherits all the issues of that owner, good and bad. It's inevitable. I'm not sure it's an issue with people not wanting to hear other viewpoints, it's more so people have decided they have had enough of, say, Musk, and don't want to support him. With Facebook stuff came up about that. The other stuff, about feeling like they're drowning in abusive right-wing stuff is also part of it but I think if it were just, say, like the web, they'd say "well this is the web" like people say "this is the news". Once you can point to, say, Musk, and say "he made it this way" or "I don't want to support a person like this", regardless of whether or not it's true or whatever, if enough people feel that way, they're going to want an alternative.
This won't really go away until there's a decentralized open system that's easy to use, and not associated with any given "owner". Mastodon/AP is close but things there are so closely associated with hosts that the host starts to become a dominant issue (see Threads), as does figuring out where to go, and transferability of accounts across servers.
As for "why Bluesky"? Probably because it looks like Twitter and a lot of journalists and politics people were complaining about Threads rules prohibiting things they wanted to post. Not because it's left or right wing, but because of links and political content period. I don't know enough about Threads policies but independently lots of journalists on Bluesky were saying they just couldn't post content on Threads even if it was fairly neutral, or that it wouldn't get any visibility?
Bluesky is easy to sign up for and fairly open. Once you get the journalists and news organizations on there, and a critical mass it grows.
Personally from a technical standpoint I'd like to see Nostr take off but that community currently is very heavily crypto-focused. Network effects and feedback loops are a pain.
I find it weird those analysis that forget the obvious Brazil moment.
It provided the coordination needed to execute the exodus.
The momentary Banning of twitter in Brazil, provided the impetus for a large amount of normal people there to look for a close alternative. And BlueSky is a more normie friendly.
Now a simple network analysis will show you that a lot of "tech-normie" people, but heavy user of social networks, in the US have an extended network that touches Brazil, especially for people of color and blacks. their social contact primed them for changing to Bluesky. In a sense it was the dry powder.
Now came the election, where Elon Musk took a central role and where
more than 80% of black voted against his prefered candidate. It just gave the sparkle inside an implicit network that was already playing with BlueSky.
I don't want to engage in a social network where if I state my views, a horde of people who disagree can get me shaddowbanned. Now I state my views to an empty room.
Mono-cultures are forming because as a whole, we are becoming less tolerant. Tolerance is the ultimate challenger of belief because it is gentle. No extremist is going to change their ways because people keep yelling at them to change. It'll be because they see the people they revile living perfectly fine lives and willing to accept them as they are.
"B-but they believe these morally reprehensible things!" So what? Have we not all hurt people and been the villain in someone else's life? People get lost along the way. Show them grace. We can't force people into different ways of living, but we can show them.
I don’t think of myself as less tolerant, but I’ve definitely become less patient with the qanon-level discourse that has come to dominate the reply section on twitter, which used to be a place for interesting conversation.
Maybe somebody being patient with them will change their mind, but that’s not what I want to spend my time online doing.
Dude, we used to live in strictly segregated ghettos everywhere. If it wasn't ethnically divided, it was strictly segregated by class, and if that wasn't the division, it was religion.
The internet for a while was a big melting pot, probably because there was an inherent IQ filter to using the early/medium web.
But once the stupids came on, then came the stupid-manipulation companies chasing them, and everything went to hell.
Usenet was kind of like this too, until tools made usenet more accessible.
I've been too busy to look at Mastodon/Bluesky out of laziness. I never did Twitter. Mastodon may require some technical work to make use of, which may be a wonderful long term thing.
There is a difference between a social network or forum that has different beliefs but interesting discussions, and one that is solely focused on attacking the other camp.
Sounds great to me, if its true. Prior to social media, "echo chamber" was the status quo, and I think everyone can agree things were a lot more peaceful during that time.
Have people not always been this way? It seems like people forgotten their Emily Post —that it is generally considered a faux pas to discuss controversial topics like religion or politicd outside of intimate social settings with close friends and family.
Anyway, I don’t want an echo chamber for my beliefs. I just want to be able to discover and discuss scientific articles and watch sports highlight clips without being bombarded by a bunch of bullshit.
It’s not an echo chamber to refuse to accept hate speech and shitty right wing media. It’s an interesting but continuous claim that if you don’t accept far right and increasingly fascist viewpoints, you live in an echo chamber. This is a lie.
Most of the time it's undebatable, it is just hate speech. I'm talking slurs and "you're destroying America" type rhetoric. It's so common on a lot of social media platforms, including Twitter. Nobody wants to put up with that, it's obnoxious and completely impossible to debate against.
If people think I deserve AIDS what the hell am I supposed to do with that? That's not useful information, and I don't understand why you're demanding people have to put up with it. They can leave, and evidently, they are.
Maybe the social networks promoting the most radical, outrageous, loud, and disturbing posts are the problem.
If the political alignment of those posts resonates with you, it isn't as annoying.
It's noteworthy that with AI, so far we will just get more / louder / more awful posts, rather than a potential for superior moderation and appreciation for nuance.
After all, the busted metrics that AI will be aligned to are the same old flawed ones that reward sociopathy.
There are different levels of how bad that is, and it's not just owning the thing, but buying it in order to prop up right-wing propaganda and trolls. I don't belong to Gab or Truth for a reason. I wouldn't participate in a Fox News run website either.
It'll be interesting if Twitter/X does drift rightward amongst contributors and still keeps its For You feed oriented toward "engagement" and view counts, whether or not it will just end up leading to infighting between far right and moderate right views.
I think so, extreme ideologues like communists, islamists or any other hardcore ideologues fight among each other and in their own tribes all the time because they are actually divided quite a bit on the implementation details. Once the thing they rage against is gone, they will have to rage against each other. The anti-jewish Trump supporters already begin dropping out with disappointment.
This is what we see in fascism and authoritarianism - the goal is to always make the circle smaller. You start with immutable traits (race, gender, hair color, etc) to chunk out a large part of the population, but once they’re gone, that small circle needs to get smaller. There’s Always a Bigger Fish[1]
Leftists know a thing or two about infighting. If X becomes the right wing space and bluesky the left wing one, they can soon point at each other for "look, the other side doesn't even get along" gotchas.
I think the difference as I see it is that Twitter/X is oriented around increasing levels of "engagement" and encouraging contributors to focus on going viral in hopes of going even more viral by reaching the "For You" feed.
Bluesky seems a bit more like a 140 Characters mashed with Reddit with subtopics/submods of feeds as the focus. Also it seems to highlight the custom feeds feature which you can manage yourself. Twitter/X has such features but for the most part you are nudged away from these to improve "engagement" metrics. That said its highly possible that could change over time based on the long term vision.
Bluesky would be way worse than that in terms of engagement once their VC money runs out. Since it would be in their interest to promote more rage baits and echo chamber posts.
It's still an empty place. I just moved over, and I could find NO ONE with my interests (a common hobby). There are / were thousands of people in this group on twitter. I doubt it's even one percent of even what's left on X.
Bluesky waited too long to open up. They'd have seen a lot more takeup if they'd been available when Twitter started going downhill post-Musk. But they made a lot of their potential userbase write them off, which is going to stunt any possibility of growth.
Neither they nor Masto were ready for the scale at the time. Mastodon had a lot of difficulty -- servers were slow and broken for a while.
BlueSky was also not a practical Twitter replacement for a lot of people until a few weeks (!) ago when they finally added video support.
Also, have you not seen the latest user growth stats on BlueSky? Apparently it took the total destruction of the United States postwar consensus to achieve people finally abandoning Twitter en masse, but hey, it's happening in the past week or so.
> I would have hoped people would have taken BlueSky at their word when they were told they weren't wanted.
That's an unusual way of viewing it.
When you're waitlisted for an app that has limited capacity, you take it as not being "wanted"?
Of course they want you! They're just building capacity so that you can have a good experience once they're ready to send you the invite. Don't worry -- you are wanted!
My belief is that there's some very real reasons for that!
First, incendiary posts seem to get boosted by the algorithm. It's good for engagement, which keeps people online and hooked, which feeds more ads, and is good for the business. Elon and his CEO of the company know this.
Second, the more you look at the replies, the more you find people who are weirdly into Elon Musk. They'll bring him up even in a thread where he's not mentioned and the topic isn't about him. "Thank god Elon saved free speech!" or something rather. Just profoundly weird stuff that I can't help but feel is designed to stroke his ego. Again, I believe the algorithm is intentionally boosting these things. It also serves to create a cult of personality. He's not just the site owner, but he's its "savior".
Lastly, the company is clearly in trouble financially. Revenue is down substantially by all accounts, and there's a very high valuation to live up to. They want to get people to pay money, look at ads, and keep them coming back again and again for more. Being community-first and focused on people having the kind of good time they want in their communities just doesn't align with those very difficult business constraints.
Bluesky is the blue version of Gab. You'll find that it's an ideological echo chamber and gets uninteresting fast.
The difference is that this version of Twitter isn't censoring and banning people for wrongthink. The people leaving are self selecting out of the idea gene pool, as opposed to being forced out.
Naval wrote it well, "Rigid ideologues move but the persuadable center does not. So they just move into irrelevance."
There is a seismic shift happening, involving millions of users.
Also, this is a seemingly great underdog story. First open source app to top the App Store, a tiny scrappy team of protocol nerds takes on the most powerful people in the world...
What leads you to believe that people posting about this is not organic?
Anecdotally, I have submitted a few stories about Bluesky, and I am paid nothing.
Not the person you're asking, but my answer: VC funding. A bit ironic to say given the website we're on... but the benefits are there for the taking. Also: a decentralized service that isn't, actually, that decentralized.
The same reasons I see manipulation, I also see legitimate moves. It's loaded as can be. The iron is extremely hot given Elmo and everything with the election.
This entire conversation breaks HN guidelines about meta/moderation.. but if anything, I believe that some recent Bsky posts have been getting kicked down the rankings by mods, a bit.
> This is because the data in the network is all cryptographically signed based on what came before it. The protocol does this using the Merkle tree structure, which is also how Git stores data. The issue with this is: if you want to look at one piece of content in the system, you also need to know about everything that happened before.
This isn't quite accurate. You only need the MST blocks in the merkle path(s) back to the root, for the subset of records that you care about. For a single record, that's O(logn) blocks on average, where n is the total number of records in the repo. For a full checkout, the MST block count is ~33% of the number records in the repo, on average.
> Also, it would be great to edit posts! I believe this is tricky because of the Merkle tree structure mentioned above
It's not so tricky at the MST level, and it already happens there when you edit your bio for example. What is tricky (relatively) is figuring out how to represent post edits at the UI/UX level.
For context, I'm working on my own PDS implementation in Python, with corresponding library for working with the MST (both fairly WIP):
An earlier version of the repo commit format (v2) had a "prev" field, which referenced the previous commit by hash. This is vaguely blockchain-ish in that you could follow the chain all the way back to the first commit*, but even then, you still didn't need the prior versions to verify the current version. In "repo v3", the prev field still exists but is optional, and in practice it isn't used.
Bluesky looks promising. In my bubble it seems like a lot of artists have been moving to it after some Xitter fiasco with AI training or whatnot (idk, I don't keep up with those news).
But, this:
> Radically open
> I think some might be surprised to learn how open Bluesky is. It’s trivially easy to grab an export of any user’s data. It’s also a core assumption of the service that all the data (aside from out-of-protocol stuff like DMs) is completely open.
I'm still skeptical of Bluesky having "won" until the average user is completely aware of things like this. I fully expect that there will be some drama about this openness at some point in the future.
When this happens, we'll see if people go back to Twitter again (how many times has it been already?); or if they embrace this new social network where your art and posts can be scraped waaaaaay more easily than in Twitter, so they're probably more likely to be used for AI training anyway.
Until conversations about these topics happen between non-tech users, I'm mostly just watching how the situation evolves.
Bluesky released a statement today about data use [0] - saying they will not use your data for "Generative AI" (surely in response to X's recent change to say they will).
As you imply, this is a bit meaningless for people who don't want their posts used for AI, because anyone can grab all data pretty easily (at least for now).
But, AI aside, this is so much better for a lively ecosystem - 3rd party apps, bots (the fun and useful kind), research, etc. A lots of things simply died when Musk decided effectively end the API program [1].
> Bluesky released a statement today about data use [0] - saying they will not use your data for "Generative AI" (surely in response to X's recent change to say they will).
Yea, like how WhatsApp promised they wouldn't share data with Facebook;
As a reminder, the Twitter APIpocalypse already happened in 2012, long before Musk... and some of the people now at BlueSky might have been behind it ?
I know a lot of artists who hate the idea of their work being used to train generative models, and I can’t blame them tbh. That being said, most of them know that they can’t prevent that from happening unless they want to stop posting their work anywhere public.
HOWEVER: there’s a big difference between posting your work publicly and having someone come along and use it to train their models against your wishes, and a platform changing its terms to say “And you’re giving us permission to use this to train our models”. They’re saying “no, you don’t have my permission to use my work and you’ll have to go against my wishes to use it this way”. It’s not a big difference in terms of outcome, but I think the principle of the thing is important to a lot of artists.
The average user (non-tech oriented) doesn't really think about or care that much about openness. This is the kind of user who posts disclaimers on their Facebook wall saying that Facebook is not allowed to use their content.
The average user still gets surprised when a website "steals" (knows) their IP address and make some drama around this "leak", not realizing that any network communication makes this possible.
So that's what makes me think it's plausible that they might care that their whole account data can be exported by any internet rando.
(EDIT: All this is of course in the context of my bubble, where the non-techy users are mostly artists and streamers, because those are the ones I've noticed migrating to Bluesky. I realize you might have had a different subset of people in mind when responding to my comment.)
Twitter/X changed the TOS so that it's now impossible to opt out of having your posts used to train their in-house model "Grok". This caused an exodus of artists (and their followers).
The U.S. Presidential election and its outcome on November 5th was the inflection point for the significant migration from X to Bluesky, as a) many were staying on Twitter/X only for the real-time news and discussion about the election results which ended up not being that interesting due to the Trump sweep and b) the results in favor of Trump will give Elon more power and make Twitter/X more insufferable.
US soccer journalists seem to have migrated to bluesky en masse, and I just saw a very active thread, with a bunch of names that I recognized, cross posted to reddit.
That is definitely a quantum jump beyond a bunch of geeks posting about rust or whatever.
That's about what I'd expect from a network that's also undergone exponential growth in the past ~week, while still being much smaller than e.g. twitter in absolute terms.
Another data point. When Musk bought twitter and started wrecking it, several people I followed created an account on blue sky but most did not use it that much. This seems to have changed over the past week (i.e. after the US election). Dozens of users have moved, pro-Ukraine people in particular. Some double post. As certain content creators move, others do the same, amplifying the trend. It's interesting to see network effects at play.
Feels like the early days of the digg -> reddit migration in 2010 or so.
Network effects are so powerful at keeping people in, but they have the ability to turn a trickle into a flood when it comes to depopulating a service. The big social networks were so big we thought they were unstoppable, so I'm interested to see if we can still see a shift like that in this day and age.
People do that when feel it's socially acceptable to do so. It feels like it could be a matter of time. A million people joined in a 24 hour period yesterday.
I loved Twitter. It was this magic place where I could connect with both friends and legends in my field (programmers). That’s not what it is anymore and it’s impossible to ignore how political it’s become.
Bluesky feels like Twitter used to and it’s shockingly refreshing to hear about industry news and friendly updates rather than some “pick-up artist” explaining how women are too privileged these days.
The first post when I opened it after reading yours:
>The same people who’ve spent the last several years decrying “unqualified DEI hires” are now shoehorning through Cabinet nominations who can’t even pass a basic background test.
This is the opposite of what I want in any app I open. It's time we stop chasing engagement for sites and start filtering for content. I want sites that don't promise to be the place to do everything for everyone but one's which I can judge on their censorship to know if I want to join.
It isn't. I want a place where people leave their politics, religion and genitals at the door. Op made it seem like bluesky did that. A look at the front page says otherwise.
It seems like it's complete luck of the draw on what the front page looks like before you sign up.
I refreshed once after posting that and it looked amazing enough to come back and post here that it does look great now. Refreshed again and got this at the top: https://bsky.app/profile/rexchapman.bsky.social/post/3lazzns... here's hoping they stop amplifying the people who made twitter so toxic and make a network that's actually pleasant to be in.
It was also a magical place that gave the CIA carte Blanche to monitor Americans and spread propaganda, and was happy to censor in behalf of the federal government. that’s my beef with the folksy view of old Twitter
Also, its "format" probably contributed significantly to political polarization: specifically, restricting tweets to 140 characters made it tedious for a writer to provide and a reader to obtain a detailed explanation of anything, but made it easier for a writer to join a mob with a simple message.
But that hasn't changed. If anything it's going to be far worse. The owner of Twitter is literally going to be part of the Federal government. It seems naive to think he won't manipulate or censor it on behalf of the government or his own interests.
> I loved Twitter. It was this magic place where I could connect with both friends and legends in my field (programmers). That’s not what it is anymore and it’s impossible to ignore how political it’s become.
It is a program. What has become political is society. Bluesky and Twitter are just the two sides of the fracture manifesting as online discussion spaces. Bluesky users are just as polarized as Twitter users, but perhaps more in line with what you’re comfortable with reading.
Twitter/X is great. I like it quite a lot. Follow people you like and keep that number under 100. Or if you just started, under 25 and add people slowly. Unfollow people quickly if they annoy you! Or mute them if you still like them but they annoy you temporarily.
There's two feeds: for you (the algo) and following. following is the traditional only people you know feed.
If you're having trouble with the people on X you might need to reconsider yourself. Why are you not open to many viewpoints? Diversity of thought and people should be welcome and if you hope to change minds, you do need to be able to interact with those people to do so.
I did theater when I was younger, and I think a lot of my 'open' friends weren't open per-say they were just weird and like being in the weird group more than being truly open.
I can handle other view points, what I won't put up with is disinformation, straight up lies, and racism/sexism. They immediately go in the bin. Unfortunately that's simply not possible in the firehose feed on X since the trash is promoted to the top and I would guess that 90% of blue checks are bots either from American PACs or Russian/CCP/Iran/N. Korea.
Not too long ago I would have agreed with you. That was, for a long time a decent way to enjoy Twitter, even when people were already long claiming it was an unpleasant place.
But for the current situation you are just misrepresenting the problem.
Aggressively maintaining a decent follow list no longer helps.
And "other viewpoints" are not the problem. Every somewhat popular tweet has automated replies full of porn bots and clearly automated answers that say basically nothing or just try to provoke or advertise.
"Following" has become infuriatingly useless too because it algorithmically sorts in nonsensical ways.
The result: many tweets I would have liked to see get completely buried while others get shown to me over and over as I visit the site.
I'm so incredibly tired of algorithmic timelines.
It used to be a good tool on interesting updates on hobbies I enjoy. Now it just wants to waste my time, and I'm just not interested in screaming matches about daily politics.
That includes echo chambers too so it is not about differing opinions even, I don't need people from "my side" telling me again and again what the "enemy" is doing wrong and how I am supposed get angry at that.
> Aggressively maintaining a decent follow list no longer helps.
> I'm so incredibly tired of algorithmic timelines.
Then why not just use your following lists? I have a main list of people I follow, mostly people I know, then a bunch of topical lists for various topics, from silly stuff to NLP.
i'll note that everyone, even the guys i like and never post about politics are posting politics. interesting times.
i will probably work through my physical book backlog in the meantime.
other things: i use the web app exclusively. the bots have been pushed to the bottom of all replies or hidden. the following feed is unaltered and chrono (annoyingly so, some posters post A LOT). and i know even hovering on things i dislike for too long will show me more of that. i get good good content from non american friends so i have a hunch this is a unique american thing rn
I'm not asking you to make any epistemologically unsound leaps, I'm not making an argument. tThis is just my impression. In general, if you're going to rely only on numeric metrics, then you'll be giving up a lot of other helpful information.
You need to use non-numeric information to tell you if "number of posts" should be more meaningful than a HackerNews stranger saying "these are the vibes I get, anecdotally." Numbers are pretty appealing because we have a lot of simple and consistent tools for working with them, but we also know the number of posts on Threads are artificially gamed, because Instagram and Facebook crosspost to Threads by default for anyone who has an account.
But it's still my guess. English is my only fluent language and I don't know even 1000 people. Threads could be wildly popular and I could be blissfully unaware. Again, I'm not asking you to make any epistemologically unsound leaps.
When you post on Instagram, there are opt-out features that will 'automatically share to your Threads account too' and you can see Threads notifications in the Instagram app and such .. so I think it's reasonable to assume they are leveraging the Instagram user-base a bit.
True. But you don't become an active monthly user. Unless there are some shenanigans happening, which is highly likely. I think I visited Threads by accident several times by clicking posts in IG, that were apparently Threads posts embedded directly into IG as a growth hack (my speculation).
Threads artificially juicing their numbers with Instagram integration. I can't remember what it was but recently when posting to Instagram it offered me an option to enable all my posts to automatically cross-post to Threads, very possibly defaulted to "on" too.
Threads is not trying to be a Twitter replacement and is another brand in the Zuck conglomerate
What makes Bluesky different to me is ATProto and the possibilities for a new social media fabric, that they learned from some difficulties with ActivityPub to build something better
I literally forget Threads exists for months at a time.
Nobody I know uses it, or has even acknowledged its existence. I see people on other social media talking about their Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and directing people there, but I have never seen anyone do it for Threads. I have never seen anyone share a link to Threads, I don't even remember what its domain name is. I have never seen Threads included in those little sets of social media icon links that all brand websites have.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe Threads has actual users who care about it and aren't just clueless Facebook/Instagram users who were not-so-subtly encouraged to also use Threads by those apps.
The expected trend varies depending on the stage in the curve. Threads is at the size were a positive trend should be exponential. Once you've fully expanded, a positive trend would be a very tiny growth as you've already captured the entire market.
Yeah but what made Twitter twitter wasn't really the usercount, it was the mix of established voices and complete randos mixing. If the journalists and economists and politicians go to Bluesky, it will win. I definitely don't think that's a given but it seems much more plausible now than it did a few months ago.
Bluesky is increasingly getting that way. Every time I check it this week I'm seeing new content from recognizable people. I think at some point there will be a tipping point where Bluesky will have more content and just win outside of alt right circles.
Until they start censoring. Some orgs (like Guardian,) don’t like getting fact checked in real time. Old Twitter is far worse than new Twitter. In the recent old days, you’d get suspended for even debating Covid vaccine safety. Couldn’t even debate it! They even colluded with the U.S. government to silence dissent. Crazy.
They probably are juicing the numbers that way, but the dedicated Threads app is pretty high on the app store charts so evidently people are going out of their way to get it.
YMMV depending on your region but my Play Store "social" chart is currently showing Bluesky at #1, then TikTok, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Reddit at #7.
They are definitely “growth hacking” as much as possible - I regularly would see 1/3 of a Threads comment in my FB and IG feed and when you click to expand it takes you to the App Store to download the Threads app. I’m not interested so I just back out but I’m sure it works wonders to get their numbers up.
Nop. You need to download Threads app and create an account (using your Instagram).
Of course Instagram helps, because they keep showing Threads posts on Instagram, notifications, etc, so people download and create an account, but is not automatic.
> Is instagram usage counted in active threads users? I doubt it
It is if they have a Threads account and interact with any Threads content on the Instagram app, which is extremely easy to do even accidentally, because they shove it into the Instagram feed and make it look like Instagram content.
I would not be surprised if a large chunk - maybe even the majority - of "Threads users" interact with it exclusively through the Instagram app, with many of them not even fully aware that it's nominally a separate product.
Many of these alternatives are piggybacking off the parent site. Google at pone point made anyone with a Gmail account a default user for its own social network.
I remember Quora circa 2016 fondly. It had a high number of interesting people writing deep insights into their area of expertise. And then, of course, since they are a venture-backed startup, they tried to grow, and it all went sideways.
I think a small, somewhat homogeneous community is very attractive. You get a high ratio of interesting posts and very little toxic behavior.
The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. Technology won't solve this problem (because it is not a technology problem). Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.
Maybe the balkanization of social media is the best we can hope for.
I think the fundamental issue is running a social network as a for-profit business. Every business model people have tried so far has ruined the platform for the people who originally found it valuable.
Online services do scale, which is the root of the problem. It's more profitable to focus on a large number users who get a little value from the platform than on those who find it particularly valuable. No matter whether your revenue comes from ads or subscription fees, you want more users, more impressions, and more activity. Which turns your focus away from whatever the early adopters did when there was only a little activity.
Influencers are a convenient red flag. Once they find a platform attractive, it's probably no longer good for activities not centered around them.
We don't actually want online communities to get too big, from a users' perspective. After a certain size, they become difficult to maintain any sense of responsibility to the established culture, become targets for coordinated manipulation or misuse and end up requiring constant moderation just to be usable.
But taking venture capital means you can never restrict growth, even if in the end it kills your service.
I'd love to see a Reddit that caps its communities to a thousands or even hundreds. Once that cap is hit, either form a new community or join a waiting list. But it's clear that a hundred passionate users often produces a much better discussion than millions.
> The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. ... Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.
Every problem you mentioned is solved by Mastodon. Independent instances can and should stay relatively small to allow good and independent moderation, while the whole network can grow a lot without being homogeneous.
How big do you think a Mastodon instance can get before it's too big? Right now the largest instance is maybe 1 million users. Let's say that's a good size. To get 3 billion people on it (Facebook's scale) we'd need 3,000 different instances, right?
Except, people won't evenly distribute. Instead, we'll have a power law distribution. The largest instance will be maybe 500 million users, the next largest will be 200 million, and so on. That means that most Mastodon users will be in Twitter-sized instances, and you'll either have to spend a ton of money on moderation (except, I don't know who pays) or you'll end up with the usual toxic anarchy.
> The largest instance will be maybe 500 million users, the next largest will be 200
Yes, this is likely indeed. Those instances will probably be unsustainable and/or user-hostile, but users are always free to leave to another instance without much to loose.
Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.
A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.
Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.
Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.
> That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone.
When you want to reach people you go to where the people are. You fish where the fish is. It is that simple. People did not join twitter because the police was posting there, the police post on twitter because that is where they can reach the people.
> Using it was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not.
That I can agree with. Usually what I have seen, at least where i live, is that no public body used it exclusively. They still had a website, they still talked with journalist, talked with radios, used flyers, whatever was appropriate in each situation. (Or at least they tried, not saying everyone was getting it always right.)
Twitter used to be a good way to share information because the tweet link would expand into all the info you needed to see, regardless of whether you were a Twitter user or not. Today it sits behind an auth wall, and so is inaccessible to a majority of the population.
The people aren't on Twitter, pretty sure every time I've checked the stats Twitter users are a relative minority. It caters to the sort of people who enjoy communication without discussion - that might be the police's target audience for their communication but it isn't most people.
I've been annoyed over the years because (not having an account) sometimes Twitter won't let me look at Tweets. Hopefully none of them contained useful info.
These public entities post _exclusively_ on Twitter as if it's the public square. It's not and it shouldn't be. The argument is not about how easy it is to create a Twitter account.
This is because the US has a history of inadequate public infrastructure. Local safety alerts and things of that nature are a public service, and there should be a system in place to perform them. There isn't, and still really isn't to this day. Sure, we have amber alerts and such but that's not really the same thing.
Twitter almost literally started as a place to get updates on celebrities, designed closely to UI's seen in tickerboard updates. So the metaphor is more apt than you'd think.
One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above?
I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.
This was solved 20 years ago with RSS, I guess it's about time for someone to rediscover the idea and reimplement something like it, push it like a great new invention, and make a couple of billions in the process.
It was solved 20 years ago. But companies unsolved it by deciding to de-prioritize or even remove such RSS API's.
Getting around that requires some heavy and expensive scraping (compared to a lightweight API to hook into), and as we're seeing right now companies are at each other's necks in real time over scraping.
I feel like that's fine, as another boomer. The internet wasn't designed with this idea that you only visit 10 websites and everything else is on the fringes. Did people forget that bookmarks exist?
Back to crushing reality, that's also why I'm a huge RSS fan. your feed should be based on websites you want to follow, not what the website's algorithms want you to follow. RSS puts the control back to the user while giving 95% of the convinience of a centralized platform.
Policing in the US is fragmented. Unlike many European countries, the local police are not nationalized—each department has its own concerns, budget, etc.
The users. You can put your news on RSS and approximately nobody will read them. Or you can put them on twitter and it will reach people.
This is true even now when the management of the bird app is seemingly hellbent on destroying the site. It was even more true when the decision was made.
I guess we can hope (or work) on an RSS based future, but the key thing to achieve is users, and then the rest will follow.
To be fair, RSS isn't an either/or. Quite the oppoiste. You make an RSS feed and bring users into twitter to reach them. Ideally being able to move people to your own hosted service and they then interface with the base news in the same way, on their chosen RSS. Even if the link may take them to a blog instead of a centralized service.
Issue is that the bird app doesn't want this middleman between them. They want all the users' attention.
Unfortunately you are way more likely to get a blank stare when you say "add our RSS feed" than when you say "add us on Facebook" or similar, especially if you are an organization like a police department. Ordinary people do not tend to set up RSS readers or know how to handle feeds.
Picking a reader means making one or more choices (for your phone, laptop, tablet whatever), adding a feed is several steps, and it is easy to get overloaded with too many boring items (and too few interesting ones) because curation is left to the end user.
Centralized social networks require no choosing of readers, let you add an info source in one click, and ensure you have neither too few nor too many interesting items -- for some value of "interesting" -- regardless of how many entities you follow.
I love RSS and decentralization but creating a smooth, user friendly experience with such tools is a major unsolved challenge.
I'm not sure. People click on links all the time. Sometimes it opens a browser, sometimes it opens a social media app. Why wouldn't it work with an RSS feed?
I mean, there's plenty of clients for an RSS feed. It's kind of like saying "subscibe to our email list" but you never heard of gmail/yahoo/MSN. The user needs to put up some legwork to understand what's what.
But after that, it is at worst pasting a link into your client, or clicking a button if the site gives proper attention to it. Not that much more friction than following someone on any centralized platform.
Why does a police department need a feed to be interactive? Actually, doesn't it being interactive invite improper interactions from citizens that should have used official channels?
By "official" channel I was thinking of making a police report, or writing something in a complaints book. Tweeting at a PD's account is comparatively as official as scribbling something on the wall of the station bathroom.
No, it's more like dropping a note card in a "Tips" drop box in the station lobby. It's literally an officially monitored communication channel that is explicitly authorized.
If anything, the transparency of a social media post is much better than, say, private emails that can be buried and ignored.
Well in practice, if the police department doesn't care about your "tips" (not every station has a "tips" drop box, right?), there is no reason why they should care about your comments.
I have seen plenty of toxic comments on "official" announcements that allow comments that the official entity doesn't actually read. I'm happier with no comment than with toxic comments.
I don't find it particularly interesting to argue about which analogy is more appropriate. My point is that it doesn't have the same degree of officialness as a report or some other public record, and it existing just invites to confusion on that matter.
I challenge you again - wht is this any less official than any other officially controlled, officially monitored communication channel. You have offered absolutely no argument to that, yet you continue to say it.
That's a rather silly thing for an adult to ask. There's multiple reasons why a police report is more official than a tweet.
* A police report is a legal document.
* A tweet can be removed by either its poster or by the platform's operator after it's been posted, while only the police can make a report disappear.
* You can tweet at someone anything you want and they don't have to accept it to receive it, while the police can refuse to accept an unfounded report. An insurance company might require a police report be filed before accepting a claim, but it would not accept a tweet as a substitute.
This is a platform for discussion, but if it was the example of a police department, why do they necessarily want to turn a feed of updates into a space they have to moderate (or if they can't moderate it, having to put up with most responses being along the lines of "ACAB"?). Communities can have value, but sometimes you wouldn't lose much by having your feed be read only.
Interactions draw views. If someone asked the same question you had, and had it answered by the original poster, that's more valuable to you than a simple feed.
I sure am! Just because I'm commenting on this platform doesn't mean that I actually care about upvotes and such (spoiler alert: I don't give a shit what my score is). I interact, but I never feel the need to and I don't find the interactions to be the important aspect of the site, rather the kinds of articles I find submitted here are what I appreciate the most. The commentary is secondary, "extra" if you will - take it away and I wouldn't care. Hell, I have an RSS-based news reader that I utilize on a daily basis that provides no interactivity and I find it a more pleasant experience than on this site, and you know why that is?
Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)
No, it only appears as a gotcha. It's actually providing an insight. There are read-only sites and there are sites that people use, and for the most part that splits the universe of sites. For better or for worse, even read-only users primarily go to sites that others interact with.
I know RSS is basically old tech by now, but I'm a bit surprised how many seem to misunderstand how this works.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's goal is not to be "the" hub. It is a middleman that takes you to other websites that implement it. Be it twitter (on shakey ground), Your own website, or a game server (in theory). Anything that implements it and sends out messages can be caught by any number of clients made on top of RSS.
Asking for interactivity from an RSS Feed is like asking for interactivity from an email. The goal is to point you towards other content that may or may not be interactable. The RSS is simply there to consolidate all your feeds into one view.
I'm not misunderstanding anything. The original discussion was about why wouldn't RSS itself be a good backbone for replacing current types of social media. And my answer is because it's not interactive.
Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed. And they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.
And I explained why that response is a bit nonsensical. Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.
>they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.
1. Thars overly presumptuous. Social media didn't give them a real choice.
2. You don't need an account for every blog. Not even for interacting. I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing. If you really want to like stuff sure. But that's not anything different from today.
>Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed.
Sure, Bluesky shows they don't have to but the service can still be successful. As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.
How's thst different from using something like Feedly? It's juet a different app view.
> Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.
It does take it away. The current status quo has (1) a feed of content and (2) two-way interaction between poster and commenter in the same place. Switching to just RSS inherently takes away (2)
> Social media didn't give them a real choice.
Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.
> I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing.
People didn't but I doubt most people running blogs want to deal with anonymous comments. You already get so much spam and unhinged content when you require a signup.
> As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.
Part of it sure, but it also involved other layers to compensate for the parts that are lacking in RSS that users have come to expect.
How is one extra click taking away Twitter? This is like saying older apps (taken down because centralized services didn't like this) took away interactivity because they werre managing multiple feeds for you. That's all RSS is. Did Reddit/HN or any other link aggregator take away news sites? That's all RSS is.
And using other non RSS parts is fine again, RSS isn't a social media. It's a way to help aggregate content. You keep claiming to know how RSS works but demonstrate that you feel it's some competitor instead of a commodity.
And yes, the powers that be "won" becsuse they were at war with the idea of people not having all their time dedicated to their feed. Users "chose". to be manipulated becsuse their choices were taken down, weakened, or taken hostage. Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.
> Did Reddit/HN or any other link aggregator take away news sites? That's all RSS is.
Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them. Further, it's a known problem for both of those sites that people will not read the article and instead riff of the title. I'd wager the final 50% of every article could be removed and it wouldn't significantly change the comment sections here.
> Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.
Yes they did, they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour. The alternatives just aren't good enough.
>Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them.
Yes. And you can use RSS feed to do the same thing, either liking to a reddit comment section or actually reading the article and not bothering. Same structure except you're not limited to Reddit's servers.
>they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour
They lost choice and decided using the worst choice was better than moving off of Reddit. I guess if enshiftification is "choice", They did indeed choose. I chose to walk away.
And it's why I hate centralizafion. Because it reduces you down to two choices per owner. Their way or the highway. If you instead managed an RSS feed of a dozen websites and Reddit removed its API, your daily feed may be smaller but your browsing habits would not change. I can still interact with the other 11 sites as much as I want and not need extra time trying to figure out what's out there.
I’m not disagreeing with you about the issues of centralization. I too walked away from Reddit and paid that cost.
My point is that (a) many people have not despite the cess pit Reddit and other sites have become, and (b) RSS is inherently incapable of replacing the experience because it’s a pull only mechanism.
Mastadon based itself on ActivityPub, not RSS.
We’ll see if the long term forces that consolidated and entities Twitter and it’s ilk will do the same to Mastadon instances. Cause I’m still not convinced that the general public is willing to or ready to run their own servers
> Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.
Can we say that people choose to get addicted to addictive stuff?
Credentialing. I frequently find myself reading Tweets from people I’ve never heard of because someone who I know to be an expert in a particular topic has liked or retweeted them. This kind of signaling helps surface more obscure content and make it available to people who wouldn’t have found it on their own. This is a huge deal.
One important one is reposting that shows post to your followers who might not see the original. It is important way to see other content.
Also, liking it signal that other people were interested in the post. I don't global likes are useful for likes from people you follow are important.
Finally, replies mean can see interaction from people you follow. If you follow interesting people, you see interesting discussion.
With social media, it isn't possible to read everything, I know I used to try to read my whole Twitter feed. There needs to be some way to filter than just time when you looked. I think the current algorithmic feed is bad because it tries to show other stuff instead of ordering things that want to see.
But all those features allow for optimization and create competition.
If you want likes, or views, or reposts, then you will have to "engineer" your post in such a way that it gets more attention. Not sure if that's always beneficial.
There is not much point in attention when post is only seen by followers and reposts. It is indication that wrote a good post. The only currency is followers. It was hard to get those without outside fame.
The problem is with Twitter and others is that they now have algorithmic feed. That means posts get seen globally and clout metrics are valuable for reach. Comments also get clout so get lots of drive-by ones and less discussion.
"social" means people interacting - replies, likes, etc.
If someone has an RSS reader with feeds from some news sources, official channels issuing announcements, etc - that's great, but does anyone consider that "social media"?
(Of course, you can believe that social media is bad and you don't want it, but that's a different question)
For things like a missing person alert, it provides an instant feedback mechanism and the ability to share things with people you might know in the affected area.
Otherwise, there’s absolutely utility to interacting over social media. We’re doing it right now!
RSS feeds simply return the last N posts, correct? How can RSS be used to serve a user's whole history?
Already, we talking about some other service that accumulates the history and provides search, history, etc. That and many other things (likes, replies, quotes, etc) are all things users expect (rightfully, IMHO).
While orgs/people simply issuing announcements should ideally provide an RSS feed, that type of content is a tiny part of "social media".
ActivityPub is something like RSS. It is based on OStatus which used Atom and other standards. But it also does multidirectional syncing.
If Bluesky did ActivityPub, that will federate Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. There are tools for posting to old social media, we will probably see tools for the new ones. Should be easier since protocols are more open.
ideally, yes. Realistically, companies were never going to willingly give up their centralization once they started chasing ad revenue and then later selling data to 3rd parties.
Internet publishing? we could create a generic document format that could be published on the net. you'd need some standard markup to define presentation. then a hypertext protocol of some kind could transmit.
It’s a lot of work to do, in part because you have an increasing number, and even more because you now have many more ways that people might respond. You need to monitor those accounts.
- PDS are websites with an RSS feeds, each a publisher
- Relays are WebSub hubs aggregating many sources into a central host
- App views, labelers, Feed Generators, whatever are subscribers being alerted when a new entry is received, making their internal sauce. They're also hubs for pushing content to any step that comes after
- PDS are at the end, subscribers of labelers, app views and feed generators. They make their internal sauce to have a nice social-oriented UI.
A properly decentralized, boring-tech Bluesky can take this form. Steps are additive, not all of them are needed
1. A single, simple server that can receive and emit RSS feeds. Emission of RSS feeds must be able to include content from received entries. Directly subscribe to the people you want to follow, you're done. Social readers <https://indieweb.org/social_reader> do something like that with indieweb formats.
2. A network of WebSub hubs to more efficiently get and distribute everyone's content. superfeedr.com is one of them, https://switchboard.p3k.io/ is another one, but we need many more. Also RSS feeds need to have a server-side that sends a notification to the hub when something is published. Having hubs make searching and having a general view easier. In fact we already have something like that, it's called Planets <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)>
3. Any filtering can happen on top. "People with blue hair", "Posts without tuna in them", any algorithm is anyone's to build
All the layers already exist, but like any social endeavour it's all about the network effect. Having a simple thing to install where you can post, follow and search will make wonders
For those who find Mastodon's default client a little bloated, please check out https://phanpy.social. It is one of the most thoughtful PWAs and websites I have ever used, and made Mastodon a daily for me now. It's feels like Threads but with deeper functionality.
It can just talk to your Mastodon server, which as the article notes is very easy to set up on Coolify/Digital Ocean, etc
It will never make sense cause Claude Shannon already told us why.
When everyone Broadcasts, info explodes, no one hears anything. And as a reaction, they shout louder and louder or increase the number of times they repeat their message. This compound the absurdity of giving everyone Broadcast capability even further.
When you use the word commons you dont even realize the commons never had Broadcast (1 to All messaging) for Free.
Technically we can give everyone a radio transmitter that support Broadcasting. But no one allows that anywhere on the planet ever since Claude Shannons Theory of Information came out. Because it clearly shows us everyone can not broadcast simultaneously.
Even the human body with more cells and more signalling going on than the entire dumb internet does not give every cell broadcast capability.
which I like operationally. I'm following about 110 RSS feeds which cost 10 cents/month each. I like having a simple AWS Lambda that puts the notifications in SQS and then fetching them at my convenience later. It's a steal for a feed from MDPI that has 1000+ papers a day or arXiv or The Guardian but not affordable to follow 2000 independent blogs which I would like to do. The poll and poll and poll some more and poll again and maybe poll too fast and waste resources and other times poll too slow and not only get content late but miss it entirely situation is just not cool. I could write an RSS poller but it would be slowing down my internet connection or adding to my cloud bills and would need maintenance.
This is exactly why WebSub, formerly Pubsubhubbub, was written. Publishers can push to a relay only when something new happens, never having to be polled.
Your local TV channels and newspapers aren’t commons either; they’re as privately owned as Twitter or Bluesky. Yet local governments make good use of them too, and have for many decades.
Things do not need to be publicly owned or distributed to be useful to society.
It's federation that is the problem. Federation leads to fragmentation, which ultimately is a headwind to adoption. IMHO you need a single network that allows people to choose the "channels" that you can view/join and then people that join that channel start hosting and replicating the content. Also, great filtering controls are critical to the success of such a platform.
Not sure if there is really anything attempting to implement essentially Twitter with this model or not? I would be interested though if someone has run across or is working on a system like that.
The fediverse very much is "the commons", at least it's as close as you can hope to get online.
Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should be able to make their own instance that they can control and plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.
You're collateralizing bad mortgages and rating them AAA.
I think the central question is how people can collectively own a node and organize its decision making. Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's feudalism.
You're in danger of making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Email is far from perfect, but good enough and its federated nature means it's reasonable for institutions to use it as a default mode of communication and authentication.
What exactly is the alternative to federation? Is it possible for everyone to be their own admin?
In any case, under feudalism serfs didn't have the freedom to choose and switch their feudal lord as they saw fit.
I assumed that private or corporate control over something that becomes a default communications network is undesirable, because that was a basis for the discussion I was replying to.
I also believe it. I don't want to have to subject myself to the X dumpster fire or sign away my data to Facebook just to receive communications from my local police department or child's school.
These ‘federated’ systems are just recreating feudalism in cyberspace.
Edit: Well even worse in some ways, since it’s not like a majority of the ‘gentry’ and ‘nobles’ could challenge and seize control of e.g. a Mastodon instance from the owner.
> that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.
Having seen this process of creation sustaining & decaying happen again and again, I totally get why you would feel this.
And I forgive you for applying the thinning broadly like this, casting insidious doubt widely like this.
But that's not what Bluesky is doing. Some links; first their o.g. app-lead (is that still right?),
> The network should outlast the company. Imagine if the Web died when Netscape or Yahoo did! It's strange to even think that. The same should apply to social networks.
Steve Klabnik has a post, How Bluesky Works, that talks about what Bluesky is. Yes, right now a variety of the layers of At Protocol are run by BlueSky alone. But the data can retain its integrity even if they fail, the network & data is by design open & transparent to all & transferable, and it's all based on protocols. https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work
This hypothesis that everyone else has been rug pulled & so BlueSky will too defies a ton of very hard careful work that Jay began when she very specifically worked to make sure BlueSky could be independent, to make it based on protocols.
What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess?
It was my understanding that Mastadon has _far less_ javascript than Twitter, not more.
The UI for mastadon always seemed far cleaner, more performant, and importantly - capable of actually loading, compared to twitter
Essentially, anytime something is shared from twitter I simply ignore it, because it may take a good 40 minutes to figure out the workaround to view it, compared to Mastadon which 'just works'.
folks should just go to wholly owned websites like back in the day. on the other hand most major websites are absolutely unreadable with the ads/autoplay videos.
> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.
Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/)
Mastodon is not a bloated sloppy mess. Have you even used it? I use it every day and it's enjoyable. It felt like 2010s Twitter. It both makes me feel good and is also educational (because I have chosen to follow accounts that provide educational value, not just empty rhetoric).
Why would I need to know that? Do you know that the Threads backend isn't also a bloated sloppy mess?
Again as I have already said, it's like requiring a blogger to write an elegant static site generator. Who cares that the Wordpress backend is messy and bloated? Only on HN will you find this fetish about an elegant backend when you are merely a user.
because it makes you unqualified to say that it's not a bloated sloppy mess. Because it is.
If the blogger just wants to write a blog and doesn't care about anything else, they can just use threads, or keep on using twitter, for that matter. But for some reason, this hypothetical blogger has decided that they don't want to use Twitter. They don't have to write their own static site generator, but in moving off Twitter, they're going to be exposed to some of the details behind the scene. If they're not an anti-intellectual, this hypothetical blogger can do some light reading to get up to speed.
Not to disagree with your post, but I'd *love* to support a renaissance of RSS. It was/is essentially peak distribution of content in a proper decentralized manner, putting users first and letting providers use whatever they want freely to generate it. No walled gardens. No restrictions.
And no good tools. RSS readers in 2024 still keep failing with the same failing interfaces that failed in 1999.
No, I don't want a portal with a little box for every feed I follow.
No, I don't want a listing like an email client.
No, I never want it to show me a piece of content twice unless I ask for it. (e.g. as David Byrne says: "say something once, why say it again?")
Yes, I expect to subscribe to more RSS feeds than I can read entirely so I expect it to learn my preferences like my YOShInOn agent does. In a cycle of a few days, YOShInOn might find 3000 or so articles in RSS feeds and it chooses 300 to show me which I thumbs up or thumbs down. I knew such a thing was possible when I wrote
this paper
Newspapers filled this role once, and they're privately owned. You have two choices: privately owned or government run. I'll take the private ownership route. Better than prior, now users can openly write back outside of "letters to the editor" and without paying money. People used to complain about Twitter censorship, now they complain about its ownership. One is about free expression. The other is about political tribalism.
> You have two choices: privately owned or government run
Or worker owned, or shared ownership (basically 1/3 capital, 1/3 workers and 1/3 local council, ratios are not usually that, it is often 60% for the capital owners, but you see the point)
There will be no great migration like we saw in 2010 with users shifting from Digg to Reddit but, instead, only the slow trickling escapes of users to more dispersed communities.
Here the human condition can flourish in a more localized way, with more participation (less lurking). No more winner takes all.
It's definitely something that's happened community by community. A lot of space news I care about is still just on Twitter but urbanism stuff has mostly moved to Bluesky, for instance.
The real issue is that none of these alternatives (Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky) offer anything other than "we're not Twitter".
Digg to Reddit was a unique case, because Digg very specifically fucked up their site, badly, with the V4 update. Reddit was in a great spot to pick up users from Digg because of not only having a similar overarching purpose as a link aggregator, but additional features like subreddits which enabled more smaller and casual link sharing and comment sections. It was a clear upgrade from Digg V4. I do think that Reddit would have eventually overtaken Digg anyway, and V4 only sped up the process.
Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now. If you're on there to look at funny memes, cat pictures, celebrity news and pornography -- which encapsulates about 98% of Twitter use cases -- it still functions much better than the alternatives. The migrations are happening for meta reasons, either political or ToS-related (specifically, X claiming they can use images you post for AI training). This isn't a recipe for long-term success, it's a precursor for people making bunch of noise for a month and then heading back to Twitter.
As someone who doesn't really participate in these large social networks -- even modern HN is way too mainstream for me honestly -- I do think it's a good thing people get off them, though. Smaller communities are a good thing. Shouting your loudest, hottest political takes on Twitter so you can pat yourself on the back for 10k likes is a fast track to mental health issues.
> Technically and product-wise, there's not a whole lot wrong with Twitter right now.
The Bluesky app both performs better and uses much less battery than Twitter does. I think because it uses Google ads now, but not sure.
Twitter also has disk space leaks - I regularly find the app has gone up to 3GB or so. (And it's not from image caching, seems to be an SQLite db of all accounts I've seen posts from.)
Bluesky app is becoming a fine React Native exemplar, and it's been a blast watching former Facebook React guy Dan Abramov, now working at Bluesky, start using Native for the first time. https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov
> Digg very specifically fucked up their site, badly,
And Twitter didn't? They use the "nazis at a bar" metaphor for a reason. UX is not the only way to screw up a site. Ashley Madison didn't torpedo because of a bad UI redesign.
Even on a product level, the change to not hide tweets from blocked accounts may as well have been a Digg v4 for high profile people. There was no profit to be had here and no one to gain with this update. Purely ideaologically driven.
> it still functions much better than the alternatives.
in which ways? Genuinely curious. All these social media feeds, by design, all just blended into the Instagram/tiktok mush of infinite scrolling and predictive "you might like this!" sorts of algorithms to meximize engagement. None feel much easier/harder.
unless you have two enormous networks where one happens to be libertarian/right leaning and the other is mostly very left. both have huge audiences and can likely thrive just fine on their own. i don't particularly think it's healthy, but it seems like that's just how humans are.
I think that if you have a neutral social network and a politically-charged social network, the neutral one will attract more eyeballs. People like to see ideas challenged and debated. Heavily-moderated and single-sided networks (Mastodon, Truth social, etc.) are simply boring compared to celebrity drama and political clashes on twitter.
What you have in the modern internet is that left-leaning users avoid networks that aren't moderated in their favor (in a conscious attempt to prevent moving the overton window), which leads to right-wing takeover (and eventually death of the social network because there are only right-wingers, see the graveyard of reddit alternatives). This trend would have been reversed a decade ago.
The "ideal" of Mastodon was the first thing I regarded as new. This idea to properly own your communities and conversations and move them around and connect/remove others as you would an email address was novel.
In reality, it's nowhere near that ideal. But I still want to see if anyone over the years could make it work.
----
Much less realistically (somehow), I'm still waiting for that moment where we run a full on AAA game in the native browser. I think the tech is now at the point where it exists and is possible. Just not the incentives. But IDK if that's the "new" you were talking about.
Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism. In theory, I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn. I haven't had a portfolio in years, because I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it. Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists. (And plenty of precious content that ended up on other services, like Qik, no longer does.)
If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.
The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.
>If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.
Good! Higher barrier to entry is exactly why Neocities, Mastodon and [redacted] are so much higher quality than the NPC internet. We need a couple hurdles to keep out the low effort posters.
Yeah but is it good gatekeeping or bad gatekeeping? Because having to agree to a code of conduct is a gate, but I don't think we want to remove that one. And anyway, when did gatekeeping pick up such a negative, pejorative tone? The gatekeeper is the one who kept people out of the gate. Some people were kept out for good reasons, others were kept out for bad reasons. Depending on the gate and country politics, nobody or everybody was let in through the gate. That doesn't make gatekeeping inherently bad. Doctors gatekeep who can call themselves a doctor, and while there are broader problems with that, fundamentally, some random fraudster shouldn't be able to call themselves a doctor sell rat poison in a pretty box as cure for cancer. There are some kinds of gatekeeping that are bad, but it's not inherently so.
>having to agree to a code of conduct is a gate, but I don't think we want to remove that one
depends on who you ask.
but in general I think that the goal of gatekeeping should be to filter out bad candidates without filtering out good candidates. You could imagine that for a medical degree, if students were graded on exams based on their handwriting and spelling that many otherwise good candidates would be eliminated, which is bad. So we want to avoid arbitrary gates and uphold meaningful gates.
If we are talking about gatekeeping new technology, we might want almost everyone who uses it to grasp it well, so it does not become a system of organized control. It may be reasonable to allow the technology to filter those who struggle with its inherent problems, but it would be good to avoid filtering out people due to the tech's unnecessary complexity (complexity based on its implementation, for example). So it is good to cull this unnecessary complexity of the system.
For example, a good gate for technology is making sure users understand the modular aspects of it (for example on linux this would be commands and unix pipes) and how to repurpose those modules for their own needs. A bad gate in this case might be bash syntax.
> Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists.
by the good grace of Meta Inc. and nothing else. Your account can get purged because:
- they decide to start purging old content
- they comply with a censorship order from the country you live in (or a country you don't live in)
- the CEO decides they don't like you (though that's really only a current issue on Twitter)
> Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism.
Decentralization is the bedrock of all the _most_ pragmatic internet technologies (DNS, HTTP, Email), centralization is a more recent phenomenon driven by a dozen or so very large companies.
This feels like an argument that stuffing cash under your mattress is better than keeping it in a bank. The number one cause of data loss - by far - is technical incompetence. 99.9% of users do not have the expertise to spin up an AWS instance and maintain it.
The difference between Facebook and your bank is that it's illegal for your bank to just say "you don't have an account here anymore and we're never giving back any of your deposits".
I mean why stop there with this analogy? we didn’t solve that problem by building decentralized banks. As a society the solution we came up to this is regulations around what banks can or can’t do, how much notice they must give you. If user data is so valuable (and I would vehemently argue that it is) we must have regulations to protect that.
well, people are trying. Jury's still out on that one.
But yes, we're in a weird spot of "clearly this is altering society" and "it's just an app bro". The latter is shedding away, but the powers that be will try to delay it as much as possible to squeeze out a few billion more dollars.
You are stuck in a centralized mindset where the only way to host content is to pay someone else with a static IP address and a reliable connection to host it for you, and to pay a domain registrar to link to it.
Why shouldn't hosting a webpage or social media content be as easy and reliable as seeding files on bittorrent? Programs like syncthing are proof that this model works in other domains, for example "cloud" storage.
I like and use matrix (I'm indeed one of those ideological types), but even their nice webapp is janky in comparison to discord, with fewer features on paper (E2EE is huge, but the median discord user doesn't care). I use it in spite of the jank.
With bluesky on the other hand, there really isn't much jank, certainly not relative to twitter (except right now when it feels like the servers are struggling to scale fast enough...). The average bluesky user doesn't seem to be ideologically motivated (or if they are, their ideology is "I don't like elon musk"). They mostly use bluesky because it works for them, regardless of implementation details.
On the Matrix side: to be clear, Element Web/Desktop isn't a nice new webapp (yet) - it's an 8 year old codebase which is improving slowly but surely (unless we get lucky and can focus on a step change). Element X however is an entirely new mobile app written in Rust + Swift UI / Jetpack Compose, and it has zero jank, and gives an idea of just how good Matrix can be: https://element.io/blog/deep-dive-into-element-x/ etc.
It's fascinating to see how well Bluesky has done with RN + Expo though, and makes me wonder what an equivalent Matrix client would feel like. Unfortunately rnmatrix.com looks to have been stalled since Annie joined Beeper/a8c.
Element X has been a long time coming and most of the people I brought to the matrix ecosystem have left (calls are basically broken and everything is jank). Telling them there is a new app will not bring them back. Finally I am tapering off my use and moving to other applications.
i’m flattered you made an acct just to wish us luck :) EX is here, and the jank is gone (although Element Call is admittedly still beta). Sorry it comes too late for you.
But just as Bluesky dipped and then returned with critical mass, so can Matrix. The uptake patterns of decentralised platforms seems to be much less linear than the tightly controller centralised apps of the path.
I suspect being spun out of Twitter, developed by Dan Abramov, and not owned by Mark Zuckerberg are all inputs that make Blue Sky feel like the blessed continuation of what used to be Twitter (at least for people in the hacker sphere).
> I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn.
But people still care about it and that minority can become expensive to fight off. We see this as we speak with games. The (IMO, frivilous) minorities got to a point last week where 2 Californians are trying to sue a 10 year old game for shutting down in 2023 (before this law they are suing under was made).
It'll probably take a few thousand to fight it off, so those two plantiffs are having the effect of maybe 100 gamers in terms of cost. For what I see as a frivilous lawsuit. Imagine one with teeth.
Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need decentralization are people who are being censored but that's very few people. So everyone incurs extra complexity to benefit a small minority.
I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it
This is caused by you writing custom software, not by decentralization. If you were running some off-the-shelf software like WordPress it would probably be updated to keep pace with the world so you wouldn't have to do much.
> Yeah, the only people who pragmatically need decentralization are people who are being censored but that's very few people.
There is a larger group of people who are frequently harassed but don't have sufficient control to prevent harassment on Twitter, for instance the recent change in what the block button does.
With decentralization, one can self-host on their terms, or find one with like-minded people and have more stringent controls on both incoming and outgoing messages, via blocks or defederating unmoderated or otherwise disagreeable instances.
You ever go through the Reddit blackout of 2015 or the API scandal of 2022? It's a common phenomenon. You move to sites and the people who are the most engaged will be talking about the reason they moved and their dissatisfaction.
It'll calm down in a month. Maybe. The current atmosphere isn't going away in a month like the API protests.
As with a lot of things these days, the places you congregate are what you make of it.
Putting aside the issues with who owns twitter and some of their recent policy shifts about content, I still have relatively sanitized feeds where I mostly only see friends' content. I'm still making new friends from Japan on it through our shared hobbies. Most of the sports news I follow is still there.
Nothing materially has changed about how I use the platform.
Bluesky is still pretty empty. Maybe some "nodes" of it are getting busier as people trickle out of twitter but I'm not sure it matters much until theres more saturation of many more things.
One thing I like about bluesky is it allows you to watch embedded videos from external media sources (e.g. youtube) without leaving the app. Seems like twitter/X was clearly opposed to the loss of control this entailed.
I'm concerned that Bluesky has taken money from VCs, including Blockchain Capital. The site is still in the honeymoon phase, but they will have to pay 10x of that money back.
This is Twitter all over again, including risk of a hostile takeover. I don't think they're stupid enough to just let the allegedly-decentralized protocol to take away their control when billions are at stake. They will keep users captive if they have to.
> I’ll also add that the reason I’m a big fan of a ActivityPub solution like Mastodon is that it’s quite inexpensive to run your own complete stack unless you’re extremely famous. Hosting a Mastodon instance is a one-step process, and you then control everything. To get the same experience with atproto, you’ll need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, and even then you still don’t control everything as of today.
When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison. I'm quite interested to find whether there will be niche relays that only index posts from certain pds (or provide a kind of community-chat discord competitor by being one server that hosts the PDSs of the community, and also provides the relay and appview for that community)
If you want to run your own social platform, you can do so by running your own Mastodon instance. If you want to do the same with Bluesky, you simply can't at the moment. You'll either need to rely on other parts of the system that you don't control, or you'll need to control the whole system at great expense.
Aha, agreed that they are not offering anything for the use case of standalone communities. I wish they would, and I think the architecture is there for it, it's just that no one has used a relay in that way yet. I /might/ take it up myself in the next year or two, really I just want phpbb to have a second renassiance - special interest, user moderated forums like reddit but each community able to fork off to their own infrastructure if there's some schism re: moderation or otherwise.
It's a weird install with a hybrid of Docker and systemd, but basically you run a script on a low-end Ubuntu VM and point your DNS at it and you're done. Far less resource intensive then Mastodon.
I wish they released an official k8s Helm chart or something, but it's not too hard to roll your own deployment.
A PDS allows you to store your own content and signing keys. It's not an instance in the same way as Mastodon, because Mastodon is fully contained. Your PDS still needs a Relay (which are quite expensive to run), and an App View (which currently only Bluesky runs) to be useful.
I'm intrigued by this guide of setting it up manually behind nginx, I fall under "just don't like docker", but I figure it makes support easier if you only offer containerized deployment by default, at least everyone's machine is the same that way
> When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison.
That's the point, though. You don't need (nor, I imagine, would most people want) to mirror the entire network. If not needing to mirror the entire network makes self hosting simpler, then that is an advantage for the people interested in self hosting.
personally do not understand the same, but for a completely another reason.
microblogging, i.e. twitter, succeeded in the first place because people just want to post, and not worry about taking care of technical things.
in the demographics that often forget the password they once set, expecting "one-time setup" and "complete control" when they do not change default settings for most things is very out of touch with reality.
we are still living in the internet that for the most part wants someone else to take care of these things for them. but besides the ownership, there is nothing that is also setting bluesky aside for a regular folk. we ought to do better before celebrating any level of success.
Just saw a YouTube video from legaleagle, a lawyer and in his videos he usually cites Twitter posts but the recent ones have bluesky posts which made me think bluesky has gone mainstream so I spun up a VM and hosted my PDS for me and a few friends
I like the feeling and style of the app, it's very comfortable coming from Twitter
It came as a bit of surprise this morning when an radio interview with a politician concluded with mentioning her Bluesky account, not Twitter or Facebook.
Still I feel like Facebook/Instagram, and certainly X/Twitter has done a lot of damage, which has cause many of us to be sceptical about ever opening another social media account.
Bluesky has made a lot of smart choices to both support openness while also retaining the benefits of a monolithic single instance. In reality this makes it easier to use than say Mastodon.
So if you take everybody at their word and assume the money doesn't run out, this is sort of the opposite approach to federation. Build out a solid main instance and get federation working "for real" later.
But has it won? I guess that remains to be seen. It entirely depends on the users who are willing to move there from x.
It's definitely the best contender, and I've been trying to use it but so far there's less people, my feed there is much blander, there's missing features that I miss from Twitter, and everyone seems to be posting about Twitter itself all the time.
Most of the Vitriole is still contained in twitter/x, bluesky will soon have the same problem and I expect it to be worse/require more active user maintenance due to the decentralised aspect of trying to moderate speech.
Bluesky should actively increase the difficulty of onboarding people onto the platform to weed out or reduce the population. Vitriole need a critical mass before it overtakes the entire discussion.
Bluesky has pluggable moderation and users can subscribe to multiple labellers. What they offer with ATProto is competition in moderation, which is not something we've had in a social media app before
Bluesky's biggest asset is the technical leadership team. Using Paul Frazee's (and Daniel Holmgren's - though I never actively used IPFS) work is like living in the far out future.
"if you want to look up a DID:PLC, you need to query the Bluesky servers. This is important because every user is identified by a DID:PLC, and all interactions need to reference them."
which is not strictly true.
almost every user is identified by a DID:PLC but DID:WEB is also supported. DID:WEB is not mentioned in the article at all
I think this is important because it means that users can opt into being their own source of truth for their "identity" in the ATPROTO system
Bluesky's issue is the Discover feed is not good. After a few days of activity, the suggestions are mostly random and nowhere close to the stuff I want. Twitter was very good - it makes sense because the graph is rich.
Lots of other feeds, though. Which I think is a cool feature. I follow a feed for theme I'm interested in, which is nicer than following people that post about lots of various things, not all which I'm interested in.
I agree with authors take of writing on your own blog and then posting to network(s) for engagement. If your crowd moves its social platform then you move too. Platform independence and you choose what to "push" just like you choose what to share during IRL conversations. Platforms that own the data are farming the users.
So far I see good sides of both Threads and Blue Sky. Threads has a lot more users, but I see more 'subject matter expert' kinds of people on Blue Sky as well as smaller more intimate communities. But we'll see what happens if that dynamic attracts more people and it stops being quite so cozy.
Threads seems unusable unless they change the algorithm. It defaults to For You and For You is 50% Instagram-style engagement bait, 50% people you've never heard of complaining about things you've never heard of, and 0% people you're actually following.
If they fix that it could indeed be quite good, but it still feels too much like "broadcasting" vs "conversation", and I'm personally not ready to be popular like that.
Bluesky does have a little toxic positivity but it's much better, and it's possible to chat with friends on it. (When I try enabling the algorithm features they still won't stop showing me gay porn though.)
I follow a decent number of tech people and I do see some of their posts, but then it runs out. In particular all the people I follow go to bed at US nighttime and then it's all bait until they wake up.
Also, half the people I follow are getting baited by the "random people complaining" posts - so I just see their replies to it!
Threads is unusable. I'm not sure what I expected, but of course it's just the slop-pushing, engagement-farmed, censorship-heavy auto-moderated Instagram algorithm but in a format made to look like Twitter.
The only posts I see on there that look like they're made by humans are jilted twitter refugees trying to convince each other they're having fun by sharing articles about how X is dead. Meanwhile on X nobody has thought about Threads since the day it launched.
I’m tired of threads. In the beginning it was nice but now it just gives me engagement fatigue. So much shallow content provoking replies and adding nothing to your life. It actually makes me feel worse.
And now they will be adding ads. That’s it. I’m out.
For the longest time, I didn't get the appeal of Twitter. I started using it a bit more when I was still in the habit of using social feeds, and Facebook's was getting actively bad.
I haven't used Twitter much lately since it got bought, and I haven't missed it.
A lot of the time when I did use it, it was for customer support. I feel bad for my followers who had to see my gripes about whatever behemoth sold me crap.
We can assume that Twitter was a vocal opponent to the repeal at the time and that they have now become somewhat more in favour if it means knocking out their competition whilst they enjoy special protection.
All it would take is some catalytic content to kick things off and a compliant state judiciary to get the ball rolling.
Bluesky's Terms Of Service explicitly state that they are not liable for the impacts of their user's content. They say they reserve the right to delete content or accounts at any time at their discretion. And then there's this:
Indemnity: Summary: If someone brings a legal claim against us based on your actions on Bluesky Social, you are responsible for our defense in, and the consequences of, that claim.
It all looks bulletproof on the surface but I just don't know if it will survive under Trump/Musk.
Can someone explain why Twitter was good? I have an account and I posted like twice. The UI is weird, takes the entire screen to show a thread and it's difficult to follow a conversation.
I get the sense that it's just for trying to be witty. The replies are hard to follow for a reason. They aren't the point. It's really a series of unrelated posts you have to keep reading to follow any kind of "zeitgeist". It's like they thought of a good user interface for conversations and did the opposite of that.
I think Bluesky has won the battle to become the replacement for Twitter. A lot of the attempts were all trying some weird gimmick like posting voice notes and stuff. Bluesky has the whole federation stuff without actually having it, which is ok, but for the rest of it. They're clearly just copying features over from Twitter and adding in some of the most requested features for Twitter.
This makes me super happy I was on that train early and got the "iain.bsky.social" handle.
I'll never create a bluesky account because the people who use it ultimately think it's some sort of genius political point to rag on X.
Went to GopherconAU last week and one of the organizers very proudly announced that you should "skeet" with their hashtag like the word didn't have another completely inappropriate connotation. I really can't take this sort of internet circlejerk seriously when I have a mortgage to pay and a family to look after.
Setting up a PDS isn't too hard but still requires a dedicated IT person right now IMO. If you have a lot of customers I think it's worth it (aka you can justify spending budget on keeping the PDS up.) If you're small, it's not worth it yet I don't think.
Censorship/moderation is based on labellers that label posts for content. The default App View has opt-out moderation based on the default Bluesky moderation labelers. You can also opt-into other labellers if you like. You can run your own labeller to get your own moderation. I run my own labeller and my own feeds so I can customize my experience but none of it is in a state that others could really fork the code. It's not too hard to start reading the jetstream (a version of the firehose that's easier to parse/read) though.
> Censorship/moderation is based on labellers that label posts for content. The default App View has opt-out moderation based on the default Bluesky moderation labelers. You can also opt-into other labellers if you like.
Does this mean there is one set of moderation/censorship that you get by default, but you can turn it off and get a fully unfiltered version of the service? Or is it like clicking “reveal” on every hidden post individually? Are the additional “labeller” on top of the default or can you replace it entirely?
If November taught us anything it's that instead of looking for an x alternative and creating increasingly silo'd echo chambers on the internet, we should instead be trying to disconnect ourselves from social media.
The golden age of social is over and it's just a horror show now. Look what it did.
I'd argue longform content has done more for opinion-making than microblogs in the 2024 election. And to be honest, I like that. Irrespective of the politics the podcasts with JD Vance and even Trump at Theo Von were remarkable. Seeing Trump genuinely care about Theo's drug history was a strange but impactful moment.
It certainly made them feel more human to me. I wish Kamala would have done the same just so people could see her have a real conversation. I have no idea how that would go.
Bluesky definitely has a "this is what twitter used to be vibe" but it's so much more than that. With follow lists and block lists it's really easy to get up to speed and curate your feed. It's also very noticeably less algorithm driven.
bluesky is reselling domains? Not sure that's still the case. Never saw anything about buying a new one when I was going thru the settings to change a handle.
That being said, the change handle to domain process is quite slick with very smooth DNS record based transfer done in a minute.
July 2023. Like I said, don't think that's the case anymore. It's not in the process of handle changing. They simply suggest buying your own domain from any registrar now.
I will never, ever use Bluesky. ActivityPub is the present AND future of decentralized social networking on the open web. Bluesky's protocol isn't even a standard and amounts to little more than smoke and mirrors.
I'm fine with people backing the wrong horse (again), and I don't have an ounce of FOMO. It's upsetting in a general sense that people will regularly behave in a manner against their own self-interest. But when Bluesky is fully enshittified in a few years and people are wondering what in the hell just happened, the Fediverse will be here waiting to embrace them with open arms.
All of the major platforms experience major outflow after elections, no? Logically, Twitter would lose more users given that they have a larger user base to start with. What’s the next major event where we can reliably measure to see which platform is actually ahead?
That depends on what you use as criterium to decide which platform is ahead. For me the best criterium is how much diversity of opinion - the only type of diversity which really matters - is allowed on the platform and how much real interaction (i.e. not just shit fights) between those groups occurs. Currently X comes out on top in the former category while none of them scores anything worth mentioning on the latter.
What I want to know is how did people come to believe that microblogging is a social necessity. How have we allowed for what’s perhaps the most impoverished form of human expression to become a gathering place for ourselves and our institutions.
I've got this idea for a toy social media network that costs ~$1 per byte to post. No advertisements. It would be like an experiment in how dense people could make posts. If you wanted to post an animation, you would post a javascript file like dwitter.net
Instead of having "upvotes" or "reactions", this function would be the same as replying a single char or two. If multiple people post the same thing (like "" ":)" "L"), it gets collated and boosted as a single message.
If you want to flex, you can drop $10,000 to post a 10kiB picture of your dog. Or spend $1000 to write an overly long post. But I imagine long posts would be seen as bougie.
It's a bigger echo chamber than X. What's the point? I go online to try to get a general idea of the landscape of views and opinions.
I think a general problem with the current political landscape right now is that people literally cannot tolerate reading something they disagree with, because they convinced themselves that the other side is so morally flawed, they can just immediately write them off without further consideration.
But irrespective of that, how are you supposed to understand what is going on if you only read content by people who think the same way you do?
I don't let the algorithm dictate who I follow. I pretty much know the big names in all the areas that I want to keep up to date with. And for every big name I know their main rivals, so I can have a complete picture. It's that simple.
If Bluesky manages to attract the same diversity of opinions I might start using it.
> What's the point? I go online to try to get a general idea of the landscape of views and opinions.
Not everyone uses it solely for political stuff, though. I'd like to just be in a community related to my hobby without death threats and constant abuse. We moved to bsky a year ago, been so nice.
It seems very cozy, although filled with people pushing their commercial projects. If people are projecting Bluesky's future on its current cozy state they are fools. The only way to remain cozy is to remain small.
The competitive advantage to BlueSky, over Twitter / X, is that there's tremendous value in connecting intelligent and kind people while maintaining a certain quality standard.
Twitter / X, for political reasons, allowed extremely toxic behavior while at the same time disempowered communities from moderating themselves. If you force each individual user to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person it's a losing battle and low quality speech will overwhelm conversations. X folks know that but did it anyways.
It's also becoming more and more clear that we need a relatively neutral medium for free speech. Musk claimed to be building that on X but then did exactly the opposite. It's very hard to trust the algorithm isn't being manipulated in one way or another.
On BlueSky it's incredible how much value is already being produced by connecting intelligent and creative folks as compared to what Twitter became.
For better or worse, X / Twitter was never really about communities. It has always been focused on allowing individuals to broadcast their thoughts. If you want a moderated community discussion then there are much better platforms for that.
We do have neutral mediums for free speech: HTTP and SMTP.
But on X too much value was / is being lost due to policy and algorithmic choices that discourage signal and encourage noise.
I used to go there for critical discussion of various tech issues or smart people talking about innovations at the cutting edge. As an example I used to use X to learn about modern graphics programming by searching certain terms to see what the smartest people in the field were saying while talking to each other.
It used to be that if a big account Tweeted something often you'd see true experts responding as the first replies. Now you'll see dozens of Bluechecks spamming memes or gross statements before you get to any substance, which inevitably has lower engagement.
Too many smart people have been turned away from the platform and it just doesn't generate the quality of discussion it used to. Already in the communities I care about I'm finding vastly more substance on BlueSky.
How does moderation work on Bluesky? If it's not up to individual users to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person, who/what is doing that blocking?
You can either rely on Bluesky's standard labeler only or subscribe to ones that handle certain niches or the higher standards of moderation that you may want.
There's also lists made by other users that you can use to just block all the trolls/bots/etc on them at once (and as more are added).
In addition to what the other comment said BlueSky is also so hackable that I think people will continue develop more sophisticated techniques to better moderate.
X was locked down in a way that seemed to be giving the bots and trolls a significant advantage.
If you'll recall, many of the same people who voted for Trump despised him for his character flaws when he was a Democrat, pre-2015 and pre-birtherism, which again suggests there are more than enough apolitical reasons not to like him. People seem to forget this, but maybe I'm the elder statesman around here.
That aside, why wouldn't "reasonable" do the heavy lifting, and how is that a problem? Should we come to some other conclusion about the people that voted for him? Aren't we then forced to say these reasonable people just didn't know any better due to ignorance or lack of education? Somehow, that doesn't seem like an improvement. I'm okay with saying these are unreasonable people as well.
Not true. If someone can make a point honestly and in good faith I do my best to respect it even it's "harsh". I myself am no stranger to being very blunt when trying to make a case for something.
What I consider "toxic" is using slurs, trying to make people angry, bad faith arguments, spamming replies without giving them much thought, etc.
We had NIP-26 Delegated Event Signing, so you could set up multiple private keys with short expiration times delegated from a root key, then if one of the delegated keys was leaked you could just wait for it to expire.
This ended up being considered a bad idea as clients that supported it would have to display any notes as if they were sent from the root key, and clients that didn't support it wouldn't be able to keep track of anyone using delegation.
I was really impressed with a presentation I attended at the internet identity workshop detailing KERI, Key Event Receipt Infrastructure. I wish someone would integrate it into a social network so I don't have to do it myself.
For platforms I mean the owner of the platform, and for protocols I mean the theoretical person who the users would be wishing owned it so they could do spam filtering.
As a counter point to the comments that say blue sky doesn’t have as much political content. I just opened the app for maybe the third time and did a cursory sample and 11/20 were political, 4/20 we’re about how bluesky has no political content, and maybe 5 were totally unpolitical.
>Currently people can set up their own PDSs, which will host both their identity’s signing keys and their content on Bluesky. Setting this up requires a fair amount of server-level knowledge, but it’s relatively cheap (maybe $15/month USD) and lets people control their own data
Man, really? Domains tend to be around that much for a year.
I guess it's cheap if you're doing this for marketing purposes, but given that this was marketed towards "developers", I thought there'd be more homespun method to get this up.
But aside from that, I don't quite understand the counterargument of Bluesky not being federated/decentralized for custom domains outside of "Bluesky handles DM
's" (to paraphrase). I'm sure most users will more or less choose the centralized approach of Bluesky handling everything, but the fact that you can decentralize off is very valuable (even if it's a different service than ActivityPub)
>The whole Twitter mess has taught me not to attach myself too closely with these things anymore. I hung on far too long to Twitter while it made me feel terrible. My goal going forward is to post more to my own site and aggregate to any social channel I currently care about.
indeed. Don't put your eggs all in someone else's basket. If you're selling, always try to get people on an email list (the only popular standard of federation as of now) so when that basket is taken that your devout followers can keep in touch. Ideally this decentralization of Bluesky (if you take the time/money to set it up) should let you take most of your ball home, but it may not be as easy to just "move it somewhere else". Mastodon's ideals vs. reality certainly show this.
Maybe this will finally be the time but every time there has been a “migration” it feels like Twitter still holds onto enough of a stronghold that most people don’t move over so you make the move but you end up back on twitter.
Particularly if you are using it as a tool to advertise your company, channel, stream, etc.
I would love for this to not be true this time. But I am not holding my breath.
I think the last wave was towards Mastodon but most migrants returned because it was too unfamiliar. On the contrary Bluesky seems to be Twitter but without the enshittification . I can see a future for that. The open protocol/network story being a probably small bonus.
I find it funny how hard people try to push the “BlueSky is better than twitter” narrative. So hard, that my entire BlueSky feed is filled with Twitter refugees who shit post about twitter being bad.
Maybe instead of having yet another echo chamber of short form content, we should embrace long form, well written content with wide range of opinions.
I don’t think the problem is the algorithmic or chronological feed.
I think the problem is that short form content simply should not exit. I don’t care what people eat for breakfast, or reading the same motivation quote over and over again.
I want to have discussions, with different opinions. And current microblogging platforms do not provide that. Hence it doesn’t matter who “wins”. IMHO they are all net negative for humanity
Unpopular opinion: X is the best social network now because of Community Notes that tell you after the fact if a post you liked was misinformation and often warns you in real time as well. You can also have long form posts on there now. Reali life breaking news is there first.
The author seems to imply that "winning" here correlates with a measure of posting frequency:
>If Bluesky comes out as a “winner” and more posting happens there, I think I’m generally fine with that. At least for now.
If that's what the match between microblogging services is about, I wager Bluesky has no chance whatsoever to come out the winner. It sounds like wishful thinking to me. Mere delusion.
If i read some interesting article that turns out to just be a reblogging of an interesting post on a service, the original embedded article is inevitably from xitter, which if i want to read more generally i can't. Either technical or personal issues usually prevent me from being able to read the original source and additional related tweets.
Imagine putting all that effort into 'decentralization' and then building literally, the most Orwellian, cucked version of the Internet possible. See the thing with free speech is that a lot of views that might be concerned 'offensive' are in fact defined by society at that point in time. It was once considered offensive to state basic facts about astronomy to the church. It's been that way throughout history that one person's 'offensive' is another's truth. Sometimes objective truth. But usually always an ever-changing target.
Now lets say for the sake of argument that a person's speech is just trolling hateful shit. Contributing literally nothing. I argue that quite often you even want to allow this kind of speech because when almost always when you have 'content moderation' it becomes over-moderation. It's a 'slippery slope' where people are unable to keep their own biases out of moderation. Which brings me back to Bluesky. A deranged, leftist hellscape, designed to enforce the largest possible book of unwritten woke social regulations across the site. Literally stacking the deck against Wrong Think. Or an orwellian nightmare. This is what happens to the internet when you let fucktards moderate it.
Edit: ty for the downvote soyboy. On downvote sites like this if someone doesn't like your post they downvote it and it becomes a popularity competition even if you're right (which is what you're signalling is a good idea btw.) Bluesky is exactly the same. As is reddit. As is every top 100 website at the moment.
Twitter was a really good mix of viewpoints and people, but it’s people so toxically politicized and right wing that a lot of the interesting accounts have left. It’s a weird thing that could’ve only existed because they weren’t focused on profit.
Threads has gone out of its way to make real time engagement impossible. Seeing post about sporting events that ended 3 days ago on your front page is terrible UX. If I was a conspiratorial type person I would believe zuck & elon colluded not to compete in that space.
Which has limited value during real time events. If you are not preemptively following people who are interested in or involved with that event then you lose out on following that event in real time.
As far as I can tell, the main reason people give for moving off X is that “there’s more hate speech/misinformation/disinformation since Elon took over because he got rid of a lot of trust and safety controls”
So, how does moving to a platform with the explicit aim of being decentralised solve this? Even Elon Twitter has more oversight than a decentralised platform with zero control.
I like going on Mastodon and seeing other people's indie games. It isn't the same as the potato chip / crack hit vibe of other social media, but it's nice.
I follow a bunch of people on X who seem thoughtful but with whom I typically disagree with. That's useful for self-correction and avoiding group think. I also try very hard not to react negatively or dramatically.
I believe it's a mistake for the owner be so busy with his own platform but I don't follow him or any famous people. That helps too.
If you want to avoid groupthink, I recommend against following "people you disagree with" and instead following people talking about completely different things. The first group isn't really exposing you to new ideas, and the most likely reason you disagree is one of you is talking their book (ie lying) rather than some heartfelt disagreement.
Good point, and that's what I do, mostly. My interests are history and technical topics. But I follow scifi authors, cartoonists, some minor (relatively) politicians.
The horde of right wing blue checks that dominate all popular political tweets is not a filter bubble. It is a user-hostile feature that makes organic political interactions impossible on the platform. It turns a peer-to-peer network into top-down broadcast.
Right. My opinion is that following people/accounts shouldn’t be the single approach (and that it may even be the overall more detrimental one), and that it’s generally better to follow communities. Like HN, or subreddits, web forums, formerly Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, or also more chat-like platforms like Discord and IRC.
It would be great if Bluesky could generalize to that. My understanding is that it’s focused on primarily following accounts, and that you don’t independently have communities focused around topics and interests.
Technically feeds don't depend on keywords or hashtags but it's the simplest, cheap compute method to run. I run a feed with an ML model but it uses heuristics like Like Count and follower lists to limit the throughput.
I think this kind of decentralization is going to have problems once people start attacking it. It's going to be really hard for you to filter out spam in your free time. Or even misclassification if there's no scalable way to report false positives back to you.
Only by the loosest possible definition that would also encompass forums, IRC, game lobby chatrooms, etc. There's a clear and practical distinction between communities driven by a specific interest like this one and platforms like Xitter.
Saying that HN is social media is like saying that a taco is a sandwich.
Disagree. That's what HN and IRC fans tell themselves to draw an artificial distinction between networks they like and networks they don't. I don't see a huge meaningful difference except in scale and content breadth.
There are _huge_ differences. Compare HN to Xitter et al:
- Barrier to entry is higher and participation is tiered by karma
- Moderation and community participation guidelines are heavier-handed and more defined
- You can't embed media or have a profile picture
- There's virtually no advertising anywhere
- You can't delete posts after a few hours which means no way to nuke your presence after the fact
- No hashtags
- Far less algorithmic manipulation of user attention (infinite scrolling, per-user algorithmic feed, etc)
- Encouragement of longer-form discussion because of a lack of (at this point historical, from what I understand) character limits on posts
- Likes/upvote counts aren't visible to other users
- No official app with telemetry and push notifications; in fact, no notifications _period_ for things like replies
- No friend or follow mechanism
My taco comment stands. Both a sandwich and a taco comprise flat, oblong starches with ingredients in the middle. One or two people have called them the same. In practice virtually nobody would confuse the two or substitute one for the other. People are migrating from Xitter to Bluesky but almost none are migrating to HN.
Thing is, Twitter was, well, not good before Naughty Ol’ Mr Car showed up (there’s a reason it was affectionately known as the hellsite) but often quite enjoyable. Then it was ruined by an idiot, and Mastodon and Bluesky filled the niche. For those of us who liked old!Twitter, Bluesky isn’t a bad option.
When I can engage in conversatons with a wide variety of different viewpoints, without any of those viewpoints being repressed through some censorship mechanism, then I'll agree that the platform has 'won'.
But Bluesky is already censoring viewpoints that the collective don't want to see promoted, so its really not much better than X.
The issue is, whether or not a collective, reactive crowd, is really the ultimate form of human discourse. I happen to think not, but its sure interesting to see the dynamics of humans flowing from one echo chamber to another ..
You know this would be a lot more effective of a pitch if you didn't go with the free speech canard. The only change recently (aside from community notes, which is ok) is the notable surge in porn, crypto, and ads and the corresponding drop in quality of advertisers.
Is it not also my freedom to not have to listen to certain speech? I ought to be able to filter it out
What sets Bluesky apart for me is that their ATProto and their default app allow for user choice in moderation. No longer do we have a platform deciding the one-size fits all for their users. We can have competition without switching costs with ATProto
The only people I've seen moving to bluesky so far in this latest batch have basically been smug lefty types and lawyers. They're free to do as they please but these are not the early adopters that make a culture good.
I dunno man I worked on a landscaping truck and on a pumping truck for the parks department when I was younger and we had plenty of free time to dick around. This was before smartphones so usually we'd play Hearts at the truck dispatch or park at one of the town beaches and just watch the water and read magazines or books. Walk past any roadside construction site and half the guys are playing with their phones; anything with cops standing around half of them are playing with their phones. Not sure how to tell you this, but blue collar jobs have downtime same as white collar jobs and they have the internet on phones now.
Care to check how much time blue collars spend swiping on their phones? On those few daily hours, what makes you think they don't have time to argue online?
There's plenty of right wing posters on Twitter now. They get boosted even. The reason they weren't visible prior to boosting is that they only communicate in death threats, misspelled slurs and the laughing emoji.
(Far-leftists esp. tankies also communicate mainly in death threats, but in a much more literary way where they accuse you of misreading a theorist from 1840 first.)
There are not leftists trying and failing to call you homosexual, no. They'd call you a member of another obscure political group you've never heard of, or find a way to misinterpret your post in a complicated way to make you look pro-genocide.
Can somebody please explain to me why anybody would want to leave X for Bluesky other than the fact that Elon Musk undid the previous regime's censorship efforts (which almost always targeted a particular political viewpoint) and himself makes pro-Trump posts? This recent "mass exodus" seems more like people just upset at the outcome of the US election.
no good reason to leave X, just people acting out (current thing ppl)...and they have to either keep reminding us, or keep coming back trying to get ppl to follow them...unsuccessfully no one really cares.
also advertisers like Disney,IBM, comcast, warner bros, discovery, lions gate etc are all coming back to advertising on X now
If by "won" you mean the reality-dissociated left have found a new echo chamber then yes.
If you are a normal person and made the right conclusion that Trump / Elon are byproducts of forcefed radical leftist policies you'd be better to steer clear from this platform. X is lightweight compared to what Bluesky is about to become.
This is the third Bluesky submission in the past week or so. My previous comments were heavily downvoted, so I don’t expect it will be any different this time.
Many people are comparing X and Bluesky, but I think this is a mistake. The two platforms shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence. These are two drastically different platforms. X is a real-time news app, currently holding the #1 spot in the News category on the App Store (e.g., The New York Times is #8). Bluesky, on the other hand, is a social network and the #1 app in the Social Networking category. These are fundamentally different categories, so let’s stop treating them as rivals - they’re solving different problems for different audiences.
> Is X also in the Social Networking category and Bluesky also in the News category?
No. Each application is in their own category.
> If not, why do you assume that which category some intern put the apps in has any evidentiary weight in or relevance to today's conversation?
I did not assume anything. I use X as a news app, the CEO of X has stated it's a news app, and its category in the iOS App Store is News. There are no assumptions here.
Twitter is also present way down the list in the social networking category. The ‘news’ category is a much smaller pond in which it can be a big fish, but it is in both.
It doesn't matter how much Musk pays, trying to sell to to the social concious that twitter is a "news app" is a fool's errand.
That said, I do agree that Twitter is a horrible social networking platform. Not even in a snarky way.
- I could never follow conversations on whatever the hell response system it sets up.
- It's focused on short form comments but tons of people use it as a blogging platform (including its new owner).
- The algorithms and filtering are just horrid. It is so bizarre how I can be logged off and not even see user feeds in any meaningful order (ignoring that it filters out NSFW stuff).
- They recently made worse with blocking changes. a social networking tool with bad user filering is failing its most basic task. meanwhile they also recently decided to privatized what people liked, so it's all sorts of backwards in its design.
But despite all that, Bluesky as a "social network" platform solves #3. For now. Wonderful,I can see tweets in reverse chronological order without being logged in (and for now, the curation is... fine). But people still want imageboards with small character limits so I'll just continue to yell at a (literal, not digital) cloud.
That's the neat part, I don't. I only made an account after years of being broken down by trying to get past their "make an account" wall when I just followed some random link from HN or Reddit. I was fine just browsing tweets in a news when linked, but they clearly want to try and force me into their, uhh, "news network"? I never used any of the features; no comments, follows, likes, etc.
But others do and that's the sad part. I felt the same about Google+ dying to facebook; the inferior technology wins and it works against all the ways I want to communicate with others. So I gave up; I'm using Bluesky as a fresh start to be able to connect to future people I couldn't years ago that I met at conferences. But had nothing else to share other than a Twitter.
While I think it's horribly inefficient, it's even less respectful of me to ask them to take the time to make a social media account they don't have. That's all this is about for me. Meeting people at their level instead of trying to be this hipster trying to shill for this "cool misunderstood platform that's way better". I'll still use my hipster spaces, of course. But I can manage multiple feeds just fine.
If interesting people start posting interesting things on Bluesky we'll start going there. But, so far, we only see people posing and shoving it down our throats. Just like this post. We get it, you hate Musk and want to see X/twitter dead. Fine.
I'm not on Twitter and used to be on Mastodon so the idea of Bluesky per se sounds
interesting. But so far it looks like a forced, desperate attempt by a very political group of people. And that's the opposite of what people like me would like to spend time on.
it's very hypocritical to say nothing interesting is on a platform or that it's all soo loud and then proceed to perpetuate that by using a hyperbolic turn of phrase in your own comment that no body asked for.
An advantage of Bluesky over Twitter that’s valuable to a lot of people is the degree of control it gives. Algorithmic feeds are more precisely tunable so it’s easier to get them to show the things you want to see, starter packs make it easy to follow entire circles at once, and moderation tools are robust, which helps tamp down on spam, trolling, harassment, etc.
It feels more designed for meaningful interaction than it is engagement at all costs, which is probably why it’s common for people who've moved to have seen much higher numbers of substantiative replies to their posts despite having a fraction as many followers as they do on Twitter.
It may not catch on regardless, but I think it has the best shot of all the Twitter alternatives thus far.
Even if that’s true, it’s irrelevant from the user’s perspective. Regardless of the underlying reason, the result is a user experience that’s enough of an improvement that users feel motivated to migrate.
If Bluesky becomes dominant, it will likely eventually degrade too, at which point something will take its place. Such is the fate of social media apps. The only variable is how long the app can stave off that decay.
Can you explain how any of these are due to it having less users, or being cheaper to run?
>An advantage of Bluesky over Twitter that’s valuable to a lot of people is the degree of control it gives. Algorithmic feeds are more precisely tunable so it’s easier to get them to show the things you want to see, starter packs make it easy to follow entire circles at once, and moderation tools are robust, which helps tamp down on spam, trolling, harassment, etc.
Your statement appears completely illogical without a good deal of explanation connecting these concrete statements to yours.
Twitter algorithmic feeds are designed to promote engagement even if you don'like something. It is important because more engagement with various content, means more clicks, more reactions and so on.
You get something you like, you get something don't like, click bait, then begin to argue etc. It is basically like a flea market with ads floating around and retailers promoting their stuff. All for the engagement.
But BlueSky creates isolated tables - like in a cafe. Sure they have more than 5 chairs, but it does promote engagement and closer to weekly clubs.
90% of social media is the crowd of people using it. A new social media site will take over with having better people, which might be caused by getting better features but unlikely. Or, it could be that the dominant social media site makes blunders that push its users away, like Digg did.
Twitter used to be unbeatable for me in 1) areas with technical expertise or, 2) following the latest in news. Using Twitter to get the latest on news has only recently been destroyed, as evidenced by its failure as an information source during the recent hurricanes in the US.
And most technical users are now reevaluating the crap they have to put up with every day that they didn't have to a while back, and finding X lacking. And in science, this is especially with a new administration that is dedicated to science suppression (e.g. RFK Jr) and X is run by a wanna-be oligarch that wants a part in the administration controlling their social media without regard to free speech. (For example, blanket banning of "cis" made lots of discusion really hard. "Cis" is a technical word that is used all the time in my field unrelated to the culture war, and not being able to use it was infuriating and really made a lot of people angry that they were mere pawns in a stupid culture war. It is not a curse word or a slur or hateful word and nobody's life was made better by banning its use, but many discussions became silly.)
Mastodon is more clunky than Bluesky, too clunky to get working for most, though a lot of scientists got close. Bluesky is easier and is getting the community now.
BlueSky's platform choices are encouraging far more signal than noise.
X / Twitter is doing the opposite. It's rotting into a place where meaningful discussion is hard to have and you have to put up with tons of trolls / spam.
IMHO, there are some great advantages compared to X/Twitter (I'm not sure about Threads).
1) links in your posts do not penalize your post, making it much easier to share content and link. It's absolutely refreshing to click on a link in mobile and have it open directly in your preferred web browser instead of the in-app hassle.
2) You can choose your own algorithm, without having weird stuff shoved in it
3) it's a new network and early adopters are hopping on, so it's unusually high signal of interesting people, and interesting people are much more likely to follow you because there's not as many people.
4) far far far far less spam and bots
5) people can't pay a nominal fee to jump to the top of replies, which makes discussions far higher quality and much more interesting
It's an all around better experience. It may not stay that way. Twitter was always an ever-changing beast, as all social networks are, but the big changes that have been taken on over the past few years all came at weakening the value proposition of Twitter in order to feed the ego of a lucky narcissist that does not understand the experience of others or care about creating a good product. X is now the play thing of a wanna-be oligarch, and it's afraid harder to get useful information out of it compared to even a couple years ago.
Bluesky has already become far more useful to me in finding technical material and technical collaborators in just a few days, even after years of careful curation of my X/Twitter network. I don't know if that will last, or if those outside of science/data/programming will find Bluesky useful (and I actively unfollow anybody that posts a lot of stuff outside that area so I won't know!), but for the HN crowd I think Bluesky already has the potential to be a much better and rewarding use of time invested.
When Musk himself is making the experience more hostile for users and advertisers, I think this is the few times "we're not X" is applicable.
I always say that the only thing that can kill these conglomerates is themselves. Musk has done a wonderful job of that these past two years. This wasn't a spur of the moment thing with some explicit breaking point like most other migrations.
It also means they will become increasingly radicalized in their echo chamber.
It's telling that people who are leaving X are doing so not because they are being censored, but because their political opponents are no longer being censored.
I've never seen people claim they leave Twitter because of censoring. Rather because of the toxicity and death threats you receive on what's even mundane and non-political posts. All communities have been invaded by crazy people.
People only keep on hitting the endorphin button if it gives them endorphins. If the media channel owner dilutes the content too much by forcing too many advertisements or too much unwanted unpleasant politics down their users throats, you can't expect them to stick around.
I avoided politics, but I got tired of the bots, the spam, the idiots who paid $x getting promoted to the top of discussion with uninteresting replies rather than more informative replies.
Musk literally censored a key technical term, "cis," because it's used in culture wars in addition to all sorts of other uses in biology.
Calling this dilution of value and signal to be "uncensoring of opponents" is merely insulting reasonable people. That's not what happened at all. And the only "uncensoring" that actually happened was letting nazis and antisemites and racists be as offensive as they wanted. And that's pure uninteresting noise to all communities except the nazi, antisemite, and racist communities.
It would be good for all tech people to learn what happens when you insert too much politics into your platform: you go broke.
I left because a large fraction of the things its algorithm was showing me were factually wrong. And I don't mean things that people accidentally got wrong. Or where the wrong things are there for entertainment purposes. No, I mean things where they purposefully are wrong and they want people to believe them.
I only ever followed a handful of accounts and those had stopped posting many years ago, so when Musk made it so the algorithmic feed worthless there was no reason to keep my account.
I'm still hoping that X wins. I'm hoping that we learn how to coexist with a diversity of viewpoints. It seems counterproductive to partition everyone up into their own little gardens, without any viable opposition to the dominant views.
People aren't leaving X because of polite disagreement. They're leaving because ideological extremism and hate not only run wild but are actively promoted by the platform.
Here’s how I see it: imagine you like going to a restaurant for dinner fairly often. Recently, a group of rowdy patrons has started coming in, getting drunk, and making all kinds of noise. Strangely, the restaurant seems to encourage their behavior. You don’t love this—you’re just trying to enjoy a nice dinner and some casual conversation. So, you leave and don’t come back.
You can’t force the restaurant to calm down or kick out the rowdy patrons. They should be allowed to serve whomever they want. Luckily, you’re also not forced to endure their actions.
> People aren't leaving X because of polite disagreement. They're leaving because ideological extremism and hate not only run wild but are actively promoted by the platform.
I disagree. I think the definition of hate and extremism has been warped to encompass things that aren't either of those things. And that's part of the problem. The rhetoric has become so hyperbolic that we're having a hard time coexisting.
The answer is for us to walk that back, and encourage actual dialogue, not run into our own safe bunkers.
You can talk to the people at your table in a restaurant, and it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking about something you disagree with. The food tastes the same.
> I think the definition of hate and extremism has been warped to encompass things that aren't either of those things.
The definitions of hate and extremism are inherently tied to personal values. Many people perceive much of the speech on X as hateful and extremist because it directly contradicts their core values, not because they're arbitrarily expanding those definitions.
> You can talk to the people at your table in a restaurant, and it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking about something you disagree with. The food tastes the same.
This analogy only works if everyone abides by a social contract. that’s often not the case on X. It’s like if the people at the next table overheard you, didn’t like what you said, and decided to come over and spit in your food. That’s the experience many people have on X.
It's not the back and forth, it's the original content that gets posted that you find objectionable, and in which the comments / reposts become quite toxic thereafter with people disagreeing
There is most definitely original content that is hateful, racist, and/or extreme on X that goes beyond the difference of policy or ethical opinions
> I think the definition of hate and extremism has been warped to encompass things that aren't either of those things.
How about we just go dictionary definition:
>denoting hostile actions motivated by intense dislike or prejudice.
can you really argue this past week, month, year. That you have not seen any dictionary-definition hate spread, promoted, and cheered for on the platform? Some by the owner himself?
Twitter isn't a commons. it's an amusement park and Musk is the manager. You don't bother trying to change a manger's mind unless you have millions to start the talk. Abandon Disneyland and try to see if Knott's or Six Flags or Funland fit your vibe more.
> it doesn't matter if the table beside you is talking about something you disagree with. The food tastes the same.
Not when they are slinging their food at me. Experiences and atmosphere are well known to alter your sense of taste. Not just smell (which is obvious, since your nose and tongue are basically connected).
It's very hard to moderate an online forum that allows political content without succumbing to your own political bias.
I don't like the trolls on X, but if X started moderating against hateful content, it would just end up censoring news and opinions like they used to do beforehand. There is just no way around that.
I am not going to name examples because it would start a flame war, but there are enough recent examples.
Also, maybe I'm from a different generation, but the trolls can be very easily ignored. What do I care is some no name account is posting some stupid content somewhere on X? I already know which people I want to follow. The rest I don't care about.
> I don't like the trolls on X, but if X started moderating against hateful content, it would just end up censoring news and opinions like they used to do beforehand.
They censored cisgender as a slur.[1] They are not avoiding moderation to avoid bias.
> Also, maybe I'm from a different generation, but the trolls can be very easily ignored. What do I care is some no name account is posting some stupid content somewhere on X? I already know which people I want to follow. The rest I don't care about.
Signal to noise ratio is not a generational issue. Muted users and phrases not being muted is a common complaint. Less signal and more noise after the changes favoring paid accounts is a common complaint. And finding new accounts to follow was part of Twitter's value to others even if not you.
It was made up in 1994 and is therefore a new word, especially relative to the words it is trying to forcibly replace. And its popular usage was a part of the “current culture wars”.
>especially relative to the words it is trying to forcibly replace
what is it trying to replace? Straight/Heterosexual? That doesn't work for trans folk (at least not while there's still heated discussion on whether to respect their chosen gender).
And as flattering as it is. I'm '94 and I don't consider myself "new".
> And its popular usage was a part of the “current culture wars”.
Just like feminimism and masculism? or "social justice"? or Misogyny? or "Free Speech"?
Yeah, language works like that. You use what (sometimes) best communicates your thoughts
>maybe I'm from a different generation, but the trolls can be very easily ignored.
if you're a no name user who barely comments, sure. Trolls have evolved beyond mean words in the last 20 years, though. They are NOT easily ignored anymore, and it only takes one doxxer to ruin your entire online presense. Or even physical.
I used to think echo chambers are bad. I realized that when algorithms force me to consume content that I don't agree with, my mood becomes terrible. In order to protect myself, I no longer think echo chambers are pure bad. They are a necessary evil to ensure my own sanity.
In the real world you congregate with like-minded people. The same applies to my social media timeline. And I use Mastodon by the way, which doesn't have an algorithm driven timeline.
Yes, I feel the same way. I'm in favor of self-controlled filters that let each of us decide what we want to consume, and when. Don't think that means you need to go into the echo-chamber permanently.
> I'm in favor of self-controlled filters that let each of us decide what we want to consume, and when.
and you think any current mainstream social media will ever let us get full control of that?
And why is it fine for me to leave to another "echo chamber", but it's fine to filter myself with site features in your proposed "commons" to the point where I made an echo chamber?
> I'm in favor of self-controlled filters that let each of us decide what we want to consume
This is why Bluesky, with ATProto, appeals to me. They have made the four core components (data hosting, app view, algo feed, moderation) a pluggable system with user level choices, for what they use for each component and which they combine
That's true, but arguably x's only draw at this point is the ease of reaching and interacting beyond this bubble. Consider the draw of major public figures being openly mocked in their own comments! It's pretty rare to see any public figure open themselves to criticism.
Many people hold worldviews which are ontologically incapable of co-existence with other viewpoints. By reducing discourse to intergroup sparring and affinity signaling, the intermingling of various such extremists only solidifies the status quo.
There is a way to coexist, without it being a constant ideological battle all the time. If we can talk about the things we DO agree about, it makes it easier to talk about the things we don't. That's only possible if we're in proximity to one another.
Hiding in our own echo-chambers does not solve any real problems, and it creates new ones.
Yes. But The base of this thread is talking about how we can just "talk it out", when the disagreement is of things as base as "are [insert people here] inferior beings?"
No, I had centuries of ancestors fight so that question has a nigh-objective answer. I'm not going to entertain the argument to "expand my worldview". Why would I? That kind of talk is basically saying you don't respect me as a human being, so why talk with someone like that?
It is functionally impossible to run an unmoderated message board that doesn't devolve. Holding out hope that "we" learn where "we" is everyone in the world is not going to happen in 1000 years. The only way for a forum to remain civil and useful is for careful moderation to remove troublemakers and it is equally impossible to do that without ever making a mistake.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. Of course, there will be mistakes. And of course there needs to be moderation. But I support the moderation similar to HN, it's about politeness and respect. As long as you're respectful, you can say your piece.
Also, X does provide community based fact checking too, which works best when there are representatives from all sides participating.
Having participated in the notes system, it largely became another ideological battleground and was too slow to add the, by and large, accurate notes in the end. The majority of views and reactions had already happened
One of the appealing aspects of Bluesky / ATProto is that there can be multiple fact checkers that users can subscribe to, which can have differing governance models, policies, and operations. Within the app, you can decide which ones (more than one even) at an individual level. This means we can have competition, but also echo chambers. It will be interesting to see how it works out
You are more than free to talk with Dang about any given flag you disagree with. He puts up with it much too kindly. That alone is a grace reddit never gave me.
Downvoting is a user action. There's no real gain to blame the entire community for their individual action against a single comment. Feel free to inquire if you really need to, but half the downvotes I see are pretty explicitly breaking the guidelines.
I think at this point you may need to review your history. There's sadly only so much I can do as a handle on a social media platform to convince someone this unaware of the powers that be.
What nobody has figured out how to do yet is re-create that physical reality in the digital world. Policing is a reality few people want to talk about, and nobody wants to point out that graffiti (trolling in the digital world) is vandalism and not free speech. Nor do they want to face the reality that while graffiti is pretty easy to spot in the real world, it's much more difficult to detect in the digital world. All those problems are in play before we add in the problems brought by advertising and the fact that online communities legally look similar to media.
Online communities have existed for over four decades now and we still haven't solved these problems.
> Online communities have existed for over four decades now and we still haven't solved these problems.
The beautiful thing about digital graffiti is that you can remove it instantly, and return to an unmarred environment. As long as such tools are provided to each person, those who enjoy graffiti can leave it in place too. Win-Win.
We do need a new vision, with people embracing and promoting digital maturity. Both in a reduction of trolling, and in a stronger resilience against it. Because not everything that is objectionable, is graffiti. You should not hate your neighbor because he has a different political sign on his front yard during election season. We have to stop equating everything that is objectionable, as a catastrophic, intolerable insult.
I hope we get a nice distributed protocol, and I'm not completely negative on AT (or nostr) yet. Twitter is a critical chokepoint for independent media right now, and the guy who owns it is in the coming administration.
Shutting down twitter, rumble, and substack would be a massacre for independent media right now. Elon could make an offer that couldn't be refused on the other two, and turn on the censorship harder than Facebook.
The right-wing free speech heel turn is always the same: when you censor, you're trying to prevent the free expression of ideas, when we censor, we're trying to prevent the "support" of terrorism. Lèse-majesté is always around the corner.
I don't think the answer to the potential right-wing censorship, is left-wing censorship. Right now, X is actually closer to the ideal than any time in its history.
But yeah, if there is a truly distributed system, that had facilities and incentives which support and even promote diverse interactions, that'd be even better.
Nah, X is worse for free speech than it ever has been. Musk shut down Crimethinc just because one of his bootlickers went "ooh ooh they did a crime". Crimethinc actually produce a lot of great journalism, some of which would actually support right wing views... if the right wingers who complain about safe spaces and bubbles and "diverse interactions" actually read anything. For instance, they had a pretty detailed conversation with one of the rioters at the George Floyd protests, when all the """left""" wing media claimed that it was a minority of bad infiltrating people doing the rioting, these guys straight up published a source that said that no, it was tactical to lure the cops away from the police station. That they incentivised and encouraged the rioting internally. They outlined the processes they used to split off the mostly white liberal element so they could achieve these ends. It was extraordinary. And obviously, they should meet the definition of free speech.
The problem is that Musk came in and lifted the bans on a lot of people who were removed for roughly the correct thing, community standards. And then he let those very people help him find the voices you do want in the community and shut them down. Its gone beyond just echo chamber, and now the management has a clique. That clique doesnt just hate free speech, they loathe the people that largely use such rights like journalists.
Then of course theres all the shit about compliance with foreign governments etc. Twitters going to be an amazing case study one day in the future that will likely conclude against "free speech" as Musk poorly interprets it.
My impression is that the goal isn't to uphold free speech, its never done that, its to create a safe space to be an asshole. And that if you can hold your own against the assholes, then they will find a way to abuse their position in the clique to get you banned.
Back in the day you had these coffee shops, that may or may not be partially responsible for the success of so called western civilization. People would travel across europe to visit and exchange ideas with likeminded people. Thats not what social media is. People arent having robust, intentional, intellectual discussions, they are forming tribes and attacking each other with whatever weapons are available. People wake up in the morning and check their notifications like people in the blitz looking out the window to see if their neighbors survived the night. Aiding one side or the other of the conflict should never be conflated with "promoting diverse interactions".
There are bad actors everywhere. But, as far as I can tell, there are very few bans of anyone on X, and no censorship or shadow-banning of any account. The community-notes section is available to everyone, so that misinformation can be challenged (but of course relies on people of opposing views participating). These are marked improvements over the previous regime.
All the abuses you're describing, were going on previously, it was just accepted by the majority as a good-thing, because it was only hurting "Nazi's". I'm not supporting anything the current ownership does on that basis, i'm saying we should all be fighting for a new paradigm, not just recreating the old one on a new platform.
And currently, there are very few voices standing up for a healthier interaction between people with opposing views. This will take a lot more than any technological fix, it will require an attitude shift. That isn't possible if we take our respective corners, and only come out when the fight-bell rings.
X is owned by an opinionated rich guy, completely entangled in government (even before the Trump win.) There's nothing ideal about a situation where he could be flipping the switch right now to turn it back like it once was, or even worse. He doesn't even have to care, all he has to do is lie back and let it happen. It's the path of least resistance.
I firmly believe his posture with twitter has been because 1) it's a fun place for him and it was obviously a money losing purchase* so he might as well have that fun, and 2) his level of censorship is something that he can use to negotiate with government over contracts or regulation.
He might even really believe in free speech, but a conceptual belief in free speech doesn't mean he'll feel obligated to personally provide it if he can make a dollar denying it. His speech will remain free no matter what happens, he's a rich guy.
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* (not unlike say the Guardian, the New Republic, Mother Jones, the Intercept, or the Atlantic, or the WaPo, aparently, and probably CNN and MSNBC at this point. They're not for making money.)
Again, I totally understand your objection, and you're right about the potential abuses that exist. The reason I said it is better now than before, is that the abuses under the previous ownership were not potential, they were real and being perpetrated every day. So I see X as _currently_ a much better place than it has ever been in its history.
But I'm with you on the potential problems and would rather have a system that was immune to such issues. What i'm really arguing against is people who saw the previous regime as correct and just, and are looking to recreate their echo-chamber somewhere else.
Part of what it will take to create a healthy town-center, that is much better than X, is for more people to speak up for ideals of diversity and tolerance. And to fight against the very loud and angry segment of people who see censorship and authoritarian control as good things, as long as they're working in their own favor.
That's a very dangerous idea that has been tried in communistic countries many times. It always leads to horrendous outcomes and the authoritarian control of the public.
We should each follow our own moral compass, and oppose viewpoints that we find horrific. But trying to systematically stamp out disagreeable ideas, rather than to influence people with better ideas, is a road to hell.
This sort of absolutism is the same kind of garbage middle-school level philosophy that Elon Musk peddles, and it doesn't work in practice. For example, holocaust denialism, or in the most recent example, Sandy Hook massacre denialism isn't an opposing viewpoint worth hosting on a private platform. The best course of action is to simply eradicate it. Infowars being shutdown is a great example of a good thing happening.
How are there people old enough to comment on Sandy Hook, denying Sandy Hook? What do you even say to convince someone that a highly televised event within their own recent history did not happen?
Read up on the paradox of tolerance and you may see why this isn't just some "diversity of viewpoints".
- I'd love to hear more points about fiscal and foreign policy.
- I want to hear what people see in country music.
- I want to know about weird bizarre facts that can only be remembered and regurgitated by an obsessed madman. Likewise, I enjoy the occasional, IMO overanalyzed dives into arts from people who are considered auteurs that goes beyond my eye and ear
- I want to attempt to understand the experiences of those in very different socioeconomical environments. immigrants, LGBT, Some dude traveling the country on train cars,
- I want to understand more about the people who represent my country. The mundane dry stuff on the day to day, not just once every 4 years in the big showdown
- I want to hear people's technical approaches to software, hardware, and anything in between
I am open to a lot of viewpoints, I will not agree with all of them. I will find some of them obnoxious and other snooty.
Why is it that when I don't want to hear stuff like "My body your choice" I'm suddenly a coddled prude who is seeking an echo chamber? I did my time shitposting on 4chan when maybe half of it was ironic. I don't want nor need to do that anymore. That well has clearly fallen fully to Poe's law and my one and only real hard line is "don't spread hate".
This line of thought is very simple: you don't get diverse viewpoints when people are scared of being doxxed, harrased, or even murdered. You're making a place less diverse by literally trying to say they are less of a person than you. Stop it.
Why should a trans person have to put up with hordes of deranged cretins who believe that all trans people are inherently gross sexual predators? Why should people of color have to put up with all the nazis on that site who are gleefully awaiting when Trump will reopen the concentration camps?
Why should Republicans have to put up with hordes of deranged leftists who believe all conservatives are inherently evil Nazi's? Why should white men have to put up with all the racists who believe they're systemically, irrevocably evil by nature, and awaiting the day that all white people can be killed or enslaved?
Diversity of viewpoints doesn't mean every viewpoint is equally valid. It means that we endure the crazies on both sides, and don't let their stupid theories prevent rational conversation and good-natured and loving people from coexisting. That is, we become more mature, and find ways to cool down the hyperbolic rhetoric -- not abandon each other.
You're saying this as if the transphobes and racists are some fringe offshoot and not the mainstream conservative position.
We aren't talking about our favorite flavor of Pringles here; coexisting means the right has to abandon their principals wholesale, not just say please and thank you while politely discussing how vaccines cause 5G or whatever.
You might be right, I don't have the data to know. But it might just feel that way, because previously it was entirely left-wing political content that was being pushed.
You just received basic instructions to get the data. You hold such strong opinions in this thread, I think it's important you inform yourself properly.
Actually, my opinions are not reliant on the results of such a test.
Anything that X does which favors right-wing opinions, and censors or diminishes left-wing opinions, I oppose. I'm for free speech, and all of us being in the same proximity to hash out our differences, and accept that there will be some which always remain.
I don't think X can recover, and become a polite and respectful place, from the toxicity levels it currently has. Too many trolls and an algorithm and owner that prefers engagement farming
Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.
A common kind of profile on that kind of platform is: "There are good people and bad people and I'm one of the good people"
It is very easy to other people and share memes that build group cohesion while driving other people away. Really making progress requires in politics a lot of "I agree with you about 90% but there is 10% that I don't" or "Well, I negotiated something in the backroom that you'd really hate but headed off a situation you would have thought was catastrophic but you won't appreciate that I did it so you and I are both better off if I don't tell you" and other sorts of nuance, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, etc.
To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read) I have to have about 20 or so block rules.
I see some people with the same kind of profiles on Bluesky but see a lot less othering in my feed because the "Discover" feed on Bluesky filters out a lot of angry content. My rough estimate is that it removes about 75% of the divisive political junk. That
(1) Immediately improves my feed, but also
(2) Reduces the amount of re-posted angry political content (it's like adding some boron to the coolant in a nuclear reactor) and
(3) Since angry political memes don't work anymore people find a different game to play
My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable. Those who go are less agreeable than those who stay. On the other hand, a certain amount of suppression of negativity could stop it from spreading and might not even be noticed as "censorship".
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