I can attest that BlueSky is really nice right now. Feels less combative than Twitter. I started to use it 25 days ago and got 400 or so follows pretty quickly.
I used Twitter mainly to follow fellow devs, industry leaders and InfoSec people. But after Elon made changes my timeline started to fill with politics and culture wars and it ended up missing me less informed and more angry.
Maybe that is the future for BlueSky as well, but at the moment I am enjoying it and more people I followed on Twitter are making the move.
The only thing keeping me around as someone who never comments or tweets, is that there are some great local accounts (to me) like weather, police, news, concerts, etc... Any chance these move over? I'm not looking for some great community, I just enjoy timely posts I guess.
Feels like there is a need for a message broker platform, where these local accounts can sign up and push messages out to whomever wants them via socials, SMS, RSS, whatevs. Buffer meets Svix for social/messaging PubSub or something similar vs Yet Another Platform.
One way people here could help with that is to improve posting tools.
I have a couple of informational bots. It's a lot easy for me when I can just download a cli tool and run that to post than if I have to signup to a platform as a developer and then write custom code to login via OAuth.
Actually if I have to write code to talk to OAuth I probably won't bother.
Currently using bsky to post to BlueSky and paying for IFTTT because I have to make time to sit down and get twurl working.
Please share once you find out! In $EUROPEAN_CAPITAL here it seems local govt. runs on twitter and facebook. Since I got banned from twitter for following those during covid (with no posts or likes made) I kinda wish there was a rss feed or mailing list for information posted by official institutions.
Unfortunately, Bluesky being the "popular" alternative just means it's going to turn to shit faster.
I have an account there because so many people seem to be moving from Twitter to Bluesky instead of Mastodon, for understandable reasons, but I expect Bluesky to be be awash in bots, AI and Nazis within a year. That's just the way things go now.
I dont think it will because the moderation tools available to people are better and actually work..
If i block someone they are gone from my timeline, their replies are gone from my posts even to other people..
If someone re-post me and i don't like the context i can go there and "disconnect" my post from their re-post..
Also Bluesky has public block lists anyone can create and sign-up for, those accounts would be noticed very fast and included in some block list if they start getting any traction..
So while it is not impossible for those accounts to exist, it is much harder for then to get traction..
And if they get traction it is much easier to hide then from our and our followers view..
One consequence of naughty ol’ Mr Car’s ascension to the Bird Throne was that mass-blocking lists, which were always a bit of a hack but somewhat worked, became unusable. Bluesky has blocklists as a first-class function; it will be awash with Nazis, but you won’t have to look at them unless you want to. AI slop may be trickier, but that’s really a challenge the whole web is facing at the moment.
What evidence do you have that bluesky is already an echo chamber? Serious question as I haven’t used it yet.
Could it also be that people who left Twitter are simply less politically minded, and by definition will be less combative if they get to focus on their interests instead of their differences?
I left Twitter in 2017 because I was only there to get one liner jokes from professional comedians and follow some record label releases. I’m not joining any platform where memes and other low quality opinions are the primary modes of communication
It seems the combativeness of Twitter has increased with it becoming more hivemindy, not the other way around. The people leaving twitter are generally less combative than those staying / joining, so I imagine it will devolve further into a pit of rabid fighting dogs.
Similarly, I expect Trump and Elon will have a falling out rather quickly. Two megalomaniacal narcissists don't generally play nicely for very long. When that happens, Elon won't be able to help himself from whacking the bees nest he's created, by criticizing Trump. I expect the combativeness of twitter to skyrocket soon afterwards.
Following you, and hope to finally spend more time on the butterfly app instead of the bird app since it seems enough people are moving over there. I managed to primarily use Mastadon for a few months at one point but got sucked back into TWT.
You have to curate your discover feed, like joining any new platform with a recommendation engine. The nice thing is there are many custom feeds for various topics beyond the singular main feeds (discover, following, friends) and you can write your own and use it from their app.
I like it a lot too, and my feed is pretty good. Unfortunately adoption is really slow and few of the really famous people I'd like to follow seem to care about it.
The network effects of Twitter/X are just incredibly powerful. Even many people who ostensibly dislike the fact that it has become a right wing propaganda tool seem reluctant to actually leave.
The network effects are powerful, but anecdotally I've noticed fewer and fewer people I follow actually posting anything to Twitter.
I think there'll be a tipping point where nobody of value is posting enough for anybody else to bother checking in, death spiralling its usefulness. It's already 80% bots, grifters, and engagement farmers.
Maybe that is the future for BlueSky as well, but at the moment I am enjoying it and more people I followed on Twitter are making the move.