[shubhamjain]

It's beyond words how much Elon Musk has wrecked Twitter. But, I am not ready join another echo chamber that mirrors the same flaws from the other side of the spectrum. My initial impression of BlueSky is just that.

Twitter's greatest flaw—no, I won’t call it "X"—is its obsession with engagement to promote tweets. This creates the worst feed you can think of:

- People ask the dumbest questions, just to bait responses.

- Someone makes a reasonable point, and along comes the dumbest reply. Why? So others can pile on, calling them out, driving up engagement.

- External links are buried. Good articles? Forget it. They’ve vanished from my feed.

- The most toxic people are constantly pushed to my feed. And it's a losing battle to block them all. Keeping my feed politics-free is borderline impossible.

- The fact that you can buy a subscription and ensure that your tweets get highlighted more is absurd. It has made it really easy to get the worst accounts in your feed.

It’s exhausting. I am just there because I think it is still a good marketing channel. But I am not sure anymore if the pros outweigh the cons.

[medler]

The great thing about bluesky is that there are no “algorithms” by default. You see posts from people you follow in the order they were posted. There’s no feed pushing toxic posts in your face, and since there’s no monetary incentive for engagement, you don’t see the egregious bait that’s ubiquitous on Twitter.

As for it being an echo chamber, that’s a function of who chooses to join. Again, there are no algorithms, so no viewpoints are favored by the site (unlike on some other sites, ahem). And the protocol ensures you can’t really be banned.

[rapsey]

I do not understand how people have this problem. Follow interesting people and look at the following tab. Unfollow or mute uninteresting or annoying people.

I find it great because there is a ton of interesting people. It is not a website for discussions, it is for one off messages.

[skygazer]

I installed some guy's userscript to remove the For You tab all together and dump me straight into Following. It's way better, but it's still out of order, so you can't see what's new, only a random selection of what's popular from the last few days, which is irritating. My workaround is to create a list named Timeline, and add all my follows to it and pin it up top, and poof, sequential timeline again, with none of the crap. Then just some css to hide inline ads and constant upgrade nags, and it's like 2014 again.