| This could be interesting. Twitter effectively doesn't have an API any more (what they do have is prohibitively expensive for tinkering). Mastodon has a culture that actively pushes back against many of the things people might want to build - any experiments with things like search or discovery improvements or even potentially algorithmic feeds tend to get a very hostile reaction from long-time Mastodon users. Bluesky's API is wide open for innovation right now - and you can even connect directly to a WebSocket stream (from JavaScript running on any page) for direct firehose access, like in this demo https://firehose3d.theo.io/ discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159786 Here's my own quick firehose demo: https://tools.simonwillison.net/bluesky-firehose - code here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/af2e50446f6dfc5cb514a7d6aadbb... |
I built a small literary journal on early Twitter, and knowing we had a simple way to archive what we were publishing and do stuff like bio-driven contributors notes was a big part of why it made sense to bother investing creative energy on a new platform and social capital convincing writers to make accounts.
It's been frustrating to watch the past few years. I haven't fully decided if I have the energy to reinvent it for a new platform, but poking around at atproto stuff earlier this fall made me more hopeful about the prospect than a similar draft I have on top of gotosocial (even though thw former ia much further from complete).