From my pov, this is the best hacker story in recent times. A small group of protocol nerds are overtaking Zuck and Musk, the most powerful people on the planet. This is hacker af. [1]
[1] A dev team of 20 people are the #1 app in App and Play Stores, while open source and fully remote. Heck yes. This is an amazing story. It should be front page every day.
I was a highschool senior when Facebook came out, back when you needed an email with a university's domain name to sign up. That one was driven by pure FOMO. Everyone's older friends were on it and going to cool frat parties and you were just stuck on the outside looking in. LiveJournal and Myspace had nothing on that.
Call it a tipping point, call it a collective action problem finally being resolved, snowballing, viral liftoff, or belittle it and call it a "herd stampede" if you really want.
But those are all "organic" phenomena. The grandparent comment that called it "inorganic" seems to be mistaken.
There is this cynical (and maybe often warranted) take that any sudden uptake or virality is astro-turfing or I inorganic or shilling.
Not the case here though, I see it myself how basically all my old Twitter communities have migrated and things are really vibrant. Block lists, mute words and starter packs mean I we exactly what I want to see, which adds to the appeal.
Why is it so unbelievable to you that a different platform with seemingly happy users could have a viral moment through word of mouth, right as a whole lot of people are actively seeking alternatives?
Let’s put it this way: if a huge amount of people suddenly find themselves done with twitter, what serious alternatives are there beside Bluesky?
I actually think there are a few, only some have achieved critical mass with smaller subnetworks. BlueSky and Threads both seem to have attracted non-tech networks although Threads downranked political content, so BlueSky seems like the natural next mass appeal product.
From my pov, this is the best hacker story in recent times. A small group of protocol nerds are overtaking Zuck and Musk, the most powerful people on the planet. This is hacker af. [1]
[0] https://x.com/paulg/status/1858122600934752464
[1] A dev team of 20 people are the #1 app in App and Play Stores, while open source and fully remote. Heck yes. This is an amazing story. It should be front page every day.