Why would Bluesky take-off and not take the typical hype-then-die trajectory like the social networks that tried to rise in the past 5 or so years? Millions won't move due to the technical architecture alone. Is the selling point that it's not Elon's?
To me, the selling point is that it's the pure Twitter experience that was there before Elon started fucking about with Twitter in his attempt to a) make money b) turn Twitter into the everything app.
Hopefully we'll have some good third-party apps to go alongside it (again, something that Elon fucked with).
I have no numbers on this, but I reckon that the vast majority of twitter users who rarely tweet, don't engage in the outrage du jour, and aren't on Twitter to promote themselves have experienced little to no change since Elon has taken over. I know this is true for me at least. All of the things that made Twitter good and terrible are still there.
From what I can tell, most of the loudest Elon-Twitter detractors are people with some ideological bone to pick. They dislike Elon, they dislike centralized platforms, or name your cause.
To me, none of this portends an imminent mass exodus to slightly more complicated, vastly less popular Twitter clones.
While I don’t really buy bluesky as a replacement, the “people who pay show up first in the replies, not people who were chronologically first or people whose stuff is popular” feels _extremely_ corrosive to any social network; even dating/hookup sites, which invented this dynamic, tend to try to moderate it these days. That, if nothing else, seems likely to break Twitter.
if you look at nearly any widely-viewed tweet now, the first few thousand replies are from irrelevant, uninteresting blue-ticks. This is clearly worse than how it was before for most users.
Why would I be angry at Elon taking over Twitter if I had a dislike of centralised platforms? I wouldn't even be on Twitter in the first place.
And yeah, people who use the platform less will see less changes. That seems almost obvious. But that doesn't mean that there aren't any changes. And some of those changes are very obvious, like the fact that the maximum post length on this micro-blogging service is no longer 240 characters, but 10,000 characters.
If anything, your hand-waving of nu-Twitter criticism seems more ideological than anything. "They're not valid criticisms, they just hate Elon."
My point is that many people who make predictions on this topic come to conclusions by fixating on largely irrelevant details. Are people on Twitter because it's a "mirco-blogging service" or because they find funny memes, follow people they like, get information they value, find the UX addicting, and everyone already has it? Unless those core value propositions change (which I haven't seen evidence of) the changes to tweet length, blue checks, metrics visibility, etc won't get users to leave for a more complicated alternative.
Having used Bluesky, I'm really amazed at how they are able to suggest people for me to follow ... it seems like they have access to my Twitter profile somehow. They seem to know who I follow on Twitter and find the same users for me on Bluesky. That alone has made Bluesky more useful to me than Mastodon.
Also, the AT protocol is much better designed than Mastodon. The ability to leave with both my identity and data and go to a new provider is pretty amazing.
The people suggestions are probably just fairly good because there's only like 30,000 people on the platform or so, so it's recommending you some big hitters. The people that it recommends to me are not people that I ever followed on Twitter, but I recognise many of them.
Maybe, but I think it's more likely they're just recommending you follow people that are 2 degrees away from you, and that's how the social graph is constructed. I doubt they have access to Twitter data, especially given how locked down everything is now.
Never used BS, but I assume it's like Twitter and free to use. It's probably better than Twitter now, since they are still getting users, so enjoy it while it lasts. Soon they'll start the monetization and it will slowly start to suck. This process is called enshittification and applies to all business models where the use is free, see https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ for an amusing read.
I've been thinking about an ActivityPub site that was specifically tailored for Twitter refugees by making it easy for them to connect to people they were following on Twitter, and making it easy for them to be found by the people who followed them. I can imagine that would be a killer feature for some people.
I don’t think I really buy this. Twitter’s thing was historically that it was the _important_ social network. If it becomes another Facebook, only 5% the size, well, why is anyone staying on that?
It can either survive largely unscathed if rather less relevant, or it can become a Musk-ier Parler, but I don’t think there’s an obvious middle ground.
Personally I think it’s probably doomed to Musk-y irrelevance, but I’d believe “it basically carries on” before I’d buy “it is a mini-Facebook”.
I’m also not convinced that whatever replaces twitter will be particularly twitter-y. There’s a world where Mastodon and/or bluesky are to Twitter as Dreamwidth is to Livejournal; a thing for people who really liked the old thing but don’t like the new owners and/or their incompetent stewardship of the platform, but not the _default_ destination for people fleeing.
Myself, I’m enjoying Mastodon, but it largely replaced the bits of old-twitter I liked. Those aren’t the bits that everyone liked. And, realistically, it’s mostly a facsimile of an _old_ twitter that was dying even before Musk brought his unique flavour of Dunning-Kruger to the party.
What's becoming clear is that we're never going to have a single central, immediacy-focused social networking point again like Twitter was before Musk. Twitter was _it_ for better or worse and it's unsalvageable now.
