I am a huge BLuesky fan. I have switched my entire social experience to it. I get good engagement, mostly with seemingly decent people. I almost always can find interesting things to read.
I have moderated the shit out of my feed. I rarely see things I do not want to (I had to give up politics and current events after the election). I use the list feature to curate separate feeds for different topics (music, programming, books, etc). I have started experimenting with graze.social to create my own algorithmic feeds.
I have changed my handle to my own domain. One of these days I’m going to move my stuff to my own personal data store because it sounds like fun.
Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well.
There are problems, of course. It’s new and people are pressuring them to do viewpoint moderation which is a terrible idea. There are still many features that are missing.
But, it’s a very fun platform with a lot less negativity than Twitter and a lot less bland stupidity than facebook. Threads is fine but it’s 100% zuckerberg’s feed. Tribal takes like four clicks to make a post. Mastodon is a bad UI and instances tend to be narrow-minded fiefdoms.
Most of the comments on this thread are talking about what might happen, ‘enshitification’!! Oh My!. The actual fact is that it is a good thing presently and I hope decen people will flock to it and make sure it is supported to reach its maximum awesome potential.
>Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well.
Unless the AT Protocol split it self from the company to be something like matrix.org or SMTP. Then Bsky will always have an advantage over other indexers. [1]
I have stayed away from it for a while, but after my partner switched over to it I decided to delve deeper into it. The openess of Bluesky to developers is a breath of fresh air and the platform itself has some really great features. So I guess you can say I'm a fan now too.
I was also able to create an app on Bluesky that grew to 15k users in less than a month[1]. The Bluesky team was really open to helping me with some rate limits to make sure it could continue running well too. Reddit and Twitter probably had similar vibes when they were starting out, perhaps Bluesky will face the same fate, but there are no guarantees with any platform out there.
I don't know how long you've been in the space, so forgive me if I seem condescending. Twitter and Facebook used to be extremely open and encouraging to developers. That's how they gained prominence, by allowing... nay, incentivizing developers to use their platform. Once they hit critical mass, that was all unceremoniously ripped away.
Assuming a for-profit venture like Bluesky gains critical mass, it will absolutely happen again.
I'm sorry, but there's just a qualitative difference between a company setting up some API endpoints and what Bluesky PBC is doing with building atproto, releasing PDS software, encouraging self-hosters and treating them as first class, etc.
You may be interested in this thread from a core dev which examines this exact play by Reddit (and how nobody could do anything about it), how it would have been different on atproto, and how a robust ecosystem keeps incumbent players honest: https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.xyz/post/3la636r666c2p
I'll refer to Cory Doctorow's excellently-written takedown[1] of this idea. Bluesky has plans to make it technically shit-proof, but haven't executed those plans "yet". Until that's the case, they're just as susceptible as any other content platform. After all, they haven't even revealed how they will make a profit yet. And they will have to do that. Profit motive always wins, exponentially so when something is venture-backed. To quote Public Enemy: "can't truss it"
I like, and want to use Bluesky, but I mostly use socials to share my content and engagement is not comparable - I may get 200 "likes" on Twitter and 7 on Bluesky, for example. So while I would like to stop using Twitter, it has no alternative for me, currently.
I found posting on Bluesky to be a similar experience to posting on X premium in terms of engagement. I had premium for the entire lifespan of my X account (I made it to play with Grok) and my followers / following ratio has pretty much been exactly the same.
Have you actually promoted your Bluesky account anywhere or spent time engaging with other people the same way you expect people to engage with you?
I have moderated the shit out of my feed. I rarely see things I do not want to (I had to give up politics and current events after the election). I use the list feature to curate separate feeds for different topics (music, programming, books, etc). I have started experimenting with graze.social to create my own algorithmic feeds.
I have changed my handle to my own domain. One of these days I’m going to move my stuff to my own personal data store because it sounds like fun.
Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well.
There are problems, of course. It’s new and people are pressuring them to do viewpoint moderation which is a terrible idea. There are still many features that are missing.
But, it’s a very fun platform with a lot less negativity than Twitter and a lot less bland stupidity than facebook. Threads is fine but it’s 100% zuckerberg’s feed. Tribal takes like four clicks to make a post. Mastodon is a bad UI and instances tend to be narrow-minded fiefdoms.
Most of the comments on this thread are talking about what might happen, ‘enshitification’!! Oh My!. The actual fact is that it is a good thing presently and I hope decen people will flock to it and make sure it is supported to reach its maximum awesome potential.