For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for. A few never came back to twitter, but most did mostly for social reasons. But twitter as a platform gets worse each day, and if it ever truly breaks or dies, bsky will be the schelling point for a whole bunch of people

For the average twitter user this is probably the exact opposite of a compelling position. Tech people want more control and less abstraction. Everyone else is happy with their walled gardens and ten layers of separation from the machine code. Its why things are the way they are and not some technopunk utopia that we all want.

I think you're under-estimating what's happening with 3rd-party feeds. That's a core pattern where independent services can integrate into the UX as if they're native to the product. This means turning the client into an open platform for third-party applications.

That's been a success with feeds. They're actively adopted and created by users. Most of the feeds are hosted by skyfeed, a 3P app which gives users a GUI to create them. The author of skyfeed submitted this actually. Talented dev afaict but I've not met them, which is kind of the point. (Looking forward to it though, redsolver!)

3P integration operates by a thick client model. We exchange typed JSON that describes content and interfaces. This lets services drive the client through request/response flows. We can bounce out to webviews when we need, but not executing code means better integration into the app, which means users get access to new experiences within the client and providers get users more easily. This being social protocol means that auth and high level verbs (following, liking, commenting) also come along. The Web 1.0 did quite a bit without client scripting, and I suspect this client can too.

I also want to mention: the product experience right now is establishing a UX on a protocol-driven network that feels good to consumers. Our metric for success wasn't whether it was novel; it was whether we could meet consumer expectations. If we can prove out scaling -- which I'm now confident we will -- then we've established the core of the network. After that we use that core as a backbone for 3P devs to build integrated experiences, and it should lead to a notably diverse product, and I think that's the compelling position for us to offer.

Over time, they shut down their APIs (or charged huge fees) in an effort to intentionally kill off third-party clients and services.

A key goal for Bluesky is to "lock open" the network and the API so that it's impossible to reverse the decision.

Imagine a sort of plug in ecosystem with sane defaults

I do like the technical vision, a lot. But I haven't been able to try it out because any time I felt the desire to look, nobody could actually link me to a post or a feed. So I never achieved the required activation energy to even look at it, nevermind adding it to my doomscrolling repertoire or signing up to the thing.

Opening up the posts is a good first step to sustainable adoption. Now next time people are mad at Twitter they'll have an outlet instead of being met with a brick wall when they finally get the urge to try something new.

bsky-social-exnc4-5h2qb

bsky-social-cocv2-coy6u

bsky-social-txqzx-nqhw3

bsky-social-h6snn-255ig

bsky-social-yxngj-y5dad

bsky-social-fo32f-lz7p5

bsky-social-6txdl-ppkes

bsky-social-ihhnj-w4e24

bsky-social-3kidb-2tagv

bsky-social-llyit-xx3kt

bsky-social-eeqkk-tf6qh

bsky-social-qttr7-gjh3i

bsky-social-qttr7-gjh3i

bsky-social-5xbvh-kgbua

bsky-social-jaixd-xof3h

bsky-social-fzzhr-3ow5j

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bsky-social-pmqcb-izd6n

bsky-social-bmgi4-bhg5p

bsky-social-k2vcy-bbcwf

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EDIT: all have been claimed

Being a small group of course made the transition easier. Most of us didn't use Twitter to follow all kinds of stuff, just mostly these things.

And while being a clique, with no outside influences, can be bad, the "influences" you now get from blue checks on X isn't anything worth having. Just abuse.

But that's also how I used Twitter. An account specifically for this. Only ever followed or interacted with content related to this. So not using it to consume other content, write about anything that comes to mind etc.

Compelling for whom? For developers? I’m not sure anyone else will care.

Most of the biggest complaints people have about twitter are client-side problems. So just having an ecosystem of clients (and the competitive pressure that puts on the official client) makes the experience way better

A bunch of algo and client options sound good for someone who is already a committed user, but for a new user it just complicated the onboarding experience.

Not to mention, it’s unclear what the incentive to put real resources behind any of these clients is.

Take that away you’re really back to “just Twitter” with fewer features and less content.

I agree that algo and client choice would be a positive for a mature site like Twitter, but it’s unclear how a site with this strategy will get enough traction for the choices to be useful

This is in contrast to Mastodon where people were told to pick an instance and not really guided to any one as the primary one (because Mastodon devs/users don't want there to be a thought that there even is a "primary" instance).

People here on HN can claim picking an instance isn't a big deal all they want, but I can say with confidence it is. I'm in various furry artist Discord servers where people expressed their distaste for having to deal with the multiple instances.

An idealistic, technical user might put up with the typical quality of early "alternative solution" apps, but seeing enough errors, crashes, unintuitive UX, and other hurdles, several times across several apps, will get most users to give up on the platform.

The big corporate accounts may have immediately fled for the safety and features of Threads, but I've noticed more and more journalists, radio personalities, columnists etc creating Bluesky accounts as they scale back on their Twitter use.

Seems like Bluesky is the grassroots favourite.

So this isn't the same situation again.

Can it get worse? Right now I get ads every 3-4 tweets, and several of them are porn ads.

I also noticed ads that are not marked with the [Ad]-icon.

Can't see how it could get lower than this :(

Twitter was like that once. Just people flocking into the next walled garden...

I don't know how you can expect people to make the move when they're not even able to sign in

For devs that want to experiment, we've had a special waitlist for a while: https://atproto.com/blog/call-for-developers

As an aside, do you have any plans to make your choices of domain names / branding less confusing / sketchy looking? (bsky.app, blueskyweb.xyz, bsky.social for user names, 'Bluesky Social' on the app store, etc)

The domain situation is unfortunate and confusing. We don't have any immediate solution but agree it's a problem.

You guys know that every single playform eventually go downhill in content quality as the user base grows, right? You are wasting your time. You'd better open up now or never. Nobody will bother looking at your product in a year if Threads gets bigger and better.

Obviously they need to drop the invite system at some point (and I am surprised it's been this long), but it's not the reason a given subcommunity didn't make the jump

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Well that's just an opinion. I feel that it's better than it ever was. Sorry.

Okay, but I never even signed up for Twitter.

Mastodon puts too much onus on the user to pick a home server

Bluesky got it right by saying "we're going to be exactly familiar to people who like twitter, just open and better". The concepts are an almost exact drop-in replacement, for practical purposes, other than which one your friends are active on

I don't use it much right now because most of my people did switch back for now. But I check in periodically, and I'm rooting for it to succeed

Some instances and individuals will block Fediverse instances which federate with Bluesky.

I'm okay with consuming an upstream block/filter list, but I ultimately want executive control over it.

With your model that wouldn't be an issue.

So don't. There are multiple services you can pay a small fee to to host your own instance with only you on it.

Why couldn't a protocol and reference implementation exist for a client migration if servers have similar schemas for users and posts?

I will say as someone has an invite: you're not missing out on anything. It definitely has far less activity than either Twitter or Threads, but somehow it also just has worse content. You would think they were invite-only to keep the quality high, but everything is either furry porn or hate-filled rage bait, neither of which I am personally a fan of at all. I keep telling trying to tell it as much, but I honestly don't think I've seen one post I truly wanted to see. I tried to do it for like a week hoping it would get better, but honestly it seems like there's just nothing worthwhile on the whole site. Personally, the only way I can see me ever using Bluesky is if they manage to totally invert their userbase. You need to just start over when you somehow get a crowd worse than either version of Twitter, in my opinion.

As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that. It’s a move that reeks of desperation and makes me not want to sign up. I should feel compelled to make an account if I want to follow someone or post something, not just to read a single post. I’m not sure how they expect to grow when they hide what’s inside and word of mouth is largely negative. Walled gardens have their place, but it’s not the “town square” Elon has been taking about. In the town square I can walk through and overhear conversations without identifying myself or joining in.

This has been a real irritant since Elon Musk took it over and started making a lot of terrible decisions. Depending on what platform you’re on, you could rewrite the Twitter link to nitter.net (just replace, manually or through an extension, twitter.com with nitter.net) and you’ll not only avoid those signup/login prompts but also be able to see the complete thread instead of just a single tweet.

I was never into Twitter because of the noise and extreme levels of anger, but this has allowed me to view the minority of tweets and tweet threads that could be interesting and/or useful.

Optimizing for engagement is not inherently bad, nor does it necessarily result in socially suboptimal outcomes. My TikTok feed is very engaging without having to resort to triggering my anger.

A recommendation algorithm that only sticks to a handful of given topics (rage bait and furry porn?) is not a very good one.

There is one at https://firesky.tv/

I think it exists as a proof that there is activity on Bluesky. If you were looking for a feed that highlights trending posts, this is not it.

Depending on how you build your social graph, your experience can run the gamut of anything from peak political Twitter to peak pedantic Mastodon. It's up to you.

I guess I should have expected it, but I hoped that somewhere a different network would have a different style or flavor. However, the content patterns that get engagement and etc seem ingrained in the participants no matter where you go.

Personally I can't help but feel both left out, and not wanting to be a part of whatever these style of social media apps are.

Having said that there's a lot of talk about twitter clones missing features, but for me I wonder if the content is the same, why would a significant number of people move anyway?

It's like, these social media companies wrote a SINGLE outrage-farming algorithm that they push on everyone's feeds without regard for whether it works on individuals or not.

This all is why, despite it getting worse, I use FB more than the other platforms. Actual content posted by actual humans I actually know with their actual names under them. Not some pseudonym where I can't remember if it's an IRL friend or some internet rando I follow (or why I follow them), a bunch of emojis, contextless junk, and clickbait outrage farming.

Even on Twitter I never saw that junk. I followed almost exclusively tech folk, AWS community heros, NodeJS developers, Architects and Platform Engineers.

I’m not even a developer, but I followed them to be exposed more to that topic.

As a result, my feed was 99.9% technical content and product management content.

I got the same result in under an hour with Threads too - just mute every. Single. Thing. That you don’t want to see for an hour and then kill and re-launch the app. You’ll never see politics again.

'just' is working hard there. After the 20th attempt at avoiding crap posts most people just give up.

They kind of did. The optimal solution of 'just show rage bait' can't take all that long to discover.

I'm hoping some easily-supported competition for timeline algorithms helps people figure out how to make ones that show content we really want instead of click bait and outrage bait.

I haven't seen much in the way of innovation on the UX itself, which is what I'm really interested in. I guess its a mix of a) why mess with success, twitter-like design is proven to work, b) a lack of experimental startup product culture that's willing to try new things, c) not having good ideas, and d) just not enough time because they're focused on basics.

Part of the problem is a lot of us don't want "innovation" here. The limitation for the Twitter clones that I've found is none of them (including Twitter these days) have the critical mass of people it used to have.

Fundamentally the issue with Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. is that they don't offer anything different to most users. Yes, they run off decentralized protocols, but most people don't care. Yes, there's no Elon, but most people don't care.

So I'd put it firmly in (c). Bluesky and Threads both tried to recapture the lightning in the bottle which is 2008 Twitter by copying it (Bluesky going so far as to copy the early 00s invite-only model!). Both are either failures or marginally successful, depending on who you ask. Certainly neither are a home run.

If you want to get people off Twitter, don't build Twitter-but-different. Build something better.

Whenever I see comments like these, my immediate thought is "How interested are you, if you had to put a dollar figure on it?"

Also, you are missing alternative (e): availability bias. Maybe you haven't seen a lot of innovation around UX not because people are not trying, but because those who tried to experiment with different UX were aiming at such a niche that completely failed as social network?

As far as I'm concerned the innovation just isn't there in the core loops and UX of twitter-likes, it's all circa 2008 stuff.

[1]: https://nickpunt.com/blog/deescalating-social-media/

Which is not the same as "innovating with UX" in any way that is incompatible with the status quo.

Going by your blog post, do you agree that it is not something that (by itself) a feature so innovative that would make people drop twitter to favor a new social network that implemented it?

My perspective on the problem is that the way twitter's medium is designed doesn't produce a wonderful signal:noise ratio. Some people might revel in the noise, and some amount of noise certainly generates MAUs and ad dollars, but ultimately it's not living up to its potential as a medium and social network. 'A clown car that fell into a gold mine' still applies.

My theory of change is that in general, features that improve SNR are going to provide a sustaining MAU advantage to products that implement them, because the vast majority of users want better SNR. They want quality discourse, funny memes, kind interactions, etc. Drama and conflict also produce MAUs, but ultimately they're net negative because of the people they scare off.

If you accept that premise, then the question is more when than if features focused on improving the SNR of interactions should be built. Do they meaningfully differentiate and help with the cold start problem? Or are they to be built after some amount of audience has arrived?

From what I've seen on the clones, as they grow they're all running into the same SNR ceiling. I think that ceiling is preventing them from being breakout successes, because whatever differentiator they started with (decentralized, free speech, etc) will fade in relevance as they get bigger and their core experience reverts to the mean. They're just twitter, but smaller.

Would a product that focused more on improving SNR be able to breakout? I don't know, I'm just disappointed nobody seems to have tried very hard.

It seems like a ranking problem, you would think having upvotes/likes/points/etc. would be a good metric. But you just get an outsized influence of posts that have huge critical mass, and the content just becomes generic and clickbaity(i.e. Mr. Beast).

I think it is an optimization problem that has to balance competing needs and bring the best solutions under a wide set of criteria. This has been my experience trying to solve this problem, I already have a system that ingests huge amount of reddit posts from preferred and top subreddits. What I want to do is filter out the best content, then apply that generally to all content sources(YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, etc). Moving away from content that gives a short term dopamine hit to content that is an experience that changes structures in your brain. Ideally sustaining pleasure, intrigue, curiosity for longer periods of time.

There are sites with great UX like Scrolller[1] trying to solve the issue, but its only images/gifs.

[1] https://scrolller.com/

Personally, I don't. I think the flaw in this reasoning is to think that people join social networks with the sole purpose of exchanging information effectively, but I could probably make a list of 50 reasons that make people participate more than that.

There is also the aspect that SNR is frankly a bad metric. We are quite able to filter things ourselves, which means that in the end we will flock to the places where the total signal is what matters, regardless of how much noise comes along with it.

I think you're also not being particularly charitable in your interpretations of what I'm saying, or opening yourself up to the possibility for other ways things can operate. If you were to be, you'd find we have quite a bit of agreement about this. Total signal also matters, good point I can see how you read it that way. I'd put that in the umbrella of SNR, as my intent is to advocate for better signal - both in quantity and quality.

Where I think we may disagree is that existing filtering capabilities are sufficient and broadly used. I mean, if you can imagine a world where it takes users less effort in setting up their twitter account to get the same quality output, then we're in agreement that there's work to be done on signal and noise. Currently it's a hell of a lot of effort, and you still run into a lot of unnecessary strife and bullshit. I'd push you to consider that twitter's current feature set around discourse is also not the end all be all of online communication, and there is room for improvement. If you can accept that there is room for improvement in these domains, then we're on the same page here.

In fact I think this very conversation is a decent example of how the design of a medium can cause some unnecessary strife and result in the rather silly situation of being in violent agreement. Food for thought.

What I am failing to understand is idea that "quality output" is a measurable metric in any meaningful way. The dimensionality of this metric would be almost as big as the number of people you have in your network, so in the end you are just trying to solve an infinite customization problem.

> can cause some unnecessary strife and result in the rather silly situation of being in violent agreement.

Or perhaps it is a good way to illustrate that the strife is actually necessary and should be embraced and seen as a natural consequence of any group of people who are trying to make sense of their internal worldview and how it fits with the real world?

There is no place in the real world where people "connect and form bonds" by following a strict protocol and have all their interaction methods designed. Every attempt at crating those end up with a system that feels forced and boring, like speed dating, town hall meetings or those ridiculous college assemblies where they need to have a mediator to constantly remind everyone what they should and should not do.

Conflict and strife is not a problem to be removed away. If you succeed at doing that, you'll end up removing an important part of what makes us human. What we need is to have better mechanisms to deal with conflict and strife, and I really don't believe that the way to go is by throwing tech designs around.

I specifically said 'unnecessary conflict' to mean the part of conflict that is induced by the limitations of the medium, the topic of this thread. I too believe that some conflict is absolutely necessary and our communication mediums must be able to hold space for that conflict. We agree!

Again, I encourage you to interpret more charitably and to make fewer assumptions. This is the second time you've put words in my mouth and defended a position I'm not attacking and I'm trying to be polite but it's kinda tedious (can you see this?).

The time could have been better spent in exploration; I still don't know if you see any room for improvement anywhere, you don't seem to be engaging on that. A good design discussion doesn't consist of 'no no no'.

How would you expect to do this without changing the medium itself?

> I still don't know if you see any room for improvement anywhere

I don't see it, no. At least not by adding "features" or by tweaking on the software implementation of the system.

In regards of "social media", I am more and more convinced that the only winning move is not to play, but unfortunately we will never do it. The only option that I see left is to work on "damage reduction", which is why I've spent so much time, energy and money to see if we can get "corporate-free social media" as a viable alternative for the masses.

A lot of this is they're trying to capture the user base of an incumbent and users like familiarity.

> Also what is "failed as a social network" when Twitter, one of the biggest bleeds money as it is?

Twitter has millions of users and it doesn't cost a lot in infrastructure to host tweets. Twitter bleeds money because the company has been mismanaged (going back long before its current ownership), not because putting ads on a social network with that number of users couldn't turn a profit.

A "failed social network" is one that nobody uses.

> Or maybe UX where I actually feel like I can find or interact with things I want just doesn't work for profitability (Facebook doesn't show me what I want)?

There's probably a short-term/long-term thing here. Big companies run on metrics, so they make a change and the number goes up so they keep the change. But the way the change works is by frustrating people into spending more time on the site, which short-term increases the metrics and long-term makes people hate you and be eager to switch away at the first opportunity.

What you probably want here is a service with a single owner who actually uses it and cares about making the service good (and, most importantly, is competent), but what usually happens instead is it becomes a publicly traded company controlled by shareholders who institute the aforementioned metrics-based bureaucracy.

The key is somehow getting the one with benevolent leadership and the one with millions of users to be the same one.

And I'm curious about flipping this question: can you think of any UX that would be interested for you in a social network?

Still hanging around

https://non.io/

In early 2024, when the production network is federated, it will be possible to build new social apps on atproto that the millions of existing Bluesky users will be able to use (if they choose) without having to create a new account.

1. https://atproto.com

I'm lucky enough to have found a site like this and it's epic. Better than any social media I've ever experienced. People actually care about each other. We have a community.

I miss those days. Has it really been at least 20 years? I'm getting too old for this...

The reality is it was only a significant minority.

Most people don't care that they /communicate on Mysterious Twitter X/, they just care about communicating and Mysterious Twitter X is just the dominant one of all the social media networks.

Then there's people like me who use Mysterious Twitter X for a very specific purpose. In my case, I use it to follow announcements from my favorite games (FGO, Priconne, etc.) and join their repost campaigns, get info from some game guide makers, follow some Japanese illustrators, and follow a small handful of Japanese celebrities I'm actually interested in. Exactly none of them left Mysterious Twitter X.

For my use case, Musk's takeover was actually amazing because he killed off the political manipulations that Twitter Japan was spewing behind the scenes. Ain't nobody got time for politics when I'm there to be a man of culture.

If anybody wants a Bluesky invite code, I have a handful available. DM me at @[email protected] or at https://t.me/ejd215. First come, first served!

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-ac...

ActivityPub has some big flaws. We need something better, but I don't think I trust the Bluesky team to deliver that anymore.

One step at a time.

The goal in early 2024 is to enable federation with other PDS hosts, so that users can choose where they keep their data (posts, likes, preferences, etc).

Ed: Apparently you can play in the sandbox, but not set up a seperate network? Or federate with prod?

https://atproto.com/blog/federation-developer-sandbox

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

The architecture is explained briefly here: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

Code/docs are here:

1. AT Protocol (atproto) is documented here: https://atproto.com

2. App Web/Android/iOS app: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app

3. API (AppView) and PDS (Personal Data Server): https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto

4. The Relay (formerly BGS) https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo

5. Custom algorithm (Feed Generator): https://github.com/bluesky-social/feed-generator

6. Sandbox PDS distribution: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/SANDBOX.md

Though, the whole blue sky stack is significantly more complicated than ActivityPub so I’m doubtful as many would actually set up “instances”.

We have 10 servers federating in production, each housing around 270,000 users, and it all runs on disk and sqlite, quite affordable! We migrated 2 million users off a single large host onto these 10 smaller ones transparently and without need for much fanfare. We're dedicated to the tech and seeing it work in production has been super heartening.

the app-specific business logic lives in the aggregator services that pull from those instances

Someone else was already first to market. Launching as an alternative that is half baked seems like really strange idea to me. Maybe they were trying to gain traction during the surge in Twitter hate, but if the thing you are asking them to jump ship to is a lesser product, only a tiny minority of them are going to stay. Half baked launches into a very well established market just seems like you'd be better off taking your investor's money and having grand ol' time in Vegas.

Naively, I appreciate that they're not trying to rush something out just to compete, but rather are taking the time to build the right thing.

Is this all about tech?? Not enough funding to get things built?

I am not sure I'm even going to have the patience to wait to be allowed to try this platform. Reviews seem very lukewarm.

I suppose time will tell.

I do like how usernames are domain names, which gives them a portability similar to email.

But whenever I try Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads as a brand new account without anyone to follow it’s just same US politics shit. Trump, Trump bad, nazis, AOC, Trump, gender, trans rights, nazis, republicans, Trump, gender etc. This is what I see right now on Bluesky What’s Hot, this is what I see right now on Mastodon Explore.

The fact that even Mastodon pushing the rage bait (“ These are posts from across the social web that are gaining traction today”) which is supposed to be the ‘healthy’ and ‘better’ social media site shows how deep problems we have.

If really that’s what an average Joe and Jane sees when they just want to try out these services then no one wonder the world is going worse by each passing day.

I remember in the days of instant messaging, I had a single client (Adium for Mac OS X) which could talk to AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, etc. It gave me a unified buddy list, and a unified interface for messaging any of my friends, regardless of the underlying instant messaging provider.

Is anyone working on a similar omniclient for Mastodon/Threads/Bluesky/XTwitter?

If we get to the point where most users are using omniclients of this kind, that helps reduce network effects and lock-in. Seems like the Mastodon/Threads/Bluesky teams would have a strong incentive to collaborate on such a client, in order to reduce XTwitter network effects, essentially joining forces in their own unified network. (I imagine that XTwitter will block API access, at least in the short term.)

For Mastodon in particular, people are always talking about the difficulty of getting started. Is there a way to put a porcelain experience on that? Imagine I just enter my credit card info and I have my own instance without having to worry about any sysadmin details. You could monetize the client by charging a small premium above and beyond the baseline server costs.

I want an experience so porcelain that in order to create a new account, I enter my username and it automatically checks its availability across dozens of social sites, then registers me in as seamless a manner as possible. Then when I click post, it by default broadcasts that post across all the accounts I registered.

I suppose this is probably similar to the existing interface for a product such as Hootsuite, no? Maybe the best starting point is check if there's an open-source Hootsuite competitor, then optimize the interface for end users.

Is it basically an X clone that will be an alternative Twitter/X?

Or is there a lot more magic going on? Why are people excited?

(Mind you I dont spend much time on X either, so this is purely from looking at the two and comparing. )

I have also decided to give up all social media like this until at least February, and the past week has been a big improvement for me

Per our favorite chatcompletion model, Boas festas / Feliz Navidad!!!

New social media profile, new me: https://bsky.app/profile/arthurcolle.bsky.social