Bluesky got 1 million new users

fin@sh.itjust.works to Technology@lemmy.ml – 138 points –

Official account of Bluesky announced that it got 1 million new users since the registration was opened to everyone.

73

"Mastodon? Why use a free decentralized option when I can give my data to a billionaire?" - People around me.

"What could possibly happen?"

Surely this one won't end up the same as all the others before.

There are some advantages to a centralized platform, I hope them being a "public benefit corporation" (haven't had time to study what that means nor much desire cause it's probably a U.S. thing), but as long as it doesn't get enshittifed that's still a net win.

Although obviously this won't be a popular opinion on a decentralized platform like Lemmy.

I'll use this along with Signal (which is non profit), in hopes that it's impossible for them to sell out/sell our data/sell ads.

I don’t think Bluesky is better than any instance on Fediverse, but we need to make changes I guess.

If it kills Twitter it will be a net benefit to the world

It won’t be, because it’s just another Twitter.

Lol, correct.

But Elon loses more money and we don't have to hear about him or Twitter as much

Old twitter was bad, modern twitter pays to show everyone bigoted propaganda and actively courts Nazis. Mastodon is better, but most don’t want the inconveniences. So yeah blue sky it is

It feels like the Twitter from just before Elon when it was still bad but not terrible, I was hoping it would be more like the Twitter from 10+ years ago when it was still reasonable.

I waited 4 months for my invite, took a look around and went back to Mastodon.

You'd have to go back 10 years for that, modern discourse is poisoned, and even then things weren't that rosy back then for all.

Not sure what you mean there.

I mean if you wanted anything like what you had 10 years ago you'd have to go back 10 years. I don't think it's possible to ever have anything like what it was back again any time soon.

I was talking about Twitter. 10 years is not a long time.

I don't see much has changed in the last 10 years fundamentally, if you're comparing 20 years ago I might agree.

Mastodon's AGPL license will always be better though

Yeah but if mastodon itself (the community and content) isn't better, then it's a moot point

Oh get the fuck out of here. All Bluesky has is celebrities and celebrity journalists, big fuckin whoop.

I'd way rather talk to real human beings instead of the Public Relations Team of a bunch of wankers.

Sorry, most humans are obsessive about stupid celebrity culture, and that doesn't mean it's a better product. It means it's a more vapid product.

I'm glad blue sky exists for two reasons:

  1. It will likely contribute to more Elon meltdowns
  2. It acts as a containment zone for celebrity and brand worship that's marginally less bad than twitter

Celebrity and brand containment zone is the first good argument I’ve heard to date.

Settle down dude.

A big chunk of the comic art people from twitter went there. The art community on Mastodon is very mid. So that's a big part of why I like Bluesky.

And while I don't care about following journalists personally, that's arguably one of the major things people want out of a twitter-like platform. Breaking news.

Threads is much worse for celebrity bullshit.

I'm on Lemmy, I'm already sold on the fediverse idea, even though I haven't read the AGPL license :)

Yeah I’m going to support the movement as long as Trump will not appear on it.

I really wanna like mastodon more and have tried 3 different instances now (2 niche and one larger instance) but I like the community on bluesky better for my particular niche. It seems to be where a lot of art twitter went when things got shitty over there.

I saw many artists going to Misskey.io because it's main instance even English speaking ones until they gone back to twitter, stayed on Misskey or half measures. Then because of EN influx in mainly Japanese server , Misskey.io closed doors to non-Japanese add in fact that Misskey or rather any federated service can't oblige to European Union protection standard which means they can't operate in EU officially.
So I see lots of messages on Misskey about artists making blue sky accounts as well... All depends where they get more views I guess or have people supporting them around.

Not comparable, one is centered around people and the other around topics

The only thing I care about is: Will this be enough to pull critical mass from Twitter? I don't think I'll ever join, because twitter life made me very unhappy, but the sooner journalists and high-volume celebs move off twitter, the sooner it can be relegated to Truth Social 2 and that, I think, will make the world a slightly better place.

I signed up few days ago, but I learned that I still don't care about twitter style platforms. I prefer Reddit like platforms where the focus lies on the subject instead of the person.

Yup, Mastodon never appealed to me, I think I made like 10 tweets total (mostly for promotions of some kind), and I bailed on Facebook when I realized I got no value from it.

But Reddit immediately appealed to me, and Lemmy is good enough.

I kinda get the „this person seems nice/knowledgeable“ but still have issues with the shallowness of conversations, self proclaimed „experts“ and ungodly long and boring posts some of the instances allow for.

For some reason, lemmy allows for even longer posts but here they arent that long and if they are, they’re often structured/formatted, concise and informative instead of just a stream of conciousness.

I feel like twitter-likes need fast, relevant, whitty answers while redditlikes need thought out, deep answers like a forum.

Anyone else feel like this?

I feel like twitter-likes need fast, relevant, whitty answers while redditlikes need thought out, deep answers like a forum.

There are plenty of short witty responses on Reddit-like platforms too, but I think the context influences what people upvote/like. On Twitter, you only see the tweet and the response, but on reddit-like platforms you see the original topic and responses, before scrolling down to see a specific response.

I never said there are no short, witty responses. I‘m saying the majority/most upvoted total imo are the long, great explanations.

I agree that the design influences this.

Aaaand keyword blocked. Tired of this VC shit showing up on my feed.

Eh, I like seeing it. I'm not going to use Bluesky or anything similar, but I think it's important to stay informed. People are going to talk about it, and if it blows up, it'll become politically relevant.

I signed up and so far my feed seems to be dominated by a lot of bird pics. I guess that's fitting for a site called bluesky?

Unless they're owls as they're nocturnal. Blacksky doesn't have the same vibe though.

Fun fact since you may not be aware, but not all owls are nocturnal. And even those that are considered nocturnal are often active at dusk (after sun set but before the sky has gone dark). So, it could still work.

I just wish it supported hashtags, the feeds thing it has going on feels clumsy. Sticking to Mastodon for now.

I just learned this yesterday, and still can’t believe it. How can it not support hashtags? How do you find anything? Do they plan on supporting hashtags in the future, or are they on some kind of idiotic anti-hashtag crusade?

My guess is that hashtags are “Twitter“, and they don’t want to be exactly like Twitter.

@erre @fin You can create custom feeds that are based on your desired content. There are external services for that.

sad that twitter users will jump to literally anything except mastodon. wake me up in 15 years when bluesky finishes its twitter elon musk cycle and it’ll be like i took a 12 second nap

mastodon also refused to implement basic features that make things easier like cross instance searching and quote posting and then started being rude to people asking about them when the initial exodus happened

Same thing is happening with Misskey. A lot of interesting features there that don't federate. Wonder how Bluesky is going to handle that in their protocol.

Sidenote: a lot of confidently incorrect people in the comments for this (not you). Not really getting people on-board with fedi, are they?

That’s great news. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

bluesky is great because - at least in my feed - it's pretty much tumblr from 2010 but also a safe haven for trans ppl :)

also book twitter - especially romance book twitter - moved over there and that was my favourite part of twitter.

Signed up just to get my ID, and make sure no one else can have it.

The best thing about bluesky is they have the custom feeds and now you can have your following feed include some posts from your custom feeds. So its a mix of “following” (chronological) and for you (custom feed) which is great

Imagine purposefully giving a mewling quim like JACK direct access to your data ever again, just to sell it all to Elon Musk, again, again. People are in fact, sheep.

@downpunxx @fin Well, it is possible without any problem, to create a "fire hose" out of Fediverse data as well. So when someone wanted to analyze your posts, then this could be done easily with the Fediverse as well.

For values of public posts, yes.

My default for new posts is followers only and I have approve followers checked. (And I'm pretty picky, so far.)

More to the point, the discussion started out about the back end (whoever is in control of the servers selling all your data straight out of the database) and you're referring to the front end (using a tool to scrape as much posted content as possible).

@heavyboots No, I don't speak about any front end tool. There are API endpoints, relay servers and so on. These all can easily be used to receive a lot of data.

Yeah, this. People doing it again?

Nostr is the way. I think it's going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

Great post, I was looking for a comparison of nostr and AP because it seemed like basically the same thing to me and your post explained it perfectly. After reading it, I have to agree that nostr is a better solution for the fediverse.

Could the Nostr protocol be incorporated into existing applications like Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon etc?

It could be "bolted on" to the side, some people are working on that, but there are some very basic premises where they differ which make it difficult (such as an AP account being tied to an instance whereas a nostr account is not). It's like asking "can email be intergrated with discord". Well, yes, kinda, but it's not going to be as smooth as if they used the same underlying protocol in the first place.