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hamburglar 5 hours ago [-]
I notice that the stat the article repeatedly quotes is MAU for usage of the mobile app, but one of the things I love about Bluesky is that you don’t need to use a mobile app to have a good UX. I use the mobile browser to access it, so I’m not in that MAU number. Perhaps bsky has a larger number of active users that don’t use the app?
Anon1096 4 hours ago [-]
To be clear, since the mobile app users are decreasing, what you would actually need to claim is that "web users are more likely to continue using the app than mobile users are", not just that "there are a lot of web users", since the base assumption is that web and mobile users use the site in similar ways. I don't really see any reason to believe the former, and actually having worked on social media extensively I think there's a strong chance that the opposite is true, that if mobile users are declining web users are declining even faster. There's a reason sites push mobile apps so much and it's because retention is normally far better.
skybrian 3 hours ago [-]
Here’s another site that tracks monthly active users based on people posting or other activity such as liking a post. It also shows a decline in activity. Scroll down and it looks like a decline of about 40% over a year.
Not only that, part of the point of the whole "atproto" business is to allow alternate frontends and backends. The official mobile app is kind of bad. A number of people have migrated to Blacksky (alternate backend) following a moderation fallout as well.
dewey 4 hours ago [-]
Not having the app installed but being a monthly active user, not just someone who's driving by because they clicked on a link on mobile seems like an edge case and I'm pretty sure it won't make a difference to the numbers.
Sindisil 4 hours ago [-]
A website being used in a web browser seems to you like an edge case?! Really?
If that's really a common view, we really did lose the plot.
dewey 3 hours ago [-]
For a social media site on mobile, yes.
rglullis 3 hours ago [-]
We really lost the plot, then. None of the user-facing and user-benefiting features of the social media apps need native-specific capabilities.
dewey 3 hours ago [-]
It's never about the technology or if it's theoretically feasible but that tracking, push notifications and ad blocking are much better handled in mobile apps for most platforms.
rglullis 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I follow. Do you think that someone using the Twitter app is more or less tracked than someone using their mobile web browser?
dewey 3 hours ago [-]
More, as you have the advertising identifiers from Apple / Google on mobile and you are also not able to block tracking scripts / tracking ads like on mobile web (At least not without more effort or installing additional software or a vpn).
rglullis 2 hours ago [-]
Then we are in agreement: native apps are only made to the benefit of the companies, not the users.
adastra22 2 hours ago [-]
I have zero social media apps installed. Nobody in my family has social media apps. We are not the majority, but we do exist…
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
> you don't need to use a mobile app
Since they're apparently tracking mobile app MAUs as a KPI, expect this to change.
mexicocitinluez 4 hours ago [-]
Same. With the exception of Reddit (which I use a different client for anyway), I tend to just use the sites themselves.
Part of it is just not wanting those apps to invade the rest of my life. I know I can turn off notifications and things, but for some weird reason it helps me stay a bit more detached from social media when I'm forced to rely on the site.
The other part is privacy. I don't want the Facebook app on my phone. I don't want to have to worry about what permissions it wants and whether I've unchecked the right things. Using the web is easier for me in that respect.
Godsend69 2 hours ago [-]
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icantevenhold 5 hours ago [-]
You aren’t logged in on the browser when you use it?
bulder 4 hours ago [-]
The figures used don't count browser users at all, signed in or not
icantevenhold 4 hours ago [-]
Weird why not?
I can’t read the article due to some nightmarish anti Adblock software they use wtf
testbjjl 4 hours ago [-]
So you didn’t read the article, made an assumption about its content, question someone who did, then blame Adblock for your confusion, instead of just following the conversation?
icantevenhold 4 hours ago [-]
No I was confused that they wouldn’t count the browser users when there is no good reason to when they try to eval their user base? MAU commonly includes web users as well.
I blame TechCrunch for creating a website that I can’t read but yea fair criticism I didn’t read the article.
I didn’t question GP i asked if they knew why web users aren’t counted.
Do they explain in the article why they would only count mobile users as MAU?
lorreyfum 4 hours ago [-]
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omoikane 21 hours ago [-]
Maybe Bluesky is not quite the Twitter rival it set out to be, but it's got a better shot than Mastodon, according to the user count graphs here:
Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
tptacek 20 hours ago [-]
The distinction is that Mastodon doesn't have to grow, and Bluesky does. There's an extent to which Bluesky is viable because its venture-funded owner pays for the infrastructure it operates on (Mastodon communities generally have to stand on their own two feet). If there's no path for Bluesky to grow into a viable business on its current financial runway, the funding for the infrastructure will end.
skybrian 1 hours ago [-]
I imagine the ATProto infrastructure would survive. Declining activity would be bad for BlueSky, but running a firehose is not that expensive. Many people could fund it themselves. Also, it would get cheaper to run as traffic declines.
Also, the firehose is not strictly necessary either if you’re willing to give up seeing replies from anyone, anywhere and just see the feeds you subscribe to, like an RSS reader.
The hard part is moderation and keeping up with changes in regulations, not the infrastructure itself. Also, continued funding for new development is good. I’m interested in seeing what the permissioned data proposal [1] turns into.
ATProto infrastructure is mostly open and there are folks operating pieces of it independently even if the landscape is dominated by the Bluesky PBC. It's true that Mastodon grew bottom-up without centralized funding so the shuttering of the PBC will be a big deal for the AT ecosystem but it's all independently doable.
tptacek 19 hours ago [-]
Everything is doable, I'm just completing the comparison the preceding comment made.
singpolyma3 20 hours ago [-]
We already have others running infrastructure as well so if bsky goes away the platform can survive
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Over 99.99% of users (actual number, not hyperbole) are using bluesky's infrastructure. If it goes away, the platform dies.
captainbland 5 hours ago [-]
Will it though? Where mastodon is much more distributed, bluesky/ATProto use is highly concentrated on bsky.app
GCUMstlyHarmls 4 hours ago [-]
It also feels like people running ActivityPub instances are in it for "the culture", it's grass roots, moxie, free, hacker, whatever. ATProto doesn't have the same vibe.
Mastodon isn't trying to compete anyway, it's not a Product(tm) driven by desire for profits, so the people who use it don't care if it "wins" or becomes more popular than whatever other platform. We're all just hanging out socializing and stuff, sharing neat things and discussing things like communities do. It's not easy to accurately estimate active Mastodon/Fediverse users, but then again, I'm not sure anyone really cares either way? lol
Karrot_Kream 19 hours ago [-]
I've never been a fan of the "Product driven by desire for profits" line because it simplifies too much into too little imo. The reason people like scale is that it brings a diverse set of interests. For better or for worse, most Mastodon servers I've seen have a pretty similar set of interests. They're really the same constellation of interests I've seen heavily represented on internet forums since the late '90s. There's nothing wrong with that, but between IRC, web blogs, web forums, Reddit, HN, Discords, and conventional social media, I don't think you'll find a shortage of folks interested in those topics.
Meanwhile there's a lot of topics where a critical mass of fans only really exists on Big Tech Social Media and maybe the occasional subject subreddit. The hope of an open platform at scale is to expose those niche interests to open infrastructure.
graceful6800 5 hours ago [-]
That also is intentional. You join a server that suits your interests and follow people from other servers to broaden your feed. The goal is to form interlinked communities
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Notably, Mastodon servers are genuinely independent servers. The federated experience is third-class. The same-server experience is first-class. It's not trying and hasn't succeeded to build one giant interlinked network the way BGP has for IP addresses.
upofadown 1 hours ago [-]
Wait, Mastodon has 10 million users and 8000 servers? That's way more than I would of guessed. So Mastodon is a real thing in the world now.
Twitter has something like a half a billion users. So it wins I guess...
kps 1 hours ago [-]
Bluesky could have been a Reddit rival, with the ability to follow topics rather than users, but they screwed it up.
numpad0 2 hours ago [-]
Just look at the total post stat. It's declining. I don't know if it means total daily or total in past x days, or actual cumulative total, but I don't think it's supposed to be that flat.
jwr 5 hours ago [-]
That seems like comparing apples to oranges. I switched to Mastodon in order to avoid the inevitable enshittification of every service that has anything to do with a corporate entity. I learned my lesson and I am not about to repeat it. And having spent considerable time on Mastodon now, I'm quite happy with the value I'm getting from it and the people I follow. I do not need everybody in the world to be on it. In fact, I actually prefer that many people not be on it.
BeetleB 20 hours ago [-]
I'd love to see similar plots after you remove the primary servers in each! To give you a rough idea: 78% of the people I follow on Mastodon are not on the primary instance, and over 80% of my followers are not either.
> Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
It likely is the default of Twitter refugees, but as a Mastodon user none of this is relevant to me! I don't care how many more users a network has, as long as the one I'm on has a healthy number. Very few of the people I follow are likely to leave Mastodon.
VCFundedGenYer 17 hours ago [-]
Disagree heavily.
I find Mastodon/the fediverse has far better engagement and longevity due to being open source and decentralized.
Bluesky is an island on its own, just trying to be a Twitter copy and nothing more.
adastra22 2 hours ago [-]
Ever since Twitter lost the plot, that’s a good thing. I wish we had 20010-era Twitter back.
PaulHoule 20 hours ago [-]
I am on several socials, personally I like the crowd on Mastodon the best but they all have their charms. I mean friends, furs, family, people I take street photos of, local radio personalities and people who look up to my character can be found in many places.
davidw 3 hours ago [-]
Blue Sky has 'enough' for me. I don't care if it's the biggest platform. It's got local elected officials, it's got bike racing content and people, it's got software people, and by using it I'm not supporting the white nationalist owner of Twitter, so I'm happy with it. I occasionally post a bit to Threads when I need some more 'reach'.
pessimizer 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know what you're seeing in those stats. Bluesky has been shedding users since the inauguration. Mastodon is virtually a hobby project consisting of private servers that could run indefinitely as long as somebody finds it useful for communication in their community.
Neither have any shot of being a twitter replacement. Bluesky has a culture problem and a dishonesty about being p2p problem, and mastodon is too slow/heavy and has a mod problem that is intolerable without a better story about user mobility between servers.
Twitter may just die by itself if somehow a better way for people to publicize their work comes into existence, but all traditional means have been rolled up into big opinionated gatekeeping conglomerates who simply ignore things that compete with any of their interests or threaten any of their advertisers or owners. But even if twitter dies, people aren't moving to bluesky or mastodon.
mikhmha 51 minutes ago [-]
There are too many bots on BlueSky. Atleast in the niche I post within (game development). There are lots of automated accounts out there meant to like, repost, and signal boost. I appreciate the gesture but when all your engagement comes from these accounts it’s frustrating. I don’t want retweets and likes, I want people to engage with what I post.
Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives? The most insidious bots are those that leave replies based on keywords in your post. It looks legitimate until you go to their profile and see they are cranking out replies every second to posts in a topic.
gota 21 minutes ago [-]
> Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives?
I don't think there's anything other than - there are more people on twitter; due to first mover advantage and inertia
dbbk 21 hours ago [-]
If Meta had put Threads on the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub, things could have been so different... maybe there's still time. The engineering philosophy for AT / Bluesky is incredible, being able to develop your own timeline algorithms, distributed moderation agencies, etc. But whenever I give Bluesky a try unfortunately I just can't find people talking about my interests. This seems like a scale problem, which Threads solves.
jimmydoe 21 hours ago [-]
Meta's ActivityPub is very fake, it's not only off by default and functionally limited, but also has a dark pattern to get you turn it off.
It would be the same if they do ATP.
Karrot_Kream 21 hours ago [-]
Nothing is stopping you from building your own AP algorithm either though, right? An "algorithm" is, ultimately, a ranking model that ranks a set of incoming posts based on some criteria no? Nothing stops someone from building their own ranking model for themselves.
I agree that the Bluesky userbase doesn't really talk about the topics I care about and I think the audience is a big factor.
nailer 2 hours ago [-]
Threads indeed could have used AT protocol to bootstrap Threads audence, but it's likely that a corporate sponsor would not want their brand associated with Bluesky's audience.
singpolyma3 20 hours ago [-]
Anything on AP or AT can bridge both ways anyway
eterm 20 hours ago [-]
I wanted to like bluesky, I really tried, but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself, it's off-putting.
I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things.
It'd be like if 90% of twitter was talking about twitter the platform, it's an odd thing to focus on.
delecti 19 hours ago [-]
When was this? Other than posts from official the Bluesky account (bsky.app) my feed is roughly 0% about Bluesky itself. There was more discussion about Bluesky itself early on, when the contrast with Twitter was more topical.
And I actually wouldn't mind seeing more discussion about atproto. I'm mildly curious about whether anyone is doing anything with it.
And a whole bunch of other stuff about whether people should even be on bluesky, or should be instead on other federations, and it all just feels so meaningless to me.
It's as if someone has invented a few different ways to print, and there's a million interesting things to write about, but everyone in my echo chamber is talking about whether we should be using A4 or letter sized paper.
And to be clear, this is the "for you" feed even after some shaping, the official discover feed is so much US politics it's straight unusable. Plenty of politics still leaks through to "for you", but it's a manageable amount.
There's a dotnet feed I follow too, but honestly it's hard to find any real people to follow between the dotnet foundation reposts, the linkedin grade BS, and the lost musicians. ( Not their fault, the feed picks up any mention of F# as being dotnet! )
Like I said, I want to make bluesky work, it ought to have less engagement bait, and less lock out of anonymous users, but there's a still a lack of critical mass of real people.
jamilton 3 hours ago [-]
I prefer to just stay in the Following feed unless I'm specifically looking for new people to follow. It feels like an easier way to get see the kind of posts I want to see.
adastra22 2 hours ago [-]
The “for you” algorithm is your problem. Don’t use it.
Bluescreenbuddy 3 hours ago [-]
>but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself,
Fix your feeds then. I don't have this issue
inanothertime 3 hours ago [-]
> Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app
Are they implying a causal relationship between their shrinking user base and their focus expansion? The article doesn't give any proof whatsoever.
6031769 2 hours ago [-]
No they aren't. All they are doing is pointing out a temporal correlation. Inference of causality is left to the whim of the reader.
cdrnsf 20 hours ago [-]
We have ample evidence that platforms whose goal is to shove everyone you've ever met into the same room isn't a good thing. Modest growth and a healthy community that doesn't have to include everyone to succeed seems like a good thing.
tptacek 20 hours ago [-]
Sure, but not if you've taken venture funding. We already have a public, community platform for building slow-growing tight-knit communities: Mastodon/ActivityPub.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
It's not one platform. It's a set of independent platforms that sometimes federate. The M/AP federation experience is a third-class experience. Cool kids don't federate, they're already on the server with the people they talk to.
blakesterz 21 hours ago [-]
Toni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more
there's nothing you can do technically to fix bluesky.
people just hate social networks at this point in this timeline.
edoceo 21 hours ago [-]
Is there a different timeline?
MarkusQ 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but it's behind a cosmic paywall.
1attice 1 hours ago [-]
Oh my gods, this is such a fantastic line. I wish I could upvote this bit several more times
nxm 21 hours ago [-]
Twitter's not doing too bad:
550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates
So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
dragonwriter 20 hours ago [-]
The only way in which BlueSky is preferentially catering to the left is by existing as an alternative to X and specifically providing tighter control of what is in your feed; and this is only “catering to the Left” because of the groups towards which X either has weakened or stopped enforcing its policies against harassment towards.
(In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)
syrrim 3 hours ago [-]
Twitter has right wing and center/apolitical people on it, bluesky just has left wing people. They "cater" to them by not clamping down on those people harrassing anyone who joins who doesn't agree with their politics. A smart move, because if they did then the leftists would leave too and they'd have nobody. But the result is they can't even get the centrist/apolitical people to move.
philipallstar 4 hours ago [-]
X no longer makes the "people dogpiling conservatives is consequence culture" vs "people dogpiling far leftists is harassment" distinction, but BlueSky still does.
1attice 1 hours ago [-]
Perhaps the asymmetry has something to do with the fact that the conservatives are sharing memes about immigrants eating cats, and similar quality takes, during a profoundly fascist moment in American history, but what do I know? I'm just another snowflake
CharlesW 20 hours ago [-]
Edison Research's "currently use Twitter" numbers for people 12+ went from 27% in 2023 to 22% in 2025.
Pew found 16% of U.S. teens used X in 2025, versus 23% in 2022 and 33% in 2014–15.
llm_nerd 5 hours ago [-]
> So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
Maybe the "trick" is to have inertia and network effect. Facebook somehow has 3 billion monthly active users despite literally everything.
Loads of politicians, governments, sports figures, and social media stars set up accounts back when Twitter was just a conversation platform, before people were yipping about "catering" to left or right (whatever that silly nonsense means), and the amazing stickiness of the network effect means they're still there.
ChicagoDave 20 hours ago [-]
80% are bots, 10% trolls, and 5% foreign agents.
I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.
Lerc 20 hours ago [-]
Why would bots be limited to twitter? Wouldn't Bluesky be just as susceptiblle.
I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me.
I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 50.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
It's not about susceptibility, it's about actuality. When you open your home page, do you see an army of bots or an army of non-bots? That's what matters.
There isn't an infinite pool of bots out there seeking to get into anything they can. There are like, at most twenty bot actors and they're focused on the most lucrative targets.
Remember when the entire car insurance phone spam in the USA turned out to just be one guy with an army of proxies. There are surprisingly few people at the top of the worldwide spam operations.
numpad0 3 hours ago [-]
Twitter is having bots and spams actively injected rather than them simply existing as a phenomenon. There are not many possible explanation for that other than that its owner is likely wanting them.
Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
ChicagoDave 20 hours ago [-]
We get to block them. They may exist but they’re invisible.
The bots and trolls and agents on X are always on your front porch.
waterheater 17 hours ago [-]
Interesting, because X is able to work the same. When an obvious bot follows an X account, the user can simply block the bot. Also, your X feed can be configured to show posts only from accounts you follow in chronological order, so if you're following a bot, that's on you. Oh, and X hides replies that are probable spam from bots, though you can view them if you'd like. With my X account, they're around but definitely not on my front porch. It seems like you've been given some pretty egregious misinformation; perhaps people report bad experiences with bots because they don't know how to correctly use the platform?
ChicagoDave 16 hours ago [-]
I’ll pass on using a platform owned by a white nationalist who’s betrayed his daughter, openly admitted attempting to rig elections, raided our government of life saving appropriations, destroyed public records, stolen social security data, and makes nearly all of his profits on government contracts while never paying taxes.
archagon 9 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Recent choice words from Musk:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
Indistinguishable from Stormfront. And his account (along with other far-right accounts) are the most engaged-with accounts on the platform.
numpad0 3 hours ago [-]
They're charging on windows like hordes of zombies attracted to smell of flesh leaking from a bus as it inches forward. It's a horrible sight.
They're all paid accounts mostly claiming to be from poorer ex-Commonwelath colonies and some deep South Asia, slowly spreading eastward. Many are obviously pasting LLM generated responses, sometimes even leaving in "here are response ideas for such tweet" parts. They're slowly giving up on trying to say anything relevant to Twitter trends and resorting to cultist Islamic or biblical something, but they're still operating in some crazy numbers. Blocking or reporting makes no difference since they never get banned anyway and the accounts are constantly rotated. You can't block 10m acccounts manually.
It just makes no sense that this is even a naturally occurring problem that can be mitigated by some tips and tricks. Clearly it's organized, connected, with a lot of money and effort poured in.
actualwitch 20 hours ago [-]
For reference, pinterest has roughly the same number of monthly active users. [0]
Anecdotally, 90% of the interesting tech/art/gamedev people I’ve followed have moved to Bluesky or Mastodon at this point, and they’re never coming back.
andrewstuart 4 hours ago [-]
I’ve come to think there’s no “better” social media.
People just seem to leave social media entirely.
semiquaver 20 hours ago [-]
As an anecdote, I switched a year or two ago along with most everyone I followed on X.
It’s nothing like the vibe on old Twitter. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ideologically siloed. I’m quite left of center, but everyone on bluesky seems to be a caricature; the blue-haired loonies the right memes about. People there are seriously intolerant of anything other than their perceived orthodoxy. I don’t know what made it this way but it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
gniv 5 hours ago [-]
In terms of politics, yes. It's a bit like the worst of reddit. Nobody reads the article, everybody gets outraged in the same cliché way. If you try to provide nuance you get derided or blocked. (Blocking seems to be held in high esteem, which I think is also part of the problem.)
conradfr 5 hours ago [-]
Building a social network with people in love with shared blocking lists is not a great recipe.
Bluescreenbuddy 3 hours ago [-]
Actually it's great.
krapp 5 hours ago [-]
It's the worst recipe, apart from all the others.
Unless you want to expose yourself to the constant inundation of piss that social media has become, you have to curate and block aggressively. Shared block lists that you just subscribe to are one of the few useful innovations Bluesky has made and they need to be standard for all social media in the future.
gniv 14 minutes ago [-]
Blocking is way too harsh a mechanism. If they wanted to innovate they should have invented some soft-block feature.
Thanks to those lists I am blocked by 165 people. I don't insult anyone, I don't even swear. I suspect I get on these lists simply by being a white male (which is I guess obvious from my posts).
conradfr 3 hours ago [-]
No thanks.
krapp 1 hours ago [-]
Cool. Enjoy the golden shower then, the rest of us will be elsewhere, dry and happy.
BeetleB 20 hours ago [-]
I find it interesting that most conversations about Twitter or Bluesky is about the "political vibe".
Why is that so important?
On Mastodon, if someone keeps posting political stuff to the point where it's a big chunk of my feed, I merely unfollow. As a result my feed has very little politics. Can't you simply do that on Bluesky?
Of course, if you actively want politics, but want just the right kind of politics, then you've dug yourself into a hole.
aaron695 6 hours ago [-]
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PaulHoule 20 hours ago [-]
A lot of people on Bluesky are pretty normal and if you make a point to block on the first bit of political NPC behavior you can find people that are interested in cat pictures and software and such.
jillesvangurp 12 hours ago [-]
> it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
You are describing X here. It kind of turned into a very toxic political platform. The exodus to Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky happened for a good reason. After Elon Musk took over it didn't exactly improve.
I'm on still on X, and on Bluesky and Mastodon. For my network of perfectly normal people, most of them did not delete their X account but just aren't very active there any more. Quite a few showed up on Bluesky in the last year or so (30-40%) and some also on Mastodon (~20%). But that just leaves a long tail of random accounts I followed on Twitter that I don't really miss that much. Many of them have gone silent in any case.
I actually don't mind Bluesky. I pretty much ignore algorithmic feeds and just consume content from people I happen to follow in the order it is published. If what you see is blue-haired loonies, might I suggest following less of those.
Organizing people in lists is helpful as well. Mostly the people I follow are the same people I used to follow on X. Their political leanings didn't really change and they still talk about the same kinds of topics. It's just that the noise of random nut bags that I wasn't following to begin with dominating my X feed is completely gone. I don't miss that at all.
raincole 20 hours ago [-]
Bluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen. Hands down. I can't imagine anyone enjoying it unless they're 1) super into the US politics/domestic issues AND 2) politically aligned with the main user base of Bluesky.
But somehow the devs of Bluesky never thought of making it the default tab. They should be making a better Twitter but what they're actually building is just Truth Social for the left.
anon7000 20 hours ago [-]
The fact that Bluesky has first class support for me to choose my own feed algorithm is proof it’s NOTHING like truth social.
CSSer 20 hours ago [-]
Whenever I point out (in agreement with your statement) that the idea that the left and the right are somehow equally bad is a kind of fantasy on HN I usually get downvoted. People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong. Yeah, often things are more complicated than they appear, but I find it almost hilarious how often you can't do that in American politics. And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines.
antisthenes 20 hours ago [-]
> People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong.
> And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines.
Seems like you've fallen to the same fallacy within the same paragraph, which is quite ironic.
CSSer 17 hours ago [-]
“Not the same kind of mess” breaks the comparison, so… no.
brazukadev 17 hours ago [-]
the thing is that the "left" in the US (and then on HN) have almost no political representation. The Democrats aren't left, just the leftest available. They aren't better than the Republicans at all.
CSSer 16 hours ago [-]
Despite partial agreement, you’ve only reinforced my point as far as I’m concerned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
wolrah 4 hours ago [-]
> They aren't better than the Republicans at all.
This is exactly the kind of thing the parent poster was talking about.
The Democrats certainly aren't left, and they're not great, but we live in a world where the Republican party ranges between refusing to condemn and openly supporting white nationalism, gloats about making trans people's lives worse, encourages police to use unnecessary force, etc. even before we get in to the impacts of their economic policies.
Despite being a massive disappointment as far as actually making positive changes, one is still obviously miles better than the other because they're not trying to drive the car the wrong way as fast as possible. Claiming that the two major US parties are no different requires willfully ignoring a lot of bad stuff that one party does for which there is no comparison on the other side. There are absolutely specific issues on which there is often no meaningful difference but as a whole there is a universe of difference.
PaulHoule 20 hours ago [-]
If you are careful about who you follow and you click on “less like this” whenever you see hysterical stuff about politics the “discover” feed is pretty good, in fact back when I was concerned about this I found it has 30% as much hysterical stuff about politics as my “following” feed.
ChiperSoft 14 hours ago [-]
Until your thumb slips while trying to hit the dots, the post gets focused, and now you're spending the next three hours telling the algorithm to stop showing you diaper kink artwork because it thinks you must be into that since you looked closer at it.
Almost as bad as tiktok repeatedly showing you promos for the same product because you didn't swipe away in less than five seconds.
AnonHP 13 hours ago [-]
I have a lurking account and follow some other accounts, but I’m not interested in “liking” or “reposting” any posts. I want to keep my usage and engagement as low as possible. The “For You” feed doesn’t work for this need because it relies on signals like liking content.
I agree that the Discover feed sucks (why does it show posts from people I’m following when there’s a dedicated tab for that?). But I’d rather have a better Discover feed than me having to do more work on the “For You” feed.
elmo-shrugged 5 hours ago [-]
thankfully, the discover feed can be unpinned to hide it unless you go look for it. it was horrid for me too.
BeetleB 20 hours ago [-]
> Bluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen.
Even worse than Mastodon's?
tptacek 19 hours ago [-]
I don't think it makes sense to think of Mastodon as having a central "discover" tab. Mastodon is much closer to the blogosphere than to Twitter.
ChiperSoft 14 hours ago [-]
Mastodon's is at least just scoped to your own server, so it has a small chance of being relevant (assuming you picked any instance other than m.s)
hilariously 5 hours ago [-]
The false equivalency is so funny, you mean a platform where the president sells private access to his massive lies ahead of time so that you can front run the market?
The one where war crimes are directly equivocated and WW3 is regularly threatened?
The one where anti-vax conspiracy is gospel, up is down, and black is white?
Get the biggest pile of hippy dippy bullshit together and you'll never compare to the toxic waste dump of "Truth" Social.
mr_mitm 4 hours ago [-]
Plus, the fact that they call the posts "truths" (as in "the president truthed", "ads are sponsored truths") couldn't be more Orwellian.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Literally Pravda.
drcongo 8 hours ago [-]
How is this post, which fundamentally misunderstands Bluesky, the top post in the thread? The default tab on Bluesky is a chronological feed from just the people you follow, with no algorithm, just how most people want it.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
No it isn't. Maybe you've set a non-default preference.
echelon 20 hours ago [-]
I don't want to see politics, rage bait, sexism, hate, performative superiority, whining, or negativity.
Who invented all of these algorithms? I want none of this.
I want good news, awesome things, uplifting stories, cool hacks. That's it. That's literally it.
cpburns2009 2 hours ago [-]
> I want good news, awesome things, uplifting stories, cool hacks. That's it. That's literally it.
This is my actual experience on X. Find interesting people to follow. The "muted words" feature is great for filtering out political noise.
singpolyma3 20 hours ago [-]
Then follow people producing such content?
nickthegreek 20 hours ago [-]
my tiktok fyp is just that.
Karrot_Kream 19 hours ago [-]
FWIW I find much more politically motivated posting outside of the big social media platforms than on it. I suspect it's a combination of algorithmic downranking and just the fact that more politically motivated users are going to be on alternative social media.
slopinthebag 14 hours ago [-]
My socials (FB(not much)/Insta/TikTok) have fantastic algorithms, I they uplift my mood, have been responsible for positive changes in my mindset and life, etc. When I used X or bluesky or Reddit they have a noticeable negative impact on my mental state. Hackernews is 50/50.
So I think social media which is content/image based can be more positive than the discussion based media.
However we're getting more and more AI slop and AI generated art and reels and while people for the most part destroy it in the comment section, it would be nice for them to never show up in my feeds.
pessimizer 3 hours ago [-]
Bluesky's active user base has never not been shrinking, no matter what they were focusing on.
The surest thing in tech for the past couple of years is that bluesky has fewer users than it did last month. It's entire life is due to lib slactivism. It started under the conceit of being a p2p public service, took VC, and its founder bailed and badmouthed it. It's entire existence is ideological, which is why its boosters sound like evangelists.
This is just media promotion, hopefully to bump up user numbers for a week or two, but really so the people who work at the VC firms that put money into this dog have something to show to their bosses.
afavour 3 hours ago [-]
> It's entire life is due to lib slactivism
I'd disagree with that, I'd say its entire life is due to the shittifying of Twitter. People, like myself, sought to recreate the experience of what Twitter used to be like and (after trying and not being satisfied with Mastodon) it's the next best thing. The problem is that a social network of this kind relies on having a large enough population to feel "live" and Bluesky has never got there.
There have been glimmers of hope... during the NBA finals and the World Cup Bluesky felt like a genuine destination for live sports. But it might be too little too late.
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
I agree (in a way), but I don't think that people who went to Bluesky were trying to recreate twitter, they were trying to silence twitter. The past they are pining for was a past when people they didn't like weren't allowed to speak, and they were hoping (in a non-userlike, political way) that bluesky would threaten twitter, and force it to behave in the way that they preferred or to shut down. Then they would all be able to go back to the ideologically-pruned twitter of their dreams, or twitter would go bankrupt (the bankruptcy narratives were endless) and everyone would move to bluesky.
They were hoping that twitter would go the way of Digg. It's very similar to the fantasy that they had about Reddit after the API shutdown. Slacktivism.
The fact that twitter is as active as ever is why they slink back. I'd bet 90% of actives on bluesky also have twitter accounts that are more active. Twitter didn't care when they walked away; in fact it was a relief. A great many of them were extreme trolls and reply guys who spent the rest of their time mass-reporting people for disagreeing with them.
And for the few people who thought of this as the p2p answer to twitter (an obsession among programming p2p nerds - including me - for a long time) it has to be a disappointment that the company obviously has no intention of relinquishing control of a thing.
nailer 2 hours ago [-]
> People, like myself, sought to recreate the experience of what Twitter used to be like
Have you tried X recently? My feed right now is:
- A neat tech bag
- Discussion about AI going rogue
- How fee markets on Hyperliquid work
- Someone who was ill from a viral infection talk about his recovery
- Someone from Team17 talking about the game Worms
It's very much what Twitter used to be like
maelito 5 hours ago [-]
How are the X figures computed ? Bluesky is a public network, anyone can analyse and count. What about X, held by Musk ?
dijit 5 hours ago [-]
Would be hard to gauge, X has a major bot problem, which Musk made big claims about combating but yet has failed to yield realistic results...
vachina 4 hours ago [-]
It has improved a lot since the acquisition. Before the bot purge X was basically crypto shillers or scammers. X now actually feels more organic than, Facebook. Sometimes I see content on X before they eventually gets reposted on Reddit.
Hugsbox 4 hours ago [-]
You cannot be serious. On the rare occasion that I do open it up for whatever reason, I'm immediately stunned by the cesspit that greets me. I refuse to believe that's not like 90% bots.
vachina 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Hugsbox 4 hours ago [-]
It would be the "being bots" that makes them bots. I know there's some nutcases out there, but not enough of them to fill a twitter-sized insane asylum, and I'm talking about accounts that make statements at both ends of the political spectrum. You spend about 2 minutes on there and nearly every post or comment you read leaves you thinking "there's absolutely no way a real, living, breathing person wrote this", unless you yourself are an absolute lunatic or very gullible. It's downright baffling.
amiga386 3 hours ago [-]
That's really on you. There are (according to Wikidata) 259,000+ verified notable humans, who have Wikipedia articles about them, who have their own Twitter handles.
That doesn't mean they post regularly, but it's more than enough real humans to follow (so that they can retweet bot crap at you)
hocuspocus 2 hours ago [-]
I assume you don't use Twitter, otherwise you'd have noticed that annoying bots are in the replies.
hocuspocus 3 hours ago [-]
There are many other clues that clearly make them bots: obvious LLMisms, parroting canned talking points, accounts based in developing countries with nonsensical profile bios, ...
But even without all that, it's very hard to believe that suddenly Twitter attracted all the 4chan-level far-right cesspool organically, and that these people have nothing better to do than replying to any post getting traction from people that should be completely outside their interest circles.
AmericanOP 5 hours ago [-]
Elon bought X for the bot problem, not because of it.
vachina 5 hours ago [-]
Elon bought X the same reason Trump made Truth Social.
e40 5 hours ago [-]
You are both right.
ecshafer 20 hours ago [-]
Bluesky and Threads both have a fundamental issue in that their entire pitch is "We are like Twitter, but we are not run by Elon Musk, a Republican." Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones that were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place. When you whole pitch has zero appeal to 95% of people, its dead.
bigstrat2003 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I agree. It's the inverse of the problem Scott Alexander has observed in the past: when you make an alternative platform based on the premise of "we won't ban people based on having unpopular views", you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views. It turns your platform into an awful place that nobody wants to associate with, even if they agree that it's bad to ban people for having unpopular views.
TacticalCoder 3 hours ago [-]
> ... you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views
The problem of a leftist network like BlueSky is that so many people on it defend the totally indefensible. I'll give two examples...
1. Like all those who have a "preference" for young kids: it's nicknamed "PedoSky" for a reason.
You ain't finding me on a network that explains that wanting to have sex with young kids is "just a preference" and that explains that people selling drugs to kids aren't evil for it's all "contextual".
2. There are 300 million female who been genitally mutilated that are alive today. Because the west imported so many people from the middle east and africa, that issue of FGM is present in the West too.
And instead of fighting it, you now have some western "intellectuals" (or at least who believe they are educated intellectuals) explaining that "it's a complex problem".
That's where we are atm: people lecturing us about how we should be respectful of the culture where young girl's clit are removed "because it's complex / because it's contextual / because we need to understand the beautiful things about those cultures / etc.".
No it's not: it's a good vs evil issue.
If you genitally mutilate a young girl by cutting her clitoris or if you sell fenthanyl to teenagers, you are fucking evil. It's as in the TV series Euphoria:
"I don't care what your personal struggles are: if you sell poison to kids, you are evil".
I don't have X anymore but from I can see X is mild compared to the ideas defended on BlueSky.
It can be summed up as: "Musk is a nazi. I defend female genital mutilation because it's complex, I understand grow up men who have a preference for young kids, I believe we should pardon dealers selling drugs to kids for they have their own struggles, I sympathetize with islamist terrorism, ... And it's all OK because I'm so open-minded individual, while Musk is an evil nazi".
While I do believe that at some point it's a good vs evil issue (and I'm not religious) and you have to take an actual stance on those issues instead of weaseling your way out of it by "understanding the feelings" of pedos/terrorists/fenthanyl dealers etc.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Is anyone on X defending pedophilia or FGM?
bluemoonx 20 hours ago [-]
Sounds fun, sign me up. I want the bad. Moderation is somehow worse. I’m a big boy I can block the spammers myself
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
4chan.org here you go
Krssst 5 hours ago [-]
Musk is not just a republican, he's pushing far-right parties everywhere else in the world (plus, the "roman" thing). He's the textbook definition of why social networks should not have recommendation algorithms other than "chronological view of who you actively chose the follow".
He can say whatever he wants, but buying one of the biggest social network to push his ideology onto billions leaves "freedom of saying whatever one wants" territory to enter "let's buy elections by controlling what enter people's feeds".
exhumet 4 hours ago [-]
yeah im pretty fucking hard left wing, i would still have probably used twitter in this current day if it hadn't just become a total cesspool. i used bluesky because my friends moved there and tbh the custom feeds are a great feature. could not care about the owners political leanings as long as they are not being actively and outwardly malicious... pretty much most of my social media usage went down the hill when they just became outrage/outwardly racist/ai infested cesspits. i neeeeeed something more than my small local groups to keep up with my hobbies so i use reddit. but in 2025 i deleted my account and made a new one from scratch that was highly tailored and streamlined vs my 2011 account that had soooooooooooooooo many shitty subs still subbed.
PaulHoule 20 hours ago [-]
Not sure what to say about Threads. I mean, if you have an Instagram account they’ll try to give you a Threads account and photos I post to Insta automatically go to Threads so I am probably in the top 5% of Threads posters though I hardly ever log in. I am happy if people see my photos on Insta or Threads or LinkedIn or Nextdoor or wherever.
Thread’s notifications are just plain weird like it is usually clickbait where you can’t tell if they love Trump or hate Trump and if the one sexy cosplayer/alt fashion model I follow because I know her in IRL did something provocative with her friend who has tattoos from head to toe, Threads thinks this is front page news.
mexicocitinluez 4 hours ago [-]
lol
Twitter's fundamental issue is that it's entire pitch is "You can say the most outrageous things on the planet, share race-baiting videos, and be a scumbag as long as it doesn't anger Elon. Also, we're down with child pornography"
Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones who were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place.
See how that works?
brooke2k 20 hours ago [-]
calling elon musk "a Republican" is such a wild understatement
jryle70 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
20 hours ago [-]
mexicocitinluez 4 hours ago [-]
lol So stating a fact means you're more likely to be on Bluesky? Sign me up.
As long as it's not run by a guy who is so pathetic he lies about the video games he plays.
halyconWays 21 hours ago [-]
The only promising social network to me was that browser extension that let you comment on every single page, but it was shut down when people freaked out that it (obviously) sent the URL of every page you visited to their servers. I've wanted something like that for so long. There just isn't enough thread-based discussion happening online. It's all buried in what are essentially darkweb chatrooms (unindexed Discord chats)
TMWNN 20 hours ago [-]
Reddit is dominated by the left, but there are other voice audible.
Twitter has plenty of leftists. They are very, very, very easy to find, as is every other shape and size of political, ideological, or spiritual thought; far easier than, say, a non-leftist viewpoint on the worldnews or politics subreddits, which because of their default status are much more inescapable than any one Twitter account.
But it could be worse. Bluesky has block list dissemination (à la how, if you make one comment in a "wrong" subreddit, a whole bunch of others will automatically ban you despite never having even heard of them), but I don't think even it ever gets so bad as individual Mastodon instances' ability to self-destruct in spectacularly amusing fashion. mastodon.lol example over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As rvz said in the link,
>This is just one of many Mastodon instances which are undergoing an extinction event which involves: turning against themselves and destroying each other. This time, it is over a children's video game.
That said, I suppose that such self-immolation might be a good thing; sort of an immune system-like response. There are many, many mentally ill that steep far too long in Bluesky (and 80% of Reddit)'s ever-boiling toxic soup.
wookmaster 5 hours ago [-]
Huh I had no idea this is happening my entire feed is just photographers lol
What does this comment even mean? Substitute "left" for any other adjective, like "purple" or "embobulated" and it's equally meaningless: "There are very, very few non-embobulated people on Bluesky."
nailer 1 hours ago [-]
> > There are very, very few non-left people on Bluesky.
> What does this comment even mean
“It’s amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.”
- Colin Robertson
archagon 9 hours ago [-]
This thread is primed for shitting on Bluesky, but the level of discourse among the people I follow has only grown over the past few years. In no way does it feel like a dying platform. (Same for Mastodon, actually.)
Bluescreenbuddy 3 hours ago [-]
You can tell who here doesn't use bluesky. They're self reporting. It's like going to chicago, seeing a homeless person act crazy, then leaving and telling everyone that it's a crime ridden shit hole. They're just parroting the same shit everyone else who's never used it are parroting
ModernMech 4 hours ago [-]
I tried Bluesky after Threads because the ads were getting to me.
I reposted one picture of my favorite bird, the albatross, and then my feed was 100% bird pictures. I'm not interested in birds generally, just albatrosses specifically. But they were nice enough pictures so I kept using the app.
Then I tried telling it about my other interest which was robotics, and so I started liking posts about autonomous cars. Specifically, one day I liked a picture of some guy filming in in his car some other guy sleeping in his Tesla while it was driving autonomously on the highway.
After that my feed was flooded with selfies of dudes in their car. Like, "goodmorning sunshine, off to work, here's a quick selfie of me". Every time I opened the app it was just a parade of bird pictures and selfies of bearded dudes in their cars. At least on Threads the thirst traps were thirsty!
Bluesky had no idea what my interests were. On Threads we used to do a thing like "Hey @algorithm, send me people who are interested in X Y Z" and that worked. Actually first it didn't and then Threads made it official after so many people did it. But even still when it wasn't official it still seemed Threads was able to provide a better feed than Bluesky.
So I quit. Congrats Bluesky, tough feat but you've somehow found a way to be more annoying than ads.
renegade-otter 4 hours ago [-]
These algorithms are supposed to be helping me discover new interests, but instead they make me cautious about what I click on. I watch two seconds of some video I ultimately don't care for and then get my feed chockfull of THAT shit forever.
I so miss the days when the Internet was more random. It's not really nostalgia - it WAS better.
ModernMech 4 hours ago [-]
Seems these days you can't even linger too long on a feed item or they flag your interest in it.
stephen_g 3 hours ago [-]
I tried Threads a tiny bit but its algorithm seemed obsessed with trying to rage-bait me. Like I get that it is one way to drive engagement but everything was just bad takes about my interests with lots of replies correcting them… It was never an enjoyable platform to use because of that.
I ended up finding a good group of people to follow on Mastodon so didn’t end up even trying Bluesky (although I do follow some accounts from there through the bridge)
frozenseven 21 hours ago [-]
Interesting quote:
"For Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities."
I hope against hope that people started to realize that the problem isn't the platform, it's the entire approach.
Who am I kidding, people just realized that Bluesky wasn't going to be the next big thing and so it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
toomuchtodo 21 hours ago [-]
What does success look like? I get what I want from Twitter/X through a pull through cache. I get to read the folks I follow on Bluesky. Works for me? My feed as a utility is working as expected. I keep what I want to read, and mute and block that which I do not. I remain in control of my data and experience of the firehose. If someone I'd like to see on Bluesky is not yet there, I ask them to be. If there is data on Bluesky not yet there but that might have value to others, I pipe it in via a PDS and pub sub automation.
How would email and RSS be the next big thing? Because that is what https://atproto.com/ is, and to some extent, here. A private entity or individual cannot capture the AT Protocol network as happened to Twitter/X, it has already succeeded.
Certainly, this is a different perspective than "What metrics can we use to value this entity we're going to attempt to flip to someone else?" Worst case, the public benefit corp is converted to a non profit and tax deductible donations are used (potentially with a foundational fund built to operate in perpetuity, think Wikipedia) to fund the underlying storage and distribution infrastructure and labor costs for operations, similar to Signal and many other tech non profits.
(Threads is always there for the normies until it enshittifies and Meta chases whatever catches Mark's eye next)
speak_plainly 21 hours ago [-]
I think there are two things going on. After launch, there was an exuberant group of users who believed the purpose or aim of Bluesky was to be a recreation of Twitter in terms of user base and impact. They were lead on by the icon a bit and lots of rhetoric. And I think many believed it would destroy X. By their standards, Bluesky is an epic failure.
But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.
2 hours ago [-]
21 hours ago [-]
mschuster91 20 hours ago [-]
> And I think many believed it would destroy X.
Given what Musk did back at the time - member him carrying a sink? Randomly unplugging servers? - it was not that much of a stretch to assume the BS would eventually catch up with him and Twitter would enter the FO phase of FAFO.
Unfortunately, for unfathomable reasons Twitter is still alive somehow, despite being a cesspit of Russian propaganda, far-right propaganda, general trolls and a ton of porn sellers... I frankly assume the porn is what keeps a lot of people on there instead of Truth Social or one of the countless other attempts.
PaulHoule 20 hours ago [-]
Two-sided networks are really something…. It’s almost impossible to kill a social network!
EA-3167 17 hours ago [-]
This is a very... Hacker News viewpoint that I think is quite popular in tech circles, and literally unheard of for most beyond. I don't think this is a matter of raising awareness either, it's the usual disconnect between people who take pleasure in learning about and using technology, and the average person who wants to minimize friction and inputs between them and tuning out.
I don't think that Bluesky is a success as an app or site, I think it's an example of ideological stagnation and evidence of an online political culture that's come unmoored from reality, which seems to be the trend for social media. It's not a very good place to be, and the most active parts of it are frankly really boring and thoughtless just like the rest of the social media landscape... albeit with a left-of-center flavor. As for the protocol... great? I've been hearing about the next big thing in fighting centralization and corporatization here for a loooong time, and it really feels like Charlie Brown kicking at the spot where a football used to be, over and over.
If the point is to come up with novel solutions to a problem in service of a tiny minority represented here... then great. It's a success. If the point is to ever compete with something on a different scale then this seems like treading water to me.
FeloniousHam 21 hours ago [-]
> it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
I think there's some truth there, but the bigger shift IMO has been that companies, politicians and institutions have begun to notice that volume on social media doesn't translate to irl opinions. Left or right, social media is dominated by the loudest, most dedicated extremists with the most insane focus on single issues. You and I have lives, we can't compete with someone who pulls 12 hour days editing Wikipedia, cranking out Tweets, spinning up bots to vote and sock puppets to react.
It's a lesson I think we all need to learn over and over: the loudest are not really the most representative, they're just the loudest. Online I'd add that they're often the craziest and least able to compromise.
irishcoffee 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
slashdave 20 hours ago [-]
Can someone pretty please create a decent alternative to X?
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
No.
Bluesky tried. But it's not "a decent alternative" - why not?
VCFundedGenYer 17 hours ago [-]
Bluesky is a buggy borderline nonfunctional mess.
The fediverse does literally everything better than it. Bluesky by comparison is completely inferior and redundant.
moritzruth 2 hours ago [-]
I had the exactly opposite experience. I'm even selfhosting my own (non-reference implementation) PDS, and going in I was fully expecting to encounter weird consistency issues, but there were none at all.
maelito 5 hours ago [-]
What ? I have no bugs on bluesky for years.
AnonHP 13 hours ago [-]
My experience is different. I like the chronological feeds and the lists I can create to group accounts.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m
If that's really a common view, we really did lose the plot.
Since they're apparently tracking mobile app MAUs as a KPI, expect this to change.
Part of it is just not wanting those apps to invade the rest of my life. I know I can turn off notifications and things, but for some weird reason it helps me stay a bit more detached from social media when I'm forced to rely on the site.
The other part is privacy. I don't want the Facebook app on my phone. I don't want to have to worry about what permissions it wants and whether I've unchecked the right things. Using the web is easier for me in that respect.
I blame TechCrunch for creating a website that I can’t read but yea fair criticism I didn’t read the article.
I didn’t question GP i asked if they knew why web users aren’t counted.
Do they explain in the article why they would only count mobile users as MAU?
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
https://mastodon-analytics.com/
Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
Also, the firehose is not strictly necessary either if you’re willing to give up seeing replies from anyone, anywhere and just see the feeds you subscribe to, like an RSS reader.
The hard part is moderation and keeping up with changes in regulations, not the infrastructure itself. Also, continued funding for new development is good. I’m interested in seeing what the permissioned data proposal [1] turns into.
[1] https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0016-p...
The only source of truth is hosted by bluesky
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1892 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/2821
Meanwhile there's a lot of topics where a critical mass of fans only really exists on Big Tech Social Media and maybe the occasional subject subreddit. The hope of an open platform at scale is to expose those niche interests to open infrastructure.
Twitter has something like a half a billion users. So it wins I guess...
> Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
It likely is the default of Twitter refugees, but as a Mastodon user none of this is relevant to me! I don't care how many more users a network has, as long as the one I'm on has a healthy number. Very few of the people I follow are likely to leave Mastodon.
I find Mastodon/the fediverse has far better engagement and longevity due to being open source and decentralized.
Bluesky is an island on its own, just trying to be a Twitter copy and nothing more.
Neither have any shot of being a twitter replacement. Bluesky has a culture problem and a dishonesty about being p2p problem, and mastodon is too slow/heavy and has a mod problem that is intolerable without a better story about user mobility between servers.
Twitter may just die by itself if somehow a better way for people to publicize their work comes into existence, but all traditional means have been rolled up into big opinionated gatekeeping conglomerates who simply ignore things that compete with any of their interests or threaten any of their advertisers or owners. But even if twitter dies, people aren't moving to bluesky or mastodon.
Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives? The most insidious bots are those that leave replies based on keywords in your post. It looks legitimate until you go to their profile and see they are cranking out replies every second to posts in a topic.
I don't think there's anything other than - there are more people on twitter; due to first mover advantage and inertia
It would be the same if they do ATP.
I agree that the Bluesky userbase doesn't really talk about the topics I care about and I think the audience is a big factor.
I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things.
It'd be like if 90% of twitter was talking about twitter the platform, it's an odd thing to focus on.
And I actually wouldn't mind seeing more discussion about atproto. I'm mildly curious about whether anyone is doing anything with it.
And a whole bunch of other stuff about whether people should even be on bluesky, or should be instead on other federations, and it all just feels so meaningless to me.
It's as if someone has invented a few different ways to print, and there's a million interesting things to write about, but everyone in my echo chamber is talking about whether we should be using A4 or letter sized paper.
And to be clear, this is the "for you" feed even after some shaping, the official discover feed is so much US politics it's straight unusable. Plenty of politics still leaks through to "for you", but it's a manageable amount.
There's a dotnet feed I follow too, but honestly it's hard to find any real people to follow between the dotnet foundation reposts, the linkedin grade BS, and the lost musicians. ( Not their fault, the feed picks up any mention of F# as being dotnet! )
Like I said, I want to make bluesky work, it ought to have less engagement bait, and less lock out of anonymous users, but there's a still a lack of critical mass of real people.
Fix your feeds then. I don't have this issue
Are they implying a causal relationship between their shrinking user base and their focus expansion? The article doesn't give any proof whatsoever.
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...
people just hate social networks at this point in this timeline.
So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
(In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)
Pew found 16% of U.S. teens used X in 2025, versus 23% in 2022 and 33% in 2014–15.
Maybe the "trick" is to have inertia and network effect. Facebook somehow has 3 billion monthly active users despite literally everything.
Loads of politicians, governments, sports figures, and social media stars set up accounts back when Twitter was just a conversation platform, before people were yipping about "catering" to left or right (whatever that silly nonsense means), and the amazing stickiness of the network effect means they're still there.
I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.
I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me.
I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 50.
There isn't an infinite pool of bots out there seeking to get into anything they can. There are like, at most twenty bot actors and they're focused on the most lucrative targets.
Remember when the entire car insurance phone spam in the USA turned out to just be one guy with an army of proxies. There are surprisingly few people at the top of the worldwide spam operations.
Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
The bots and trolls and agents on X are always on your front porch.
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
Indistinguishable from Stormfront. And his account (along with other far-right accounts) are the most engaged-with accounts on the platform.
They're all paid accounts mostly claiming to be from poorer ex-Commonwelath colonies and some deep South Asia, slowly spreading eastward. Many are obviously pasting LLM generated responses, sometimes even leaving in "here are response ideas for such tweet" parts. They're slowly giving up on trying to say anything relevant to Twitter trends and resorting to cultist Islamic or biblical something, but they're still operating in some crazy numbers. Blocking or reporting makes no difference since they never get banned anyway and the accounts are constantly rotated. You can't block 10m acccounts manually.
It just makes no sense that this is even a naturally occurring problem that can be mitigated by some tips and tricks. Clearly it's organized, connected, with a lot of money and effort poured in.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
People just seem to leave social media entirely.
It’s nothing like the vibe on old Twitter. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ideologically siloed. I’m quite left of center, but everyone on bluesky seems to be a caricature; the blue-haired loonies the right memes about. People there are seriously intolerant of anything other than their perceived orthodoxy. I don’t know what made it this way but it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
Unless you want to expose yourself to the constant inundation of piss that social media has become, you have to curate and block aggressively. Shared block lists that you just subscribe to are one of the few useful innovations Bluesky has made and they need to be standard for all social media in the future.
Thanks to those lists I am blocked by 165 people. I don't insult anyone, I don't even swear. I suspect I get on these lists simply by being a white male (which is I guess obvious from my posts).
Why is that so important?
On Mastodon, if someone keeps posting political stuff to the point where it's a big chunk of my feed, I merely unfollow. As a result my feed has very little politics. Can't you simply do that on Bluesky?
Of course, if you actively want politics, but want just the right kind of politics, then you've dug yourself into a hole.
You are describing X here. It kind of turned into a very toxic political platform. The exodus to Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky happened for a good reason. After Elon Musk took over it didn't exactly improve.
I'm on still on X, and on Bluesky and Mastodon. For my network of perfectly normal people, most of them did not delete their X account but just aren't very active there any more. Quite a few showed up on Bluesky in the last year or so (30-40%) and some also on Mastodon (~20%). But that just leaves a long tail of random accounts I followed on Twitter that I don't really miss that much. Many of them have gone silent in any case.
I actually don't mind Bluesky. I pretty much ignore algorithmic feeds and just consume content from people I happen to follow in the order it is published. If what you see is blue-haired loonies, might I suggest following less of those.
Organizing people in lists is helpful as well. Mostly the people I follow are the same people I used to follow on X. Their political leanings didn't really change and they still talk about the same kinds of topics. It's just that the noise of random nut bags that I wasn't following to begin with dominating my X feed is completely gone. I don't miss that at all.
The funniest part is that there is a better algorithm. It's right here: https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/feed/for-...
But somehow the devs of Bluesky never thought of making it the default tab. They should be making a better Twitter but what they're actually building is just Truth Social for the left.
> And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines.
Seems like you've fallen to the same fallacy within the same paragraph, which is quite ironic.
This is exactly the kind of thing the parent poster was talking about.
The Democrats certainly aren't left, and they're not great, but we live in a world where the Republican party ranges between refusing to condemn and openly supporting white nationalism, gloats about making trans people's lives worse, encourages police to use unnecessary force, etc. even before we get in to the impacts of their economic policies.
Despite being a massive disappointment as far as actually making positive changes, one is still obviously miles better than the other because they're not trying to drive the car the wrong way as fast as possible. Claiming that the two major US parties are no different requires willfully ignoring a lot of bad stuff that one party does for which there is no comparison on the other side. There are absolutely specific issues on which there is often no meaningful difference but as a whole there is a universe of difference.
Almost as bad as tiktok repeatedly showing you promos for the same product because you didn't swipe away in less than five seconds.
I agree that the Discover feed sucks (why does it show posts from people I’m following when there’s a dedicated tab for that?). But I’d rather have a better Discover feed than me having to do more work on the “For You” feed.
Even worse than Mastodon's?
The one where war crimes are directly equivocated and WW3 is regularly threatened?
The one where anti-vax conspiracy is gospel, up is down, and black is white?
Get the biggest pile of hippy dippy bullshit together and you'll never compare to the toxic waste dump of "Truth" Social.
Who invented all of these algorithms? I want none of this.
I want good news, awesome things, uplifting stories, cool hacks. That's it. That's literally it.
This is my actual experience on X. Find interesting people to follow. The "muted words" feature is great for filtering out political noise.
So I think social media which is content/image based can be more positive than the discussion based media.
However we're getting more and more AI slop and AI generated art and reels and while people for the most part destroy it in the comment section, it would be nice for them to never show up in my feeds.
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
The surest thing in tech for the past couple of years is that bluesky has fewer users than it did last month. It's entire life is due to lib slactivism. It started under the conceit of being a p2p public service, took VC, and its founder bailed and badmouthed it. It's entire existence is ideological, which is why its boosters sound like evangelists.
This is just media promotion, hopefully to bump up user numbers for a week or two, but really so the people who work at the VC firms that put money into this dog have something to show to their bosses.
I'd disagree with that, I'd say its entire life is due to the shittifying of Twitter. People, like myself, sought to recreate the experience of what Twitter used to be like and (after trying and not being satisfied with Mastodon) it's the next best thing. The problem is that a social network of this kind relies on having a large enough population to feel "live" and Bluesky has never got there.
There have been glimmers of hope... during the NBA finals and the World Cup Bluesky felt like a genuine destination for live sports. But it might be too little too late.
They were hoping that twitter would go the way of Digg. It's very similar to the fantasy that they had about Reddit after the API shutdown. Slacktivism.
The fact that twitter is as active as ever is why they slink back. I'd bet 90% of actives on bluesky also have twitter accounts that are more active. Twitter didn't care when they walked away; in fact it was a relief. A great many of them were extreme trolls and reply guys who spent the rest of their time mass-reporting people for disagreeing with them.
And for the few people who thought of this as the p2p answer to twitter (an obsession among programming p2p nerds - including me - for a long time) it has to be a disappointment that the company obviously has no intention of relinquishing control of a thing.
Have you tried X recently? My feed right now is:
- A neat tech bag
- Discussion about AI going rogue
- How fee markets on Hyperliquid work
- Someone who was ill from a viral infection talk about his recovery
- Someone from Team17 talking about the game Worms
It's very much what Twitter used to be like
Here are some of them: https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3Fitem%20%3FtwitterHan...
That doesn't mean they post regularly, but it's more than enough real humans to follow (so that they can retweet bot crap at you)
But even without all that, it's very hard to believe that suddenly Twitter attracted all the 4chan-level far-right cesspool organically, and that these people have nothing better to do than replying to any post getting traction from people that should be completely outside their interest circles.
The problem of a leftist network like BlueSky is that so many people on it defend the totally indefensible. I'll give two examples...
1. Like all those who have a "preference" for young kids: it's nicknamed "PedoSky" for a reason.
You ain't finding me on a network that explains that wanting to have sex with young kids is "just a preference" and that explains that people selling drugs to kids aren't evil for it's all "contextual".
2. There are 300 million female who been genitally mutilated that are alive today. Because the west imported so many people from the middle east and africa, that issue of FGM is present in the West too.
And instead of fighting it, you now have some western "intellectuals" (or at least who believe they are educated intellectuals) explaining that "it's a complex problem".
That's where we are atm: people lecturing us about how we should be respectful of the culture where young girl's clit are removed "because it's complex / because it's contextual / because we need to understand the beautiful things about those cultures / etc.".
No it's not: it's a good vs evil issue.
If you genitally mutilate a young girl by cutting her clitoris or if you sell fenthanyl to teenagers, you are fucking evil. It's as in the TV series Euphoria:
"I don't care what your personal struggles are: if you sell poison to kids, you are evil".
I don't have X anymore but from I can see X is mild compared to the ideas defended on BlueSky.
It can be summed up as: "Musk is a nazi. I defend female genital mutilation because it's complex, I understand grow up men who have a preference for young kids, I believe we should pardon dealers selling drugs to kids for they have their own struggles, I sympathetize with islamist terrorism, ... And it's all OK because I'm so open-minded individual, while Musk is an evil nazi".
While I do believe that at some point it's a good vs evil issue (and I'm not religious) and you have to take an actual stance on those issues instead of weaseling your way out of it by "understanding the feelings" of pedos/terrorists/fenthanyl dealers etc.
He can say whatever he wants, but buying one of the biggest social network to push his ideology onto billions leaves "freedom of saying whatever one wants" territory to enter "let's buy elections by controlling what enter people's feeds".
Thread’s notifications are just plain weird like it is usually clickbait where you can’t tell if they love Trump or hate Trump and if the one sexy cosplayer/alt fashion model I follow because I know her in IRL did something provocative with her friend who has tattoos from head to toe, Threads thinks this is front page news.
Twitter's fundamental issue is that it's entire pitch is "You can say the most outrageous things on the planet, share race-baiting videos, and be a scumbag as long as it doesn't anger Elon. Also, we're down with child pornography"
Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones who were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place.
See how that works?
As long as it's not run by a guy who is so pathetic he lies about the video games he plays.
Twitter has plenty of leftists. They are very, very, very easy to find, as is every other shape and size of political, ideological, or spiritual thought; far easier than, say, a non-leftist viewpoint on the worldnews or politics subreddits, which because of their default status are much more inescapable than any one Twitter account.
There are very, very few non-left people on Bluesky. "JD Vance Becomes Most Blocked Person on BlueSky Days After Joining App" <https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-bluesky-blocked-social-med...>
Even Bluesky's top users say so.
"Bluesky is backfiring. Mark Cuban says the 'lack of diversity of thought' is actually pushing users back to X" <https://fortune.com/2025/06/12/bluesky-backfiring-mark-cuban...>
"Bluesky is not the good place" <https://www.ms.now/opinion/bluesky-elon-musk-twitter-replace...>
But it could be worse. Bluesky has block list dissemination (à la how, if you make one comment in a "wrong" subreddit, a whole bunch of others will automatically ban you despite never having even heard of them), but I don't think even it ever gets so bad as individual Mastodon instances' ability to self-destruct in spectacularly amusing fashion. mastodon.lol example over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As rvz said in the link,
>This is just one of many Mastodon instances which are undergoing an extinction event which involves: turning against themselves and destroying each other. This time, it is over a children's video game.
That said, I suppose that such self-immolation might be a good thing; sort of an immune system-like response. There are many, many mentally ill that steep far too long in Bluesky (and 80% of Reddit)'s ever-boiling toxic soup.
> What does this comment even mean
“It’s amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.”
- Colin Robertson
I reposted one picture of my favorite bird, the albatross, and then my feed was 100% bird pictures. I'm not interested in birds generally, just albatrosses specifically. But they were nice enough pictures so I kept using the app.
Then I tried telling it about my other interest which was robotics, and so I started liking posts about autonomous cars. Specifically, one day I liked a picture of some guy filming in in his car some other guy sleeping in his Tesla while it was driving autonomously on the highway.
After that my feed was flooded with selfies of dudes in their car. Like, "goodmorning sunshine, off to work, here's a quick selfie of me". Every time I opened the app it was just a parade of bird pictures and selfies of bearded dudes in their cars. At least on Threads the thirst traps were thirsty!
Bluesky had no idea what my interests were. On Threads we used to do a thing like "Hey @algorithm, send me people who are interested in X Y Z" and that worked. Actually first it didn't and then Threads made it official after so many people did it. But even still when it wasn't official it still seemed Threads was able to provide a better feed than Bluesky.
So I quit. Congrats Bluesky, tough feat but you've somehow found a way to be more annoying than ads.
I so miss the days when the Internet was more random. It's not really nostalgia - it WAS better.
I ended up finding a good group of people to follow on Mastodon so didn’t end up even trying Bluesky (although I do follow some accounts from there through the bridge)
"For Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities."
Code: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
Website: https://atproto.com/
Who am I kidding, people just realized that Bluesky wasn't going to be the next big thing and so it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
How would email and RSS be the next big thing? Because that is what https://atproto.com/ is, and to some extent, here. A private entity or individual cannot capture the AT Protocol network as happened to Twitter/X, it has already succeeded.
Certainly, this is a different perspective than "What metrics can we use to value this entity we're going to attempt to flip to someone else?" Worst case, the public benefit corp is converted to a non profit and tax deductible donations are used (potentially with a foundational fund built to operate in perpetuity, think Wikipedia) to fund the underlying storage and distribution infrastructure and labor costs for operations, similar to Signal and many other tech non profits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo (nsfw)
(Threads is always there for the normies until it enshittifies and Meta chases whatever catches Mark's eye next)
But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.
Given what Musk did back at the time - member him carrying a sink? Randomly unplugging servers? - it was not that much of a stretch to assume the BS would eventually catch up with him and Twitter would enter the FO phase of FAFO.
Unfortunately, for unfathomable reasons Twitter is still alive somehow, despite being a cesspit of Russian propaganda, far-right propaganda, general trolls and a ton of porn sellers... I frankly assume the porn is what keeps a lot of people on there instead of Truth Social or one of the countless other attempts.
I don't think that Bluesky is a success as an app or site, I think it's an example of ideological stagnation and evidence of an online political culture that's come unmoored from reality, which seems to be the trend for social media. It's not a very good place to be, and the most active parts of it are frankly really boring and thoughtless just like the rest of the social media landscape... albeit with a left-of-center flavor. As for the protocol... great? I've been hearing about the next big thing in fighting centralization and corporatization here for a loooong time, and it really feels like Charlie Brown kicking at the spot where a football used to be, over and over.
If the point is to come up with novel solutions to a problem in service of a tiny minority represented here... then great. It's a success. If the point is to ever compete with something on a different scale then this seems like treading water to me.
I liked Josh Barro's take: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...
It's a lesson I think we all need to learn over and over: the loudest are not really the most representative, they're just the loudest. Online I'd add that they're often the craziest and least able to compromise.
Bluesky tried. But it's not "a decent alternative" - why not?
The fediverse does literally everything better than it. Bluesky by comparison is completely inferior and redundant.