35
votes
What are your thoughts on Bluesky social app?
People are paying to get invite. I think people who left and are leaving Reddit or Twitter/X hasn't found their home yet.
People are paying to get invite. I think people who left and are leaving Reddit or Twitter/X hasn't found their home yet.
Haven't used it myself, but I've been seeing a fair number of artists I follow asking around about invites or announcing that they're setting up an account there.
I... don't really get it. Like, don't get me wrong - I get why people are jumping ship from Twitter, with how Musk's trying to run it into the ground, but... well, I'm really not a fan of Twitter's short-form message format in the first place. I think it's a net negative for discourse and intelligent discussion, and frankly discourse on Tumblr was already bad enough - moving to a platform with such a small character limit just made things so much worse. I'm probably just not the target audience, I guess, but I can't wrap my head around it.
Also, while I've seen people pointing to how BlueSky has one of Twitter's co-founders (Jack Dorsey) on its board of directors as a positive... from what I can tell, both he and the CEO (Jay Graber) have both had their hands in crypto. That's more than enough reason for me to be immediately wary of it, to be honest.
Even if I lurk more often than I post, I'd rather stick to somewhere like here.
I think that short-form message format is part of what makes it ideal for artists. It makes it easier to post art without it getting buried on people's feeds by super lengthy discussions and dialogues. Meanwhile Twitter was massively popular and attracted non-artists en masse, so artists could be seen by a broader audience than a dedicated art site. It's also good for sharing quick thoughts and updates, links, etc.
That said, not 100% sure Bluesky is the ideal alternative. Twitter may have been a "lightning in a bottle" success, intentional attempts to imitate its format will be under extra scrutiny because... Well, they're imitating Twitter. So I don't know if any similar platform will catch on as much as Twitter did.
Don't ask me why but the short form made me like Twitter, and now threads / bluesky.
I was a Reddit junkie too, but Twitter and Reddit scratched totally different itches and I sought replacements for both. I like Tildes but it doesn't fill the void Twitter left, only the void of Reddit.
For me at least, Facebook is a place where a lot of real life people and family go and I need to think about what I said - it'll get seen by my friends and grandma both, and has a wide audience. Same for Instagram, and image focused never worked for me.
Reddit was entertainment and questions and general stuff, nothing personal and mostly talking to and reading stuff strangers wrote.
Twitter was somewhere in between. My grandma didn't have it, a few real life friends did but it wasn't as wide a net. I had online friends I basically only spoke to on Twitter, people I didn't know, but my tweets were about me and my life. It was like the perfect mix of internet anonymity while still building online friendships and meeting acquaintances, much more so than Reddit.
And no, Bluesky isn't the ideal replacement, neither is Threads, but both are trying at least. It's something.
Mm, that's a good point. I know one of the points I've seen a lot of people complain about though is the image compression - I know that's one of the things that keeps me from using it for art, at least. The character limit's also a negative for me on all fronts - I like to include some thoughts about my art alongside it, as well as just ramble in general about stuff that's on my mind, and for someone as long-winded as I am, a 280-character limit just doesn't cut it, lol.
I think it might help to treat Twitter like exposure/marketing: post the compressed drawing there, and a link to a higher-definition version where you can ramble about it in full. That said, I do wish there was some more mainstream dedicated space for sharing art and other creative projects. Instagram exists, but I just really don't like it. The largest one I can think of is DeviantArt, which is... well, something, I guess.
Crypto involvement is such a red flag to me. As soon as I see someone post / like / share anything about crypto I immediately assume anything from them in the future is going to be some way to pump the value of their random number generators. It's like MLM, except you don't even get any overpriced makeup, or juice concentrate, or smelly candles or whatever.
Even if it means that bluesky’s use of crypto (private key-signed state changes, merkleized data structures, DIDs) makes the underlying social network built on atproto “billionaire-proof”?
To clarify, in my parent comment here - by crypto, I mean cryptocurrency. Cryptography and the like is fine, and I'm all in favour of secure, encrypted platforms. If that's genuinely the only kind of crypto that ever touches BlueSky, that's fine by me. If they were just, like, keen on cryptography in general, that'd be fine.
The fact they've been involved in cryptocurrency, on the other hand, makes me immediately very wary, what with the overwhelming number of frauds and scams in the crypto economy. That's more than enough for me to be suspicious of their intentions here, honestly.
To be clear, is it cryptocurrency technology that you’re suspicious of or crypto economy?
Reason I ask is because bluesky already uses cryptocurrency technologies like DIDs (originally designed by a bitcoiner) and IPLDs (from protocol labs), but bluesky/atproto as it stands today can’t hold a crypto economy (there’s no txn census mechanism, way to prevent double-spends, etc.)
It's not really the technology itself that makes me cautious - it's the intentions of the people behind it. Even if they're limited in what they can do with the site itself, I'm extremely skeptical of the intentions of billionaires and CEOS and the like who have strong connections to the crypto ecosystem.
Basically like Krawler said - I don't trust that their goal with BlueSky isn't to pump up the value of whatever cryptocoins they own.
Apologies if I'm not making sense or explaining this well. I'm very tired and drained right now.
Even if it were finished, I'm not entirely sure that what it offers is any different to what we have now. BlueSky is the exact same thing as Twitter ten years ago, and X now, and Mastadon, and Countersocial, and Threads, et al.
I lost interest in it after a couple of days. They're all just a homogeneous mass now.
To me, it being similar is kind of the point.
I never wanted anything super different from Twitter. I just want Twitter without Elon and his army of free roaming nazis.
I don't think bluesky is perfect by any means, neither is Threads. Or mastodon. But I have to wonder - how many people commenting here actually loved Twitter before Elon took over? Because if Twitter never really did much for you, it just means you were never really the target audience of the new apps to begin with.
It's totally fine if you want more from an app, and obviously twitter isn't for everyone, but I think there is also a case of 'if you enjoy deeper discussion without a text limit, try a tildes or a reddit or a totally different platform, because neither Twitter nor bluesky were meant to do exactly that'.
I also observed that. One group is now on twitter and soon another will be on blsky(maybe). I don't think it'll result in any good and open discussion.
This has been my experience too. Both the web app and the mobile app just feel unfinished. Also doesn't help that it's a massive echo chamber right now because of the invite system.
As someone who never really used twitter, I haven't really needed a replacement. The reason I'm commenting is because I'm one of the people who left reddit. As far as I'm concerned, Tildes has replaced 99.9 percent of what I used reddit for in the first place. Bluesky doesn't seem like a service I'd really need in my life at the moment.
Too soon to say. There have been other services that’s hard to get invites for. We won’t know how good it is for a while, because it’s under construction and the social dynamics will be different later.
I wonder if people still remember https://ffffound.com/
What's that?
A tumblr like invite only site. Here's an archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20160208014604/http://ffffound.com/about
I received an invite a few months ago and lost interest after a few weeks, perhaps because there wasn't much interesting content of my liking. I have three invite codes; DM me if you want one.
Edit: all invite codes gone.
A lot of my network on twitter is in the process of migrating to bluesky but I have yet to get an invite myself, so I'm just twiddling my thumbs until I do.
bsky-social-k5ikw-vwmq4
Enjoy.
Shoot, I think someone snagged that code before I could use it. Appreciate it anyway!
I'll PM one to you
Appreciated!
My favorite Social site is the pub down the street.
I suppose this'll count as noise. I tried, but I couldn't get an invite code to sign up. Then again, seeing the way Mastodon and the other alternatives have been, I'm not really sure Bluesky is going to be a platform I'd wanna use either. I can't judge it yet, but for now, I'll continue occasionally scrolling on Twitter, mostly for my F1, music and movie content.
I got an Invite and I checked it out. Not worth it at all. The post are so empty, for now it feels like twitter-hater-circlejerk. I don't have any invite code at the moment.
That's exactly it. For the topics I want to follow, these platforms are too empty. I know, they need more userbase and I'm contributing to the issue by not joining, but I'm also on social media for a reason: to be social, and to see others' social activity. This is where these alternatives fail sometimes, plus the original-platform-hating circlejerk you've already mentioned.
I saw people on Bluesky saying that the fediverse sucks and that federation is bad, and I feel like there's some users that don't know that Bluesky is eventually going to federate too. I feel like Bluesky is just a place to test the AT protocol and a lot of its current users don't understand that.
And why AT? Why not use the existing ActivityPub?
The reason I read was that ActivityPub's account migration isn't very good so they decided to make a new protocol
It's just FOMO. This is the new platform by the "creator" of Twitter (note: Jack Dorsey has done some very questionable things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8N0xN0ihMA) and people don't know where to go. It doesn't do anything that ActivityPub didn't already do, so I don't get what the point is.
I think there’s some things atproto does that activitypub does not, namely enables a global view layer (instance selection doesn’t matter), and account and data portability provided by your root decentralized identity document (DID) and authenticated, replicated, merkleized content-addressable data so you can always seamlessly exit your instance once they enable federation.
If you don’t want those things then ActivityPub is the better choice.
Apathetic. At this point, I'm even losing my drive to be an active Fediverse poster. If I'm on social media, nested comments are my preferred format.
Even for the artists, I've come to realize that I'm mostly interested in specific fandom artists. They already have their niche homes elsewhere (or at least sites willing to welcome them once they stop posting to X)
Big pass for me. I didn't like Twitter before Elon's takeover, and I'm definitely not expecting to like Twitter-by-another-name.
Needing invites isn't a problem for me, but I wasn't going to try Bluesky either way.
So, I don’t know about bluesky. But there needs to be a place where everyone who wants to can be (although not necessarily allowed to say whatever they want).
Big ol' sack of meh.
I have some codes left. If somebody is still interested message me.
*edit All gone. More in two weeks.
As a Twitter refugee, I find Bluesky to be the closest experience to Twitter, minus the frustrating promoted tweets or ads. Yes, it is still in its early stages and remains a small platform with limited capabilities for now, but I find it useful and engaging enough to stay away from the alternative that some of its members consider the ultimate best social media platform (yes, I meant Mastodon).