There is a good subset of Bluesky - certainly, I can see from my "Popular With Friends" feed that most people I view are actively against the insane rhetoric on the platform calling Jay a "temu...
There is a good subset of Bluesky - certainly, I can see from my "Popular With Friends" feed that most people I view are actively against the insane rhetoric on the platform calling Jay a "temu Elon".
But the reality is that the platform has suffered, from my perspective because of people like Rachael Maddow bringing an onslaught of people who've only ever touched Facebook before. I've had my own annoying experiences on the platform. The reality is that there is a significant portion of the left-wing who have just become a mirror image of the right, and it is just a noxious experience to be around them.
Those are Tumblr, Reddit, and (pre-Elon) Twitter people more than Facebook people I think. All of those platforms took measures to excise them from the communities and, in most cases, it’s been an...
Those are Tumblr, Reddit, and (pre-Elon) Twitter people more than Facebook people I think. All of those platforms took measures to excise them from the communities and, in most cases, it’s been an improvement as long as they didn’t go Nazi in the process.
I briefly delved into the Fediverse platforms that ended up as landing zones for them and every time I peek in the scene seems to be getting more unhinged, more divorced from any sort of tangible reality, with darker and more nihilistic and violent rhetoric.
That said there actually aren’t THAT many of them they just post a lot on everything all day. Simply subscribing to a community managed moderation list, like Skywatch Blue/Anti-ALF Aktion, scrubs almost all of that nonsense off your feed and the way blocks on BlueSky work it means those accounts functionally don’t exist for you unless someone you follow is engaging with them.
I have it supplemented with a couple of lists I maintain called whinge mongers, and angry anime avatars (you can probably guess who goes in each) and I’ve barely needed to touch them after the first couple of weeks of adding accounts. As I said, there really aren’t that many of these people and they all network with each other to coordinate dogpiles so even if the odd one isn’t in your net they can’t get critical mass of users to come after you because, being blocked, they will never see any of your content to get mad or attack you over.
Is the platform genuinely useful for anything? When I joined, my feed was about 20% random pictures of stuff and 80% incredibly extreme leftist US politics. I spent perhaps a week clicking "not...
Is the platform genuinely useful for anything? When I joined, my feed was about 20% random pictures of stuff and 80% incredibly extreme leftist US politics. I spent perhaps a week clicking "not interested" on every single one of those posts and it didn't matter. Filters didn't help because a ton of them were pictures of text (extremely annoying practice).
You need to search for some favorite people/artists/news-outlets and follow those. Having a good follow list is sort of necassary for that kind of site to work. Bluesky also probably isn't your...
You need to search for some favorite people/artists/news-outlets and follow those. Having a good follow list is sort of necassary for that kind of site to work.
Bluesky also probably isn't your platform if you're not into the leftist side of things. It is naturally going to lean away from anything X is doing, so leftists like me are going to gravitate to it for the ambient background noise that it brings.
I follow a lot of authors, podcasters, lawyers and journalists and I have some feeds that are specialized to free news articles, speculative fiction or "long reads" (substacks or other long form...
I follow a lot of authors, podcasters, lawyers and journalists and I have some feeds that are specialized to free news articles, speculative fiction or "long reads" (substacks or other long form articles.)
I mostly stick to the following feed since it's literally just the most recent. I haven't tried to curate the way you're doing it, rather just actively following people or orgs I want to hear from
I don't get images replacing text often, but when I do it's people I want to see it from (also alt-text helps)
You know I don't see as much dropout stuff on Blue sky. I am now curious about whether I ended up following them in a feed instead of directly. But I mostly follow those folks on Tiktok and...
You know I don't see as much dropout stuff on Blue sky. I am now curious about whether I ended up following them in a feed instead of directly. But I mostly follow those folks on Tiktok and technically on Instagram, but I don't use it.
I haven't been back in a while so I'm not sure. It's also entirely possible they're hunkering down just quietly making good content instead of being loud on social media right now.... something...
I haven't been back in a while so I'm not sure. It's also entirely possible they're hunkering down just quietly making good content instead of being loud on social media right now.... something something do not disturb the waters / look into the Palantir etc
They're Sam Reich (former secretary of labour Reich's kid), Brennan Lee Mulligan, and a bunch of college humour comedians plus other recurring talents https://blueskystarterpack.com/dropout
They're Sam Reich (former secretary of labour Reich's kid), Brennan Lee Mulligan, and a bunch of college humour comedians plus other recurring talents
Yes, it's quite a wasteland until you start curating it. You can subscribe to any feeds you want - the trouble is finding good ones. I deleted the defaults other than the "following" feed. Another...
Yes, it's quite a wasteland until you start curating it. You can subscribe to any feeds you want - the trouble is finding good ones. I deleted the defaults other than the "following" feed.
Another I've found that's useful is "quiet posters", which has posts and replies from people you follow who don't post that often.
But that assumes you've found interesting people to follow, and for me that's grown very slowly over time.
I don't see "not interested" in the web UI for Bluesky. I thought that was a Facebook thing?
I haven't used BlueSky in like a year or more but any examples? Whenever I was on it was more just "hurr durr, Trump bad" levels of politics, i.e. pretty generic liberal takes (that weren't...
incredibly extreme leftist US politics
I haven't used BlueSky in like a year or more but any examples? Whenever I was on it was more just "hurr durr, Trump bad" levels of politics, i.e. pretty generic liberal takes (that weren't exactly interesting or anything, just definitely not extreme leftist takes).
Well I stopped using it after public conversations about something something assassinations are good actually violent uprising capitalist class must be purged, but I don't recall the exact details...
Well I stopped using it after public conversations about something something assassinations are good actually violent uprising capitalist class must be purged, but I don't recall the exact details since it was a while ago. And yeah of course majority was trump bad elon bad etc. I just personally don't want to engage with that type of userbase, have enough of that on reddit.
You'll find political groups on any social media if they don't outright ban political discussions. Especially in trying times like this. I even remember the politics group on Gamefaqs way back in...
. I just personally don't want to engage with that type of userbase, have enough of that on reddit.
You'll find political groups on any social media if they don't outright ban political discussions. Especially in trying times like this. I even remember the politics group on Gamefaqs way back in the day.
The main thing I look for is how easily I can filter and tailor my feed. People seemed to have given this up to the app to determine, but I will adjust every knob I can.
Well I barely use it (and barely use Twitter) so I can't really say. I'm just posting a reason I bounce off of stuff like TikTok. It might be an r/all vs "my subreddit" situation. The default...
Well I barely use it (and barely use Twitter) so I can't really say. I'm just posting a reason I bounce off of stuff like TikTok.
It might be an r/all vs "my subreddit" situation. The default sucks but you can curate a list and browse that instead.
I think it's similar to that. I have a list of people I follow, and those are the only posts I see on Bluesky. I normally find new people by them being reposted by someone I follow, and if someone...
I think it's similar to that. I have a list of people I follow, and those are the only posts I see on Bluesky. I normally find new people by them being reposted by someone I follow, and if someone I follow is making too much noise I unfollow them again. My resulting feed has a bit of noise, but it's mostly stuff I'm interested in.
I know there's also the discover feed, but that's been pretty rubbish in my experience. There are some alternative feeds that you can subscribe to, but I find they're also a bit hit-and-miss, so I mostly stick to the people I've specifically chosen to follow.
The default feed is a chronological view of everyone you follow, no algorithmic sleight of hand. If you see objectionable content, you're following the person posting it and have a quick and easy...
The default feed is a chronological view of everyone you follow, no algorithmic sleight of hand. If you see objectionable content, you're following the person posting it and have a quick and easy resolution. Other feeds like Discover you have little influence on. Some feeds strike a good balance, like Popular with Friends, which shows you content from the people you follow, as well as content that they've liked, allowing you to discover new people and things in your feed (without relying on reposts) while still having a strong degree of influence.
It's doubly not true in the ex-communist part of Europe. I see leftist americans saying it all the time on the dumber platforms like instagram or reddit and it's a bit frustrating. Though it's...
It's doubly not true in the ex-communist part of Europe. I see leftist americans saying it all the time on the dumber platforms like instagram or reddit and it's a bit frustrating.
Though it's partially an artifact of not separating leftist economic policies and socially progressive policies. The saying is probably still true when talking only about economy and only about mainstream US politicians.
BlueSky reminds me of Obama-era Twitter. I didn't much care for Obama-era Twitter, despite being orders of magnitude better than the current Musk-era Twitter.
BlueSky reminds me of Obama-era Twitter. I didn't much care for Obama-era Twitter, despite being orders of magnitude better than the current Musk-era Twitter.
What's nice for me is I can read the news if I want or hear about one of my favorite author's D&D sessions. (She has a great storytelling style, naturally.) Or I can read a detailed analysis of a...
What's nice for me is I can read the news if I want or hear about one of my favorite author's D&D sessions. (She has a great storytelling style, naturally.) Or I can read a detailed analysis of a SCOTUS ruling by a lawyer, and read the conversation between them. I get a lot of great short stories and SFF book recs too.
Idk I like it because of how un-twitterlike it is, because I can curate my shit and engage with what I want, and block assholes when they show up.
It absolutely depends on the people you follow. I have two bluesky accounts for different things. And on one account all I have are art people. So I just get a lot of art and creative stuff....
It absolutely depends on the people you follow.
I have two bluesky accounts for different things. And on one account all I have are art people. So I just get a lot of art and creative stuff. Whenever someone gets too political, I unfollow them. Because I just wanted a feed about art. It's working pretty well so far.
My other account is a little harder to curate. I just wanted science related things or sci fi related things. And a lot of the accounts get very political in the middle of their posts about science or sci fi art.
I guess that's the nature of sci fi or science.
I'm in the middle of curating this account because it's relatively new. I've been unfollowing a LOT of people.
It's a bit irritating that there's no easy way to say "I'm interested in this person's X posts, but not their Y posts". I followed a board game designer for a while, and it was interesting seeing...
It's a bit irritating that there's no easy way to say "I'm interested in this person's X posts, but not their Y posts". I followed a board game designer for a while, and it was interesting seeing what she was working on and thinking about, except that she was also constantly posting about her sex life and I'm far too prudish and British to read about that.
I am quite impressed that YouTube can figure out which kind of videos I'm interested in if a channel produces multiple different series or kinds of content, but I guess that's back to algorithmically driven feeds again.
In theory, if one person is posting on two different topics, you'd expect those posts to be appreciated by different groups in different ways. So for someone with a large enough number of posts...
In theory, if one person is posting on two different topics, you'd expect those posts to be appreciated by different groups in different ways. So for someone with a large enough number of posts and distinct enough groups of readers, you could automatically divide their posts up based on how many likes they get and who likes them. I assume YouTube does this to a certain extent, because there are certain channels where I only see the half of their output that I'm interested in, and the rest doesn't get shown to me at all.
But like I say, that's something you can only do with a recommendation algorithm, and part of what I like about the Following feed is that there is no complicated algorithm.
Most people on a microblogging type platform aren’t interested in putting that much thought into it. That’s the whole appeal of it, even to actual content creators. If they felt the content was...
Most people on a microblogging type platform aren’t interested in putting that much thought into it. That’s the whole appeal of it, even to actual content creators. If they felt the content was worth investing real time into, rather than idle time while on the John, they’d have published it as a blog or a podcast or something.
Sure, that's why I'm saying that an algorithm could do the sorting for you, and figure out which posts from a person you want to see, and which posts you don't, without them having to tag them in...
Sure, that's why I'm saying that an algorithm could do the sorting for you, and figure out which posts from a person you want to see, and which posts you don't, without them having to tag them in any way.
It doesn't depend on the people you follow, that's the default experience when you first sign up into the app. I just thought it was supposed to be some actually good X/twitter alternative when in...
It doesn't depend on the people you follow, that's the default experience when you first sign up into the app. I just thought it was supposed to be some actually good X/twitter alternative when in reality it's exactly the same just with a leftist flavor.
There are multiple feeds and the "Discover" one uses a Twitter-style algorithm, but the "Following" one is just a straight chronological timeline of people you follow. I mainly use that, and then...
There are multiple feeds and the "Discover" one uses a Twitter-style algorithm, but the "Following" one is just a straight chronological timeline of people you follow. I mainly use that, and then add people to it if I've seen an interesting post from them or prune them out if there's too much noise that I don't want to see. That works very well for me - I get a bit of US politics because it's just painfully difficult to completely shut that out these days, but most of what I see is interesting tech articles with a mix of board game and RPG news.
There are other third-party feeds that you can subscribe to, each with their own algorithms, but I've not had much success with those.
As I said, I just joined the platform. Obviously I don't follow anyone so the "Following" feed is just empty. I didn't find anyone worth following in the "Discover" feed.
As I said, I just joined the platform. Obviously I don't follow anyone so the "Following" feed is just empty. I didn't find anyone worth following in the "Discover" feed.
As large of an audience as possible to express how outraged you are about something. This is why the linked story is more of a feature of BlueSky than a bug. As with twitter, the fun thing about...
As large of an audience as possible to express how outraged you are about something. This is why the linked story is more of a feature of BlueSky than a bug. As with twitter, the fun thing about the platform has always been tapping into the collective action of a huge number of people. Contrary to other posters, I think curating is actual missing the real essence. In the Wild West, suddenly you get to ride a huge wave. But the reality is that outage and witch hunts are the main generators of interest (or at least the algorithm has decided that prioritize it), so that’s what we are left with.
The nice thing is you can dip your toe in with the Discover and Popular with Friends feeds too or set a separate feed for the wild west. For me it works better to have my default curated, but...
The nice thing is you can dip your toe in with the Discover and Popular with Friends feeds too or set a separate feed for the wild west. For me it works better to have my default curated, but using feeds to curate works too. I enjoy my experience and don't feel the need to argue with racists or transphobes and mostly that's nice
I don't use bluesky all that much, but it allows you to make custom feeds based on hand-picked lists of users (yours or someone else's), and that feature is the key to enjoying the site at all for...
I don't use bluesky all that much, but it allows you to make custom feeds based on hand-picked lists of users (yours or someone else's), and that feature is the key to enjoying the site at all for me when I do use it. The default discover feed is not great in my experience but I've got a few better feeds that I occasionally enjoy browsing through.
Here’s some joking about what it’s like now. There are hints that they are working on better moderation. Bluesky sort of reminds me of email before spam filters became effective. It was (and is)...
There are hints that they are working on better moderation.
Bluesky sort of reminds me of email before spam filters became effective. It was (and is) cool that you could send an email to anyone, but it has its downsides. Similarly, you can reply to just about anyone on Bluesky (if they haven’t blocked you) but off-topic reply spam on popular posts has gotten out of hand.
I’m subscribed to a couple of moderation lists and I see almost none of this. The decentralized moderation tools work very well if people are willing to use them, and I think it’s a better system...
I’m subscribed to a couple of moderation lists and I see almost none of this. The decentralized moderation tools work very well if people are willing to use them, and I think it’s a better system for managing an open protocol than requiring super active moderation at the administrator level.
Which lists do you use? I don't know how to find good moderation lists. These things help, but it's sort of like ad blocking in that the website still looks terrible to other people.
Which lists do you use? I don't know how to find good moderation lists.
These things help, but it's sort of like ad blocking in that the website still looks terrible to other people.
Unfortunately BlueSky doesn’t actually have any way to find moderation lists. As far as I know the only way is to get linked to them. One secondary moderation service is Skywatch Blue which has a...
Unfortunately BlueSky doesn’t actually have any way to find moderation lists. As far as I know the only way is to get linked to them.
One secondary moderation service is Skywatch Blue which has a bunch of lists you can subscribe to and opt to either hide or block the ones on it.
I follow a couple of other one off ones too but I don’t think they’re actively being maintained. Gender Trolls
Thanks! An annoying thing about finding good alternatives on Bluesky is that people don't explain stuff. Like, for example: I had no idea. But there's an explanation here. Writing an "about" web...
Thanks!
An annoying thing about finding good alternatives on Bluesky is that people don't explain stuff. Like, for example:
Oldhead shibboleths like that are fine IMO. I figured it was a meme or inside joke sort of thing I was out of the loop on and was fairly confident that if it signified something important a...
Oldhead shibboleths like that are fine IMO. I figured it was a meme or inside joke sort of thing I was out of the loop on and was fairly confident that if it signified something important a certain contingent of people would never shut up about it and I’d find out that way.
Thank you for posting these! A few times I ventured out into general "Blue Sky" posts and I just saw the same recycled rantings from other platforms. I do pretty good and do not feel like I miss...
Thank you for posting these!
A few times I ventured out into general "Blue Sky" posts and I just saw the same recycled rantings from other platforms. I do pretty good and do not feel like I miss anything by only sticking to a feed of people I follow.
This is just a basic bit of internet hygiene I think people need to have. Don’t rely on the platform to tell you what to read/watch! Follow people you like and listen to them. If you don’t see...
This is just a basic bit of internet hygiene I think people need to have. Don’t rely on the platform to tell you what to read/watch! Follow people you like and listen to them. If you don’t see anything worth reading then go touch grass instead of refreshing.
I got completely lost about halfway through when the 3rd or 4th layer of people came in to call everyone pedophiles. I'm not even sure what point he was trying to make.
I got completely lost about halfway through when the 3rd or 4th layer of people came in to call everyone pedophiles. I'm not even sure what point he was trying to make.
Jay's feed is exhibit A for off-topic reply spam. People will just post Palestinian political activism in response to any popular post. Contrast to Tildes where we tag topics as politics for...
Jay's feed is exhibit A for off-topic reply spam. People will just post Palestinian political activism in response to any popular post.
Contrast to Tildes where we tag topics as politics for people who don't want to read it.
I've been on Mastodon a long time. After the election, I tried to get myself to being just "whelmed" instead of "overwhelmed". I put in filters for 50 keywords having to do with politics. I still...
I've been on Mastodon a long time. After the election, I tried to get myself to being just "whelmed" instead of "overwhelmed". I put in filters for 50 keywords having to do with politics. I still got plenty of politics in my feeds. Many, many, many people, just refused to tag their posts.
Well, I. can still post Palestinian political activism in response to any popular post here. The difference is that this place is easier to moderate. And the self moderation tools ("off topic" tag...
Well, I. can still post Palestinian political activism in response to any popular post here. The difference is that this place is easier to moderate. And the self moderation tools ("off topic" tag in this case) can help minimize potential spam like that.
If course, the people here are also specifically curated and are simply less likely to do this. Any soammers would be quickly culled, and ban evasion is much harder here
I don't follow the thread format. What exactly is the post "WAFFLES" a response to? Parts of the page say that you need an account to view them, so I am clearly missing some context.
I don't follow the thread format. What exactly is the post "WAFFLES" a response to?
Parts of the page say that you need an account to view them, so I am clearly missing some context.
Okay, the Jerry Chen post is the start and it is unavailable to view without an account. Now at least I follow the thread despite it seeming pretty random to me still. The name "Jesse Singal" also...
Okay, the Jerry Chen post is the start and it is unavailable to view without an account. Now at least I follow the thread despite it seeming pretty random to me still.
The name "Jesse Singal" also meant nothing to me until seeing this thread so I guess I am just not the intended audience.
This just goes back to my core problem with twitter style media in that it's DESIGNED to cause confusion, non sequitors, gotchas, and everything else awful from the UI/UX down.
This just goes back to my core problem with twitter style media in that it's DESIGNED to cause confusion, non sequitors, gotchas, and everything else awful from the UI/UX down.
"Jay" is reposting a skeet that says that Bluesky users would see the name of Waffle House and yell "oh so you hate pancakes?!?" Mocking them for off topic, unnecessary assumptions where if you...
"Jay" is reposting a skeet that says that Bluesky users would see the name of Waffle House and yell "oh so you hate pancakes?!?" Mocking them for off topic, unnecessary assumptions where if you don't mention "a, and b, and c" you're clearly excluding "b and c". That is, waffle house is clearly discriminating against pancakes (this is something I've seen in other places, and it's adjacent to the "here's a recipe for bean soup" "I dont like beans" sort of response IMO)
So when someone replies to her about Jesse Singal, which is at minimum "off topic" if not quite in that format, she yells "waffles". The caps lock is just yelling
I take this as her doing a "you're proving my point" sort of thing but also, IMO she's too easily baited and needs not to reply to users.
I was going to say that people should probably be careful googling "skeet" with safesearch off, but I tried it and it's just stuff about shotgun sports. I'm probably poisoned by being in...
I was going to say that people should probably be careful googling "skeet" with safesearch off, but I tried it and it's just stuff about shotgun sports. I'm probably poisoned by being in highschool, in Georgia, in 2004, at the height of Lil Jon's popularity, but that's not the first thing that I think of when people talk about skeeting 😅
I wish more people adopted mastodon. I understand why it hasn't become as popular- the amount of friction involved in signing up is greater than any of these other social networks, even though it...
I wish more people adopted mastodon. I understand why it hasn't become as popular- the amount of friction involved in signing up is greater than any of these other social networks, even though it isn't truly that difficult.
I've seen some arguments here against mastodon due to the lack of moderation on some instances, possibly even on the "main" one. But the tools you have to block or mute people, filter out posts with keywords for a certain period of time (or infinitely), have those filtered posts show collapsed or not at all... it's more powerful than anything I've ever used.
Is it perfect? Far from it. But it's the only twitter-like platform I've ever regularly engaged with due to how much I can tailor my feed, and not be a victim of "the algorithm" other social networks employ.
I use both, and I still use Twitter a little as well. They are different communities and I follow different people. I consider Bluesky to be work in progress - they might get to actually...
I use both, and I still use Twitter a little as well. They are different communities and I follow different people.
I consider Bluesky to be work in progress - they might get to actually decentralized eventually. Apparently Blacksky is getting pretty close to being independent? However, I suspect it's mostly a one-man project.
There is a good subset of Bluesky - certainly, I can see from my "Popular With Friends" feed that most people I view are actively against the insane rhetoric on the platform calling Jay a "temu Elon".
But the reality is that the platform has suffered, from my perspective because of people like Rachael Maddow bringing an onslaught of people who've only ever touched Facebook before. I've had my own annoying experiences on the platform. The reality is that there is a significant portion of the left-wing who have just become a mirror image of the right, and it is just a noxious experience to be around them.
Those are Tumblr, Reddit, and (pre-Elon) Twitter people more than Facebook people I think. All of those platforms took measures to excise them from the communities and, in most cases, it’s been an improvement as long as they didn’t go Nazi in the process.
I briefly delved into the Fediverse platforms that ended up as landing zones for them and every time I peek in the scene seems to be getting more unhinged, more divorced from any sort of tangible reality, with darker and more nihilistic and violent rhetoric.
That said there actually aren’t THAT many of them they just post a lot on everything all day. Simply subscribing to a community managed moderation list, like Skywatch Blue/Anti-ALF Aktion, scrubs almost all of that nonsense off your feed and the way blocks on BlueSky work it means those accounts functionally don’t exist for you unless someone you follow is engaging with them.
I have it supplemented with a couple of lists I maintain called whinge mongers, and angry anime avatars (you can probably guess who goes in each) and I’ve barely needed to touch them after the first couple of weeks of adding accounts. As I said, there really aren’t that many of these people and they all network with each other to coordinate dogpiles so even if the odd one isn’t in your net they can’t get critical mass of users to come after you because, being blocked, they will never see any of your content to get mad or attack you over.
Is the platform genuinely useful for anything? When I joined, my feed was about 20% random pictures of stuff and 80% incredibly extreme leftist US politics. I spent perhaps a week clicking "not interested" on every single one of those posts and it didn't matter. Filters didn't help because a ton of them were pictures of text (extremely annoying practice).
You need to search for some favorite people/artists/news-outlets and follow those. Having a good follow list is sort of necassary for that kind of site to work.
Bluesky also probably isn't your platform if you're not into the leftist side of things. It is naturally going to lean away from anything X is doing, so leftists like me are going to gravitate to it for the ambient background noise that it brings.
I follow a lot of authors, podcasters, lawyers and journalists and I have some feeds that are specialized to free news articles, speculative fiction or "long reads" (substacks or other long form articles.)
I mostly stick to the following feed since it's literally just the most recent. I haven't tried to curate the way you're doing it, rather just actively following people or orgs I want to hear from
I don't get images replacing text often, but when I do it's people I want to see it from (also alt-text helps)
I'm only very occasionally there for the Dropout crowd
You know I don't see as much dropout stuff on Blue sky. I am now curious about whether I ended up following them in a feed instead of directly. But I mostly follow those folks on Tiktok and technically on Instagram, but I don't use it.
Following creators you like is the whole point!
I haven't been back in a while so I'm not sure. It's also entirely possible they're hunkering down just quietly making good content instead of being loud on social media right now.... something something do not disturb the waters / look into the Palantir etc
Who are the Dropout crowd?
Dropout.TV the former College Humor, now turned streaming service - people who run Dimension 20 and appear in all the various shows on the channel
They're Sam Reich (former secretary of labour Reich's kid), Brennan Lee Mulligan, and a bunch of college humour comedians plus other recurring talents
https://blueskystarterpack.com/dropout
Yes, it's quite a wasteland until you start curating it. You can subscribe to any feeds you want - the trouble is finding good ones. I deleted the defaults other than the "following" feed.
Another I've found that's useful is "quiet posters", which has posts and replies from people you follow who don't post that often.
But that assumes you've found interesting people to follow, and for me that's grown very slowly over time.
I don't see "not interested" in the web UI for Bluesky. I thought that was a Facebook thing?
Yeah. I don't see not interested in Bluesky either. I thought I was missing a feature. Maybe I am.
I found it. It's in the "..." menu, but only for posts in the Discover feed, which I don't normally use.
I haven't used BlueSky in like a year or more but any examples? Whenever I was on it was more just "hurr durr, Trump bad" levels of politics, i.e. pretty generic liberal takes (that weren't exactly interesting or anything, just definitely not extreme leftist takes).
Well I stopped using it after public conversations about something something assassinations are good actually violent uprising capitalist class must be purged, but I don't recall the exact details since it was a while ago. And yeah of course majority was trump bad elon bad etc. I just personally don't want to engage with that type of userbase, have enough of that on reddit.
You'll find political groups on any social media if they don't outright ban political discussions. Especially in trying times like this. I even remember the politics group on Gamefaqs way back in the day.
The main thing I look for is how easily I can filter and tailor my feed. People seemed to have given this up to the app to determine, but I will adjust every knob I can.
As I said, it was extremely dominant in the default feed and I have tried fruitlessly to filter it out.
Well I barely use it (and barely use Twitter) so I can't really say. I'm just posting a reason I bounce off of stuff like TikTok.
It might be an r/all vs "my subreddit" situation. The default sucks but you can curate a list and browse that instead.
I think it's similar to that. I have a list of people I follow, and those are the only posts I see on Bluesky. I normally find new people by them being reposted by someone I follow, and if someone I follow is making too much noise I unfollow them again. My resulting feed has a bit of noise, but it's mostly stuff I'm interested in.
I know there's also the discover feed, but that's been pretty rubbish in my experience. There are some alternative feeds that you can subscribe to, but I find they're also a bit hit-and-miss, so I mostly stick to the people I've specifically chosen to follow.
The default feed is a chronological view of everyone you follow, no algorithmic sleight of hand. If you see objectionable content, you're following the person posting it and have a quick and easy resolution. Other feeds like Discover you have little influence on. Some feeds strike a good balance, like Popular with Friends, which shows you content from the people you follow, as well as content that they've liked, allowing you to discover new people and things in your feed (without relying on reposts) while still having a strong degree of influence.
We used to say in Europe that the most leftist american politician is like center-right in Europe. I don't think that's at all true anymore.
It's doubly not true in the ex-communist part of Europe. I see leftist americans saying it all the time on the dumber platforms like instagram or reddit and it's a bit frustrating.
Though it's partially an artifact of not separating leftist economic policies and socially progressive policies. The saying is probably still true when talking only about economy and only about mainstream US politicians.
BlueSky reminds me of Obama-era Twitter. I didn't much care for Obama-era Twitter, despite being orders of magnitude better than the current Musk-era Twitter.
What's nice for me is I can read the news if I want or hear about one of my favorite author's D&D sessions. (She has a great storytelling style, naturally.) Or I can read a detailed analysis of a SCOTUS ruling by a lawyer, and read the conversation between them. I get a lot of great short stories and SFF book recs too.
Idk I like it because of how un-twitterlike it is, because I can curate my shit and engage with what I want, and block assholes when they show up.
It absolutely depends on the people you follow.
I have two bluesky accounts for different things. And on one account all I have are art people. So I just get a lot of art and creative stuff. Whenever someone gets too political, I unfollow them. Because I just wanted a feed about art. It's working pretty well so far.
My other account is a little harder to curate. I just wanted science related things or sci fi related things. And a lot of the accounts get very political in the middle of their posts about science or sci fi art.
I guess that's the nature of sci fi or science.
I'm in the middle of curating this account because it's relatively new. I've been unfollowing a LOT of people.
It's a bit irritating that there's no easy way to say "I'm interested in this person's X posts, but not their Y posts". I followed a board game designer for a while, and it was interesting seeing what she was working on and thinking about, except that she was also constantly posting about her sex life and I'm far too prudish and British to read about that.
I am quite impressed that YouTube can figure out which kind of videos I'm interested in if a channel produces multiple different series or kinds of content, but I guess that's back to algorithmically driven feeds again.
The person would need to tag their posts for that to work, which it’s doubtful enough people would do to be worth it.
In theory, if one person is posting on two different topics, you'd expect those posts to be appreciated by different groups in different ways. So for someone with a large enough number of posts and distinct enough groups of readers, you could automatically divide their posts up based on how many likes they get and who likes them. I assume YouTube does this to a certain extent, because there are certain channels where I only see the half of their output that I'm interested in, and the rest doesn't get shown to me at all.
But like I say, that's something you can only do with a recommendation algorithm, and part of what I like about the Following feed is that there is no complicated algorithm.
Most people on a microblogging type platform aren’t interested in putting that much thought into it. That’s the whole appeal of it, even to actual content creators. If they felt the content was worth investing real time into, rather than idle time while on the John, they’d have published it as a blog or a podcast or something.
Sure, that's why I'm saying that an algorithm could do the sorting for you, and figure out which posts from a person you want to see, and which posts you don't, without them having to tag them in any way.
It doesn't depend on the people you follow, that's the default experience when you first sign up into the app. I just thought it was supposed to be some actually good X/twitter alternative when in reality it's exactly the same just with a leftist flavor.
There are multiple feeds and the "Discover" one uses a Twitter-style algorithm, but the "Following" one is just a straight chronological timeline of people you follow. I mainly use that, and then add people to it if I've seen an interesting post from them or prune them out if there's too much noise that I don't want to see. That works very well for me - I get a bit of US politics because it's just painfully difficult to completely shut that out these days, but most of what I see is interesting tech articles with a mix of board game and RPG news.
There are other third-party feeds that you can subscribe to, each with their own algorithms, but I've not had much success with those.
As I said, I just joined the platform. Obviously I don't follow anyone so the "Following" feed is just empty. I didn't find anyone worth following in the "Discover" feed.
As large of an audience as possible to express how outraged you are about something. This is why the linked story is more of a feature of BlueSky than a bug. As with twitter, the fun thing about the platform has always been tapping into the collective action of a huge number of people. Contrary to other posters, I think curating is actual missing the real essence. In the Wild West, suddenly you get to ride a huge wave. But the reality is that outage and witch hunts are the main generators of interest (or at least the algorithm has decided that prioritize it), so that’s what we are left with.
The nice thing is you can dip your toe in with the Discover and Popular with Friends feeds too or set a separate feed for the wild west. For me it works better to have my default curated, but using feeds to curate works too. I enjoy my experience and don't feel the need to argue with racists or transphobes and mostly that's nice
I don't use bluesky all that much, but it allows you to make custom feeds based on hand-picked lists of users (yours or someone else's), and that feature is the key to enjoying the site at all for me when I do use it. The default discover feed is not great in my experience but I've got a few better feeds that I occasionally enjoy browsing through.
Here’s some joking about what it’s like now.
There are hints that they are working on better moderation.
Bluesky sort of reminds me of email before spam filters became effective. It was (and is) cool that you could send an email to anyone, but it has its downsides. Similarly, you can reply to just about anyone on Bluesky (if they haven’t blocked you) but off-topic reply spam on popular posts has gotten out of hand.
I’m subscribed to a couple of moderation lists and I see almost none of this. The decentralized moderation tools work very well if people are willing to use them, and I think it’s a better system for managing an open protocol than requiring super active moderation at the administrator level.
Which lists do you use? I don't know how to find good moderation lists.
These things help, but it's sort of like ad blocking in that the website still looks terrible to other people.
Unfortunately BlueSky doesn’t actually have any way to find moderation lists. As far as I know the only way is to get linked to them.
One secondary moderation service is
Skywatch Blue which has a bunch of lists you can subscribe to and opt to either hide or block the ones on it.
I follow a couple of other one off ones too but I don’t think they’re actively being maintained.
Gender Trolls
Content scrapers
Thanks!
An annoying thing about finding good alternatives on Bluesky is that people don't explain stuff. Like, for example:
I had no idea. But there's an explanation here.
Writing an "about" web page explaining who you are and what you're trying to do is underrated.
Oldhead shibboleths like that are fine IMO. I figured it was a meme or inside joke sort of thing I was out of the loop on and was fairly confident that if it signified something important a certain contingent of people would never shut up about it and I’d find out that way.
Genuinely, there is just a point at which you don't want to have to explain a meme about a Muppet's penis.
Yeah, I can ignore those, but the project owners should still explain enough other stuff that you feel like you know who they are.
Alf definitely falls into some old lore. But a search would definitely get you answers and NSFW pics
Thank you for posting these!
A few times I ventured out into general "Blue Sky" posts and I just saw the same recycled rantings from other platforms. I do pretty good and do not feel like I miss anything by only sticking to a feed of people I follow.
This is just a basic bit of internet hygiene I think people need to have. Don’t rely on the platform to tell you what to read/watch! Follow people you like and listen to them. If you don’t see anything worth reading then go touch grass instead of refreshing.
I got completely lost about halfway through when the 3rd or 4th layer of people came in to call everyone pedophiles. I'm not even sure what point he was trying to make.
It was resurfaced after this post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.
Jay's feed is exhibit A for off-topic reply spam. People will just post Palestinian political activism in response to any popular post.
Contrast to Tildes where we tag topics as politics for people who don't want to read it.
One of the things I appreciate most about Mastodon is its culture of tagging and content warnings.
I've been on Mastodon a long time. After the election, I tried to get myself to being just "whelmed" instead of "overwhelmed". I put in filters for 50 keywords having to do with politics. I still got plenty of politics in my feeds. Many, many, many people, just refused to tag their posts.
The culture is sometimes better, but there is political spam on Mastodon too. Example.
1 post and 1 follower, how bad can he be? :-)
Thanks for the link, I muted him anyway.
Well, I. can still post Palestinian political activism in response to any popular post here. The difference is that this place is easier to moderate. And the self moderation tools ("off topic" tag in this case) can help minimize potential spam like that.
If course, the people here are also specifically curated and are simply less likely to do this. Any soammers would be quickly culled, and ban evasion is much harder here
I don't follow the thread format. What exactly is the post "WAFFLES" a response to?
Parts of the page say that you need an account to view them, so I am clearly missing some context.
Jerry Chen:
Jay reposts the above post and adds:
lucas responds to Jay’s post:
Jay responds:
Okay, the Jerry Chen post is the start and it is unavailable to view without an account. Now at least I follow the thread despite it seeming pretty random to me still.
The name "Jesse Singal" also meant nothing to me until seeing this thread so I guess I am just not the intended audience.
This just goes back to my core problem with twitter style media in that it's DESIGNED to cause confusion, non sequitors, gotchas, and everything else awful from the UI/UX down.
Yeah, after seeing this open mockery/deflection of people with legitimate concerns about harassers/doxxers I am inclined to leave.
I'm out of the loop. What is the significance of of posting the word "WAFFLES" in all upper case?
"Jay" is reposting a skeet that says that Bluesky users would see the name of Waffle House and yell "oh so you hate pancakes?!?" Mocking them for off topic, unnecessary assumptions where if you don't mention "a, and b, and c" you're clearly excluding "b and c". That is, waffle house is clearly discriminating against pancakes (this is something I've seen in other places, and it's adjacent to the "here's a recipe for bean soup" "I dont like beans" sort of response IMO)
So when someone replies to her about Jesse Singal, which is at minimum "off topic" if not quite in that format, she yells "waffles". The caps lock is just yelling
I take this as her doing a "you're proving my point" sort of thing but also, IMO she's too easily baited and needs not to reply to users.
jay is a she (unless i’ve missed something indicating they have decided to identify otherwise)
Nope I should have gone back to check and was taking my cue from someone else's fuck up.
Ty fixed
What is a "skeet" and who is Jesse Singal?
The former is a Bluesky post.
The latter is googleable. I don't mind being helpful but his name is in the title.
I assume it's a portmanteau of sky+tweet?
Basically. It's officially "post" but I guess it is on twitter now too.
I was going to say that people should probably be careful googling "skeet" with safesearch off, but I tried it and it's just stuff about shotgun sports. I'm probably poisoned by being in highschool, in Georgia, in 2004, at the height of Lil Jon's popularity, but that's not the first thing that I think of when people talk about skeeting 😅
That is why I was happy to answer that bit and not to send folks to Google.
Jay is female FYI.
Fixed, ty!
Thank you, for some reason I could not get my head around this interaction. Makes sense now.
I wish more people adopted mastodon. I understand why it hasn't become as popular- the amount of friction involved in signing up is greater than any of these other social networks, even though it isn't truly that difficult.
But it's actually decentralized, while bluesky is not decentralized (at least not currently/effectively). And Jack Dorsey left the bluesky team even though he was a core founding member, for some reasons I agree with, and others I don't.
I've seen some arguments here against mastodon due to the lack of moderation on some instances, possibly even on the "main" one. But the tools you have to block or mute people, filter out posts with keywords for a certain period of time (or infinitely), have those filtered posts show collapsed or not at all... it's more powerful than anything I've ever used.
Is it perfect? Far from it. But it's the only twitter-like platform I've ever regularly engaged with due to how much I can tailor my feed, and not be a victim of "the algorithm" other social networks employ.
I use both, and I still use Twitter a little as well. They are different communities and I follow different people.
I consider Bluesky to be work in progress - they might get to actually decentralized eventually. Apparently Blacksky is getting pretty close to being independent? However, I suspect it's mostly a one-man project.
Looks like more than that
GitHub
Yep. Thanks for checking!