Congrats! And happy anniversary 🎉 I have learned a lot with your blog, even though I'm not always 100% in agreement. I think your project is very worthwhile especially in our troubled times. Keep it up!
I'm living comfortably under a rock here, with limited consumption of advertisements and breathless look-at-this-great-tech advertorials. So I didn't even recognize the name "Bluesky". I could google it, but it's reasonable to predict that their site will be long on superlatives, short on the kind of substantive information which would tell me whether I'd ever be interested in joining it.
So here are some questions for you, who are presumably a user:
- is it specialized in soundbites, like Twitter? I.e. is there a character limit too short for nuance?
- is there an algorithm deciding what users see, that isn't something simple like "whoever they follow, in the order in which they posted"? Can the users override the algorithm, and get something simple, like LiveJournal and derivative systems, rather than whatever the supplier thinks will most boost their "engagement" or similar?
- is there a complete set of privacy and troll-control tools available to users?
- With regard to privacy, is widespread sharing to strangers opt-in or opt-out?
Hi DinoNerd. Before Musk ruined X, there used to be a great 1-2 on Twitter/Substack. People like me would write an essay on Substack and then promote it with a summary on Twitter. Musk reprogrammed the algos to punish Substack links this year. A lot of us are hoping that Bluesky will be a good substitute, although it's not there yet.
The way Dorsey is creating a buzz is by making it invitation-only. Users get about one invitation per fortnight, so it can grow in an exponential way. I'm sure it will fully open one day. It's not a bad marketing strategy, although it is still much too quiet.
- Yes, it's kind of like Twitter but sanely run. I think the magic will happen with 1-2 links to essays (as mentioned above), but it's still early days.
- Bluesky will be moderated, eventually. At the moment, it is quite civilised, due to the invite-only policy. People are unlikely to invite in trolls! More here: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
- I'm not sure about privacy. Sorry!
Do you want my next invite code? If so, let me know where to send it to. The next one should come in about a fortnight.
I've just spent a bit of time reading on their site, and I think joining Bluesky could be an interesting experiment for me. I'm particularly tempted by the custom feed feature; as a retired software engineer, I feel reasonably sure I could take the code they posted and adapt it to do whatever I wanted. Of course that would only be useful if I had a feed that was big enough to benefit from smart sorting. But a fun potential project.
Great! I'll send you my next code in roughly a fortnight. I think that building custom feeds sounds like a cool project. On the second point, Bluesky is still a long way from critical mass, but it is growing exponentially. It has gone past 2m users just two months after going through 1m. https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23964400/bluesky-public-web-access-federated-2-million-users
Congrats! And happy anniversary 🎉 I have learned a lot with your blog, even though I'm not always 100% in agreement. I think your project is very worthwhile especially in our troubled times. Keep it up!
Thanks, Alex!
I'm living comfortably under a rock here, with limited consumption of advertisements and breathless look-at-this-great-tech advertorials. So I didn't even recognize the name "Bluesky". I could google it, but it's reasonable to predict that their site will be long on superlatives, short on the kind of substantive information which would tell me whether I'd ever be interested in joining it.
So here are some questions for you, who are presumably a user:
- is it specialized in soundbites, like Twitter? I.e. is there a character limit too short for nuance?
- is there an algorithm deciding what users see, that isn't something simple like "whoever they follow, in the order in which they posted"? Can the users override the algorithm, and get something simple, like LiveJournal and derivative systems, rather than whatever the supplier thinks will most boost their "engagement" or similar?
- is there a complete set of privacy and troll-control tools available to users?
- With regard to privacy, is widespread sharing to strangers opt-in or opt-out?
Hi DinoNerd. Before Musk ruined X, there used to be a great 1-2 on Twitter/Substack. People like me would write an essay on Substack and then promote it with a summary on Twitter. Musk reprogrammed the algos to punish Substack links this year. A lot of us are hoping that Bluesky will be a good substitute, although it's not there yet.
The way Dorsey is creating a buzz is by making it invitation-only. Users get about one invitation per fortnight, so it can grow in an exponential way. I'm sure it will fully open one day. It's not a bad marketing strategy, although it is still much too quiet.
- Yes, it's kind of like Twitter but sanely run. I think the magic will happen with 1-2 links to essays (as mentioned above), but it's still early days.
- Yes, it's algorithmic, but it wants to create a marketplace of different algorithms, which makes it very personalised. More here: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice
- Bluesky will be moderated, eventually. At the moment, it is quite civilised, due to the invite-only policy. People are unlikely to invite in trolls! More here: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
- I'm not sure about privacy. Sorry!
Do you want my next invite code? If so, let me know where to send it to. The next one should come in about a fortnight.
Yes please. arlie dot stephens at gmail dot com
I've just spent a bit of time reading on their site, and I think joining Bluesky could be an interesting experiment for me. I'm particularly tempted by the custom feed feature; as a retired software engineer, I feel reasonably sure I could take the code they posted and adapt it to do whatever I wanted. Of course that would only be useful if I had a feed that was big enough to benefit from smart sorting. But a fun potential project.
I just sent you a code from my Hotmail. If you don't see it in your inbox, please check your spam folders.
Thank you
Great! I'll send you my next code in roughly a fortnight. I think that building custom feeds sounds like a cool project. On the second point, Bluesky is still a long way from critical mass, but it is growing exponentially. It has gone past 2m users just two months after going through 1m. https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23964400/bluesky-public-web-access-federated-2-million-users
And how do the founders intend for it to make a profit, once they burn through their VC funding? Ads? Fee-for-membership? Something else?
The founders are talking about custom domains... https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan (Also, please check out my previous reply)