Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky

The difference in moderation is night and day.

Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them).

That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.

Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.

> They don’t seem to offer anything new

Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.

'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.

Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.

But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.

There is more momentum against Musk now than when threads launched. Not sure it is enough to overcome the network effect - but there is a lot of illwill towards his projects.

I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.

IMO the biggest difference is that they aren’t paying users based on engagement. That’s the #1 worst decision Musk made after buying Twitter, it incentivizes people to post incendiary content, to troll and to outright lie in the aim of going viral. You see it all the time on Twitter these days and Bluesky is vastly better not having that motive.

As someone (who likes to think) is pretty unbiased politically, I can say I’ll go wherever the people I’m interested post. I have been somewhat surprised that pretty non political accounts have moved to Bluesky which I have interpreted as both political and motivated by the loads of political bs that are posted on x that normal people simply get tired of. I think Bluesky will gain more traction than threads but will end up being a more successful mastodon. A place where people with massive followings who simply don’t like x will post and there will be two competing apps.

>but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same

I disagree. Bluesky will grow further and then be like a "Coke or Pepsi" to Twitter. (Albeit, it will stay smaller than Twitter.)

I have 2 threads accounts and never created a single one. That's because I had 2 Instagram accounts.

The difference is people chose to go to Bluesky, Threads accounts were just added on to your Insta account by Meta.

Bluesky's custom labels, algorithm choice, client choice, and starter packs seem like legitimately cool features.

I think overzealous moderation was what drove some people off Twitter in the first place.

Another social media site asking for my phone number, no thank you.

I read the occasional Twitter/X and probably now Bluesky post, but this offers nothing that would attract me. Twitter/X/Bluesky/Insta/Threads is for people that like celebrities with some interesting stuff in between. But overall that isn't worth it.

For social media, moderation makes the product

I'm not sure Threads ever had that much of a spike in usage beyond the first day of new accounts. Got the impression a huge number of people curious about it signed up due to the very easy onboarding if you already had an instagram, looked around a little and then never went back.

Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.

I’m going to guess you don’t use the service much… You’d likely have a very different opinion otherwise

I have given Threads a good try, and recently when Bluesky activity started up I restarted using Bluesky (it didn't stick for me the first time). The technology doesn't really matter that much, as long as it's basically competent. It's only the social network itself.

I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't.

Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us.

X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two.

Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.

> Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same.

Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago.

> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky

There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads.

I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.

It would be the worst thing for Bluesky if the eternal September came over from Twitter. I think that population is too passive to make the move and will put up with any level of advertising etc.

> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation

Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there!

It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in.

There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss.

The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to.

There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on.

Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping.

The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049

It's not just checkbox features that matter, it's also the entire algorithm and who is allowed to have their posts gain organic traction. X actively penalizes high quality information, and pushes misinformation in an attempt to become an echo chamber.

If you want to find your colleauges' posts, if you want to find high quality information, if you want good links to long articles, X is no longer the place to be.

If you want to have click-bait and rage-bait or lots of right-wing politics, X will cater to your needs. But it won't cater to somebody that's trying to get to highly-curated high-signal information networks that Twitter allowed in the past. That's all been actively destroyed, with great intention.

X is pretty great now. Once the politics dies down a little it'll be the best place to be for the next 4+ years