Agreed about that they nailed the UX for BlueSky in terms of “best possible Twitterlike”.

That said, my biggest concern is how they plan to make money. With BlueSky being completely open at the moment, there is effectively no possible monetization strategy for them without making major breaking changes to the protocol.

For example, if they added ads to the app, someone could just write a client that didn’t have ads. Donations are another possibility, but probably wouldn’t be enough to pay for the servers.

In fairness, Mastodon apparently is working on quote-tweeting. AIUI to do it properly (ie, like Bluesky, with the ability to remove quote-tweets etc) requires changes to ActivityPub.

Bluesky, at least for now, has the advantage that they essentially control the protocol, and are the only significant user; they can move a lot quicker. It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves.

I vastly prefer comments as second class citizens anyway. Twitter felt like such a rat's nest sometimes.

Yes but mars man bad.

Ergo if everyone who hates mars man proclaims that the alternative to mars man website is “the next big thing” and “exploding in popularity” loudly and often enough, then maybe it will actually become popular outside the mars man bad crowd.

You know it’s manufactured when news outlets are comparing App Store download rankings of X and BlueSky. The new app versus the one that’s been around for nearly 20 years and already present on most devices it ever will be.

Meanwhile in the real world nobody has heard of BlueSky or really cares that people they’ll never interact with no longer get banned for being bigots on X.

After all the hullabaloo recently I went and looked at it for the first time.

Here's my true first-time user experience: The first 10 posts recommended to me were 1 comedian making a joke, 2 pictures of space, and 7 hate-based partisan political posts. All from one extreme end of the political spectrum. You can guess which. I instantly left and will never go back.

For what it's worth, I also do not use X.

Where are the 400 million left leaning party members from to make up for the US?

> Twitter/X is actually a balanced discourse site now. CNN even admitted that the party affiliation of its users went from majority-left (65/31) to split down the middle, 48/47

To repeat a quote I have seen repeated in dozens of email signatures (below the pronouns, of course!)

"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

> Twitter/X is actually a balanced discourse site now.

That might have a chance at being true if the owner didn't flood the network with deliberate misinformation and block dissenting opinions.

Well first post I’ve seen was “punch a nazi” and then bunch of other hate towards right-wing.

Someone's pushing really hard to make Bluesky happen. I suppose it lines up with "We need our own Leftist Joe Rogan, and our own Leftist Elon, and our own..."

The Left had all of those things, and it didn't help. (Twitter was theirs, Joe and Elon both used to be Democrats, and if you mean a billionaire buying up comms networks they have George Soros already.)

Allegedly, Bluesky does not plan to ever have ads on their app. They have some other monetization plans, yet to be announced publicly

Same for me. 1,000 followers and barely any engagement. I swear it used to be different. My posts weren't any less dumb years ago, but I used to at least get a few replies and likes, even retweets.

You can literally host your own PDS, and no one will stop you. It's based on protocols: so what thou wilt.

But that doesn't mean you also get to show up for free in any place you want & spout off your mouth. Block & moderation tools aren't censorship; we don't let lunatics into our living rooms to say whatever they want any time.

The X experience for many is being drowned in the muckiest shittiest slime. Paid-for bluechecks drowning out the air, spouting wild conspiracy theories, hate, disinformation, and every other blood pressure rising attention grabbing FUD they can push. The open protocols are a great possible virtue we hope keeps combinatorially improving the ecosystem, but really it's the absolutely despicable descent to bedlam that X has dug its own hole with.

And if Bluesky thinks your account looks antagonist (which a significant number of right wing agitators are doing), I respect Bluesky 's right not to have to host hot slop garbage.

Your post is full of incredibly slanted wild flame-wars level accusations & bitter slant. That I don't think represents reality at all. Underneath the mud slinging your core argument seems to be censorship, but that complaint is so very on the face of it obviously factually incorrect at the most basic levels.

Why not? These all come and go, it could be Twitter's time to go. MySpace became irrelevant, Facebook is near-irrelevant.

Bluesky is fundamentally different.

1. It is built on an open protocol

2. User controls and choice, they decoupled {algo, app, data, moderation} and users decide which ones they use. Anyone can build any of these and offer them up without having to change social network. In short, they created a social media fabric with built in competition on the supplier side while removing the switching cost for users

It's clearly already "happening." Bluesky doesn't need to offer anything fundamentally different, just an experience that users consider better than the alternative. People aren't seeking novelty so much as an escape from the toxicity and algorithmically-driven vitriol of Twitter.

I mean, it doesn’t have the pay-for-attention mechanism that Carface added to Twitter. That in itself is a huge difference.

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