In our brave new world I wonder if we need to wonder about BlueSky's vulnerability to Musk/Trump and their use of power of the US government to destroy.
the paid blue check marks ruined twitter for me. generally those that PAID to be noticed had nothing interesting to say and I had to scroll way down to see more interesting replies...which just got tiresome. i had blocked Elon long ago so he wasn't the problem for me.
I know this sounds dumb but I still don't understand what makes a service like Twitter or bluesky so expensive to run, to where it takes constant advertising growth just to stay afloat. Posting and distributing short text messages seems trivial, even at scale.
I have been a TPM (Ad Free) subscriber for years. I am not sure whether to continue following Josh in bsky, not because I don't like his work, but because I already get it on TPM.
Curating feeds on bsky is best done with regular cultivation; the audience is put to work (John Cage would agree).
This is where lists are good. You could put him in a list with other good and up-to-date commentators. Easy to ignore when you have everything you need from TPM. When stuff hits the fan and you want last-minute updates, open the list.
There's also the need for real time news and reaction to important events. I'm a longtime subscriber as well, but would still dive into the 9 Circles of Hell (okay, Twitter) to see his takes and that of others when there's breaking news.
This makes sense. I try to limit following prominent media figures; they can overwhelm my feed. The other element is that I get an email every day with Josh's Backchannel. So seeing the same thing in my feed is redundant. As his postings are not constant, I guess it's O.K.
It seemed at the time like everyone dunked on Musk for overpaying for Twitter, which is structurally unprofitable, but what if he just wanted to destroy a public forum that too often mocked Trump. What if he can afford it? What if he got the money from Russia?
I am happy you are here, Josh. Twitter is dead, and it’s unlikely to reverse course. I’m happy to soon have my profile deleted. I’m hoping for Bluesky to be a platform for the majority of non-extremist people.
This is an excellent article and very proximal to the political concerns of our current situation. Thanks for taking a chance to link it here and it expose it to community comment.
Just from my interests, a big part of this has been the migration of important science communities and the easy creation of starter packs so that i can follow the same people/groups.
I’ve been on twitter since it launched but basically ignored it for the better part of a decade because I felt the limitations were stupid. I reengaged a couple years ago and watched it become a cesspool.
The ascent of Bluesky & the relative decline of Musk's Twitter are bright spots in a pretty bleak landscape right now. The great migration was the result of a nice confluence of developments, including Bluesky getting its tech house in order and scaled up after a good year or so of effort.
If Twitter was still everyone's favorite dumpster fire, the post-election migration wouldn't have had the coattails it did. But these days, X is hostile and damn near unusable, so once the migration started, it just kept going.
There's an essay to be written about the effects of an "en masse" exit of creatives and intellectuals from X into a separate space....
"a day without a liberal to troll"
I stopped relying on Twitter for news once Elon started ruining it. I joined Bluesky when there were enough news sources that let me learn nearly instantly from my feed what’s going on in the world. So far it’s been great. I hope they don’t ruin it. I would pay for it.
I've been super encouraged that sports Bluesky (sportsky?) has taken off. Real time engagement during NFL games this past weekend was off the charts, plus many sports journos have moved here and set up shop. To me that's critical mass for the masses.
Bluesky doesn't seem to have any ads either. I guess eventually it will. My ads on Twitter changed once Musk took over, to weird stuff I wouldn't want in a million years. I left almost immediately afterward. Anyway, I'm really happy this alternative is available!
I left Twitter when Elon became co-president and it became state-run media. Besides politics I also follow sports and now that many beat writers are here I’ve got all I need without having to see MAGA or cry harder on every post.
I suppose the question - how does Bluesky make money - perhaps it’s Ai LLM data mining. We are in open discourse that creates a data set to access ??? What else ?
they've actually said explicitly they won't use the feeds for AI-training. obviously that's a way to set themselves apart from the other players. But they've probably walled that off, at least for the foreseeable future.
Bluesky in 2024 is what Twitter was like back in 2009. I was in Beijing when it got blocked, due to some morons posting about June 4th on June 4th at Tiananmen Square. So we then used 4Sq for msging until that got blocked.
Clearly twitter had a value let’s say 44bill & and given its not worth that now - that’s the cost to buy an election
We need to be more nimble & not held hostage by a platform. Like keeping a burner ph in a dom violence situation - always ready to flee. Lesson learnt - can’t let this happen again
I completely agree. And this is exactly what the "atproto" was designed to "disrupt." BlueSky may die, but your posts, your engagement, and your likes can live forever.
I similarly hemmed & hawed re: leaving twitter, but for me one of the final straws was the change in terms of service to crawl people's accounts for AI and changing venue for any disputes to that Texas district. Not saying that was a huge factor for folks, but it prompted me to download & delete
I left over a year ago. Don’t miss a thing other than the good people, who are finally coming over here. It’s been a great development at a really dark time. May it continue to build.
Yeah that had occurred at one point but had forgotten that point. Does the roll out of those match the timeline? My sense is that it broadly doesn't. But I don't know whether was just when I found out about them.
Starter packs were definitely around for awhile and people would post them pretty frequently, but as more folks joined Bluesky (people were posting daily stats), etc.), new starter packs began to flood the feed. I do think that helped people switch over/take advantage of network effects more easily.
Also one could take the view that @hunterw.bsky.social posting "Bluesky has the juice!," and the like, on a regular basis created a dope vibe that drew in millions. I think that's the best explanation!
I never got into Twitter in the early days, and by the time it got huge I already felt it was little more than an abuse platform. I'm still learning how to navigate Bluesky, but I do find myself enjoying it.
You've nailed it Josh. We're discussing on our local Lexington Ma email list why many of us are migrating to #bsky. Escaping the algorithm has come up as a key benefit. The freedom to curate your feed and not see ads and trash talk is very appealing, along with thumbing your nose at the oligarchs.
I love a good piece on excitement about Bluesky growing. I am hopeful that the oligarchs and bad state actors will ultimately have limited power on here.
Bluesky is neither an echo chamber nor a safe liberal bubble. But you can't deny there's a substantial portion of the userbase trying to make it into one; read the Bluesky subreddit if you can stand it. Lots of bossy "don't engage, block" and "if you engage, we'll put you on the blocklist too" posts
I'm optimistic despite the very real echo chamber vibe from some users. They're already a minority and mass adoption will make them more so. Most people are, by definition, normal.
But they're a very loud minority and that's why I don't think all the "it's an echo chamber" takes are in bad faith.
It most certainly is. Regardless of any outcome, we’re witnessing a large-scale, real-time experiment that’s teaching us a lot (everything?) about what people, corporations, and governments want from social media.
Part of what makes Bluesky special is you can write your own algorithms, which means that it's (for the moment) not subject to the kinds of manipulation prevalent on Twitter and Facebook. Besides, who wants to be swarmed by Nazi trolls, or even near them?
It's become clear that those who care about facts and democracy have got to find a way to communicate clearly and effectively in the social media space. Let's hope Bluesky can provide some bandwidth for that, relatively free of manipulating algorithms.
After the election the impulse was strong to leave. I hate the money in our election system & how he campaigned for a person who has autocratic tendencies. I voted for BlueSky with my fingers. & here is a holiday gift for Elon.
Never joined social media before, but I just created this account as an EffYew to Musk. Impotent rage to be sure, but it makes me feel a bit better.
Who knows… maybe I’ll like it.
I'm pretty sure I found you on Andrew Sullivan's daily dish list of bloggers. As memory serves, others in that list included Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Reynolds, and some other people not named Glenn. What I'm missing now is thoughtful conservative voices. Maybe David French?
Don't forget about the user extendability, and the volunteer efforts of a member of your team, @hunterw.bsky.social to verify journalists. BlueSky may need some features, but in the meantime they've given us the tools to build them ourselves.
Good points. One thing you don't talk about is how BlueSky is open source and an open protocol. You make the comparison of Mastodon to Linux, spot on, but BlueSky has a more permissive license than Mastodon (last I checked). Anyone can make a professional version of the bluesky app and sell it.
Now people realise the value of a good platform I think they’ll fork out some cash for it. Will it be enough people to support the machine? I suspect it can and will.
I've said this before but what's weird is the two things I follow - professional bike racing (mostly Europeans) and US politics - have nothing in common and no overlap. And yet both had major movement to Bluesky at the same time.
By being so much like Twitter, the transition is easy to make for most people. It actually looks and feels more like Twitter, than X. The blue color as the icing on the cake. I think browsing Twitter comes with a base negativity now. Here is fresh air.
X changed the TOS so that all of your content, including original art, belonged to them to train their AI. They also changed the way block worked, so the blocked users could still see your posts. All of this happened around the election. And this time when they made unpopular changes, we had Bluesky
My sense was that Twitter aficionados had been uncomfortable since 2022 when Leon turned it into X, but stayed because everyone was there. And Mastodon vs Threads vs Blsky was iffy. Then the election plus news of automatic AI scrapping on X starting 11/15 or so. And viola. Time to bolt.
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that a good enough number of politics power users also had toes dipped in other communities (especially sports) for those communities to feel the politics-driven shift and respond to it.
Once the network starts moving it starts pulling in everyone connected to it, and politics power users are among the most central nodes in the network (really only outshone in that regard by mega-celebs).
Yep, and while their in-network connections are stronger than their between-network ones, the latter are definitely there. Can’t not be, like you said, because they’re such big accounts.
I think the biggest factor, which you alluded to in your post, is that a whole lot of people have been watching the place get worse and worse for ages but didn’t have an offramp
so when the most visible portion of the site (politics) decamped for here they decided to follow
It's a question of where the critical mass is. Not really possible to define how many people is the critical mass, and it's probably a little different for everyone, but once it gets there, it's gonna inevitably snowball (and did), at which point the shift seems sudden and universal.
There might be a few more plateaus and local minima between where we are now and a complete migration. And it might still stall out at one of those minima. But yeah, it's just one group following another, because the platform only has value insofar as most of what you want from it is here.
One thing I think is true is the power users have moved. So small in number but big in usage. And that's both the big accounts but also regular users like me to just use the service a lot.
Bike racers and fans probably skew liberal as bike riding is something you do in progressive cities (and in Europe.) Republicans seem threatened by public and not motor transport. That's my only guess.
I think within the groups that make less since there were some big names that helped people that were on the fence. I think someone like Mina Kimes was huge for NFL. Some big NBA, college basketball writers, helped bring fans of those sports. I also think links not being degraded helps a lot.
To me, the key is they have no power over you here. I don’t see their ads. They can’t bribe someone to change an algorithm bc I am in total control of what I see. If a feed I like (or its creator) goes south, I can just recreate it myself. Nuclear block, etc. Smart system design
I think that some sort of subscription system for BlueSky might actually work, because the people here see the value of paying for a service rather than being products for sale to the highest bidder along with all of the algorithm manipulation. The Twitter experience has certainly educated me.
I arrived right after the election & was happy to find so many of my follows come on board. I knew Bluesky was my place when Old Movie Twitter inc. @tcmparty.bsky.social arrived. Still waiting on Soap Opera Twitter to arrive but @nancyleegrahn.bsky.social & @ericbraedenyr.bsky.social lead the way.
Comments
https://mashable.com/article/bluesky-paid-subscription
Curating feeds on bsky is best done with regular cultivation; the audience is put to work (John Cage would agree).
"a day without a liberal to troll"
Their stated plan is to charge for advanced features.
We need to be more nimble & not held hostage by a platform. Like keeping a burner ph in a dom violence situation - always ready to flee. Lesson learnt - can’t let this happen again
But they're a very loud minority and that's why I don't think all the "it's an echo chamber" takes are in bad faith.
Over a year now I’ve been gone
It most certainly is. Regardless of any outcome, we’re witnessing a large-scale, real-time experiment that’s teaching us a lot (everything?) about what people, corporations, and governments want from social media.
Who knows… maybe I’ll like it.
Bluesky and old-school forums (even Reddit) are much more useful than Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Tik-Tok.
so when the most visible portion of the site (politics) decamped for here they decided to follow
Maybe that's what made the switch so much easier? Millions of dormant accounts like mine?
https://go.bsky.app/8VMtqJe