Bluesky an' clear: the social media app that will definitely last forever

The only social media app I like is the one where people talk endlessly about the other social media apps I don't like and am not on

Still to use my code.

lol, that's maybe the smartest way to bluesky

sell it on ebay

I'm @rooob.bsky.social btw, not that I post really

rhymes with brewski

another for the pro column

Anyone who pronounces it like that around me is going to get a restraining order.

ello

Bluesguy

not a bad idea, Eazy

Folks, you're all doing it wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-36ijwAQUs

So if someone were to try to extract user data from this new service, would that be

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/MidnightOil_BlueSkyMining.jpg

seems like the owners/employees have basically been bullied off their own platform. apart from one SWE they've completely stopped posting. truly outstanding effort from the userbase.

what a world

abolitionism starts here

Bluesky: It died in Beta

"seems like the owners/employees have basically been bullied off their own platform."

Just joined 😂

ha i thought that would catch your eye.

leadership here is as sus as threads or twitter. like jack, they seem to share a lot of intellectual heritage with thiel, although i'm sure they'd deny it (60s bay area libertarianism, girard, etc.) but with burning man and shitposting (as an alibi for race wierdness) and some weird fash-adjacent stuff about nature.

grasscist

seems like the owners/employees have basically been bullied off their own platform. apart from one SWE they've completely stopped posting. truly outstanding effort from the userbase.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, 14 July 2023 19:17 (one hour ago) link

tbh this is very funny

dril's second skeet was good: "im going on a posting strike from here until the.y make every one not racist or whatever"

first post from someone other than that one poor SWE who had to ship the n-word regex. replies are good. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3k2izrg6k6o2j.

someone normal should make an app imo

first post from someone other than that one poor SWE who had to ship the n-word regex. replies are good. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3k2izrg6k6o2j🕸.

lmao the mods are being called out and people are snitch tagging the investors on ... linkedin!

no

i mean someone else can, but i can't be bothered to be honest. no offence. it's very silly.

its all fun and games til you bring the beef to linkedin

ahh brilliant, hide it where no one will look

seems like the owners/employees have basically been bullied off their own platform. apart from one SWE they've completely stopped posting. truly outstanding effort from the userbase.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, July 14, 2023 3:17 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

'scuse me, while I diss bluesky.

Not a screenshot but: the post is from a bsky team technical advisor that says “Some of that Blue.” with a photo of a blue sky with which is just not remotely helpful.

To you, no. If you consider that some people reading might be colour-blind, though...

I almost went back to LiveJournal after seeing my posts from the 2000s and missing writing in paraphernalia, and then I found it was owned by Russians and…subject to Russian law.

(Also am in Bluesky and it feels like me and Albini and Parton Oswalt hanging out in a Delta Skylounge.)

Xp: ha well they did include an alt text so that’s good

TIL blueski was (probably) a pun

Holy SHIT you are not ready for this pic.twitter.com/1wMD4Jq9Kp

— Lauren McKenzie (@TheMcKenziest) July 14, 2023

Bluesguy

― underwater as a compliment (Eazy), Friday, July 14, 2023 11:11 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Lol

I joined ello but lord only knows when I was last on it or if the account still exists

i was @lebronjames on ello

in case anyone wants an invite code

bsky-social-ufxqd-dszmo
bsky-social-2biwx-cqxgy

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

both taken

I'm on there now as chants.bsky.social. Haven't found very many people to follow on there, idk.

"I joined ello but lord only knows when I was last on it or if the account still exists"

the app still exists, so I assume the network does (I think I wound up deleting it, but I would occasionaly open it up as recently as a year ago and see just random images). Confusingly Ello is also now the name of a more high profile reading app that has nothing to do with old Ello.

If anyone wants to follow me on there I’m matthewbalaam.bsky.social - I won’t post much except the odd link to a radioshow or gig probably.

bluesky cant hope to compete with twitter until they get video so you can watch the cop eat shit on the slide

Have atthem:

bsky-social-w77g6-ysjch
bsky-social-zsizl-emv5i
bsky-social-efm3v-h6eeh
bsky-social-7ch5w-6blgf

Thanks!

thanks!

all taken (not by me, alas)

I’m on there, easy enough to find.

I've got to keep an eye out for the next invite dump!

Voilà

bsky-social-jl33a-obpxg
bsky-social-q5c6l-q6owc

Thanks!

welcome :)

if anybody needs one just DM me on slack or twitter, I've got 5

will do ASAP, I'm stuck somewhere else right now. are you easy to find on Twitter?

yeah I'm @smashedmcdouble

or I can just ilxmail you if yours works josh

that would be great, thanks! I am pretty sure my Gmail address is in my profile.

So jklein04 AT gmail.com. Thanks again! (Looks like I couldn't DM you on twitter if I wanted to without twitter blue)

I just used the ilxmail interface

Got it, thanks! Will start porting over twitter peeps and whatnot later today. Now I need to figure out how to change my ilxmail, lol.

yeah i don't want to post mine here because you're nominally repsonsible for who you invite and people get banned if their invites misbehave but i have a few. ilxmail me if you need one.

I'm not even sure how my ilxmail works. Is that just the address I used to originally sign up/register? My login ID? How do I change that without re-registering?

https://ilxor.com/ILX/Pages/editprofile.jsp ?

No, that didn't do it. When I send an email (to myself) through that portal, by clicking on my screen name, it just sends to my original login ID, which is an old email address. But when I try to change that old login address to a new login address, my current email, it logs me out, because it no longer matches the one associated with the password. Hmm.

who do we follow on bluesky?

everybody cool follows tracerhand iirc

thats right

I'm not nominally responsible enough to give a fuck about this platform or any of the people on it, anything online where you need invites to access it is for wankers, apart from private torrent sites - I don't make the rules.

I'd never lower myself to ask for a fucking invite code and then get precious about who you are going to give them to. Ohh can't have any riff raff here. It's a site for snobby supercilious wankers - lol, even worse than this one!

aww

Haha, funny posts. To be fair to them though, it costs a lot of money and takes a lot of infrastructure for a site like Twitter/Bluesky to run – as it is whenever there is a flood of new people the site starts to stop loading posts etc.

Yeah, it is notably sluggish at the best of times.

Lotta placeholder accounts there right now with virtually no activity (including Tracer's, lol). I often can't tell if they are squatters trying to steal/scam the handle or legit mirrors of their twitter accounts.

I don't know anything about this app other than I agree it is pronounced like brewski

i'm still trying to "find my voice" josh

also need to settle on my bio, something like "Flâneur. Appreciator of gin. #fuck2017."

ok, so a few months back i added my email to the waiting list.
i got my code today so signed up.
how is it within a few hours i have several followers that i have no connection with !?
i mean, i have done no promo.
is there something about this place that i have yet to understand, or is it cos the first thing i did was follow ned ?!

There's probably a bunch of possibilities, but most likely is that someone from those accounts is just friending other people's follower list. It's a little less mysterious when you follow an account that posts about something specific, like if you follow a Nat'l Park account and suddenly you have five new follower accounts that are into parks, travel, etc.

Did you post yet? There are a bunch of feeds of peoples first posts that real users glance at. If you didn’t post it’s probably just bots. The network is small enough that there are still accounts that follow spam every newly created account.

A super kind ilxor threw me an invite—right here on The Aorta, WXOR!

But a scammy scammer stoled it afores i could snag it, and ay, no way i’m axing y’all again. I can’t do with that nonsense and guilt.

But someday I’ll git there, an if i ask to follow u, pls folla back ha

bsky-social-xbnsk-jzcyl

https://bsky.app/profile/restaurant-bot.bsky.social

lagoon, this not you?

nope, they do credit me in the description tho lol, more power to em good to see the capital snack bar again

Does anyone want an invite still? Here's a code

bsky-social-ncfr6-pgyzh

Claimed. Thanks, Alba!

Code: bsky-social-s3rme-hua2n

thx Jordan

bsky-social-tkdte-hji7y

hello I am on this app now

if you get a new follower it may be me

I also made an account at centuriesofsound . bsky . social
because why not eh?

mh what's your handle dawg

firstnamelastname

Invite:

bsky-social-eotk7-243jh

I kind of forgot that I signed up to the waiting list for this until I got my invite just now, I guess I'm on this now. I'm @eatmorefish, I am unlikely to post much or at all, so not much point following me I guess.

This is ridiculously slow right now, nearly unusable. Will check back in a couple of days or weeks.

yeah it's even slower than usual today

The theory is that a lot of people are trying to shift over because Twitter is going to do away with the block function.

some more invite codes

bsky-social-d73rk-rrf55
bsky-social-nimxr-t7o2n

site seems to be working fine atm

It ALWAYS seems slow.

Can someone flick one to me on webmail? I think mine still works.

I dm'ed you at facespace

i am dubdobdee if you can bear to subject yrself to my usual nonsense

I got it JF thanks! xx

if there are any going spare i’ll take one via ilx mail as well. enough people over there now to make it slightly annoying. plus it’s of great importance to sustaining the fizzles brand obv.

ilxmailed you Fizzles

Sent one

I have a couple more going too.

xp

just saw a bunch of people responding to a fake CBC News image, even labelled as such in the alt text. I think this app might have what it takes after all

thanks both!

It ALWAYS seems slow.

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Saturday, 19 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Especially when Musk announces a new feature lol

That might be the biggest problem with Bluesky, we'll see..

A post I read on bk just now is coming up with a figure of 600k so I am not sure how feasible it is.

i am on here and im enjoying the skeets

imo network effects of twitter are too strong (and generally useful/valuable obv), and they’ll prob gradually break down and deteriorate in crappy ways, but be v difficult to reconstitute elsewhere. things will just get generally worse in terms of social media usability. idk maybe that’s better in some way too.

definitely need a place where high profile people say and do things that wouldn’t be out of place in a playground tho.

yeah kinda doubt well ever see big posting sites like facebook-twitter-instagram again, insta has already turned into something more like tiktok or youtube a content consumption place

it’s a shopping app

I tell you one thing I already love over twitter is the customisable feeds. I immediately snapped up the "onlyPosts" feed.

if anyone has a spare code they’re willing to give me i’d be very appreciative. my ilx mail should still work, i think

sent via ilx mail!

thank you and mookie and lagoon so much<3

mookie’s arrived earlier so that’s the one i used

Hurrah! What's your handle?

same old estelaisalei

i already followed you :)

https://maxread.substack.com/p/checking-in-on-twitter

What it lacks, and what might be hard to develop, is a large contingent of normal people who signed up to follow celebrities/politicians and stuck around to be a permanent disapproving audience and pool of intermittent guest stars.

this is true. so far the main characters have mainly been the mods, or moderation adjacent drama. the user base is too sophisticated. not enough willing bean dads.

thank you and mookie and lagoon so much<3

mookie’s arrived earlier so that’s the one i used

― estela, Sunday, August 20, 2023 10:45 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

up 4 grabs bsky-social-h3t4k-f3fco

ooh i said i wouldnt beg but uhh

ilxmailed u

Nice piece from Max (as always) and very funny how X (formerly known as twitter) hasn't broken. My experience is like, 90% the same as before Musk took over.

Look at these codes I got

bsky-social-mgrnd-efchn
bsky-social-oom7t-bv4nl
bsky-social-i3gau-u73f6

Thank you Chris L, I took the first of those codes.

bsky-social-nr63m-2duvo

Just grabbed that one Cow_Art, thx!

Does anyone have a code to spare?

bsky-social-pho3m-nqqqz

Happy to see more ILXors there (akm just joined), but definitely make it clear who you are if your handle isn't the one on here (I've got some mystery follows who I *might* know? But am not sure?)

i'm @reesewitherspoon

caek, thanks kindly. are these time locked in any way? i just entered it and got an invite code not working msg.

Thanks, Clay! Its not accepting it for me though. Getting the same message as Hunt3r.

bsky-social-glrzr-oio7l

bsky-social-c6dfa-muw2g

bsky-social-hcwbz-elbge

bsky-social-qmqmi-kbayv

bsky-social-mv6r6-bfvjg

here’s what I got, hope something works!

That probably means someone snaked the invite out from underneath you

Clay, I swiped the 4th in your series, figuring other faster fingers were at work. Thank you. and caek, thanks again for the email, i don't know why it didn't work-- nobody else has access to that email-- it's exists for me only as this weird ilxor legacy thing.

i'm @foxshark fwiw. Have not yet followed or posted or done anything but I'll get around to it!

Grabbed the second one. Thanks, Clay! Now, what is this???

im @kateisnotreal for anyone interested

i'm @theporouscity.com

I used Clay's first invite code, thank you.

or maybe it was Cow Art's, dunno.

Sorry hunt3r, glad you’re in.

no worries. i’m @hunt3r

caek who are u

See I dont want a social media space where I can fawn over slebs and go "oooh! They replied to me!". I just want a damn space where I can sort posts by the people *I* want to read, at *my* pace, and occasionally sling a bon mot or grenade into the mix. Livejournal suite that purpose nicely. FB kind of did, but nowhere near as well.
There's no one space anymore where I can catch up with what everyone I know is doing. I have to lurk on FB and Twatter and bsky and ILX and thanks to fucking algorithms I am STILL missing half of what people say and do because I'm not glued to it all 94/7 I am well aware this makes me sound like a cranky old lady version of AlexinNYC but hey whatever.

...maybe bsky will be a good "just my mates" place for at least a while?

Does have that vibe!

I just lurk as @veedonriver

ok so far blue sky is basically exactly twitter, but without a few people (but also no elon, and so far not as many political pundits though maybe I haven't stumbled on those yet). I imagine it's over for X as soon as this is no longer invite-only

I am @writtenlow

Would love a code if anyone wants to ilx mail me. I seem to miss them whenever someone puts them here.

bsky-social-yxfcv-77ey4

thanks! I'm @twentydollars.bsky.social

Cool. I have two more:

bsky-social-qwusj-rqncy
bsky-social-jjzo5-bzjvd

Thank-you, Alphie, that is me set up as braisedbywolves.

My views are largely the same as Trayce (particularly about Livejournal as an apex) but I might go a bit further - I don't think any part of the Hello magazine "see what the stars* really think" aspect of Twitter has done much good for either side.

*stars, politicians, VCs, pretty much anyone - and also of course regular folks who are suddenly the main figure.

I will make an exception for Kristin Hersh who has always been delightful on twitter tbh.

yeah I miss JCO and that's about it

caek who are u

― mookieproof, Monday, August 21, 2023 9:42 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

posting under my government name, just followed you.

Trayce hope holds true

ME ON TWITTER: Tired of these rightwing assholes. And now the feed is all broke to hell. What a shitshow, I'm done here.

ME ON BLUESKY: Are there any channels that aren't about furries.

paying it forward

bsky-social-ge4cz-mryqj

@fuiud

the signal to noise ratio on bluesky is very high, it's so nice to have no ads, no sponsored or promoted content, no real "official" accounts, no spam, just people posting. we'll see how long it lasts.

Bluesky need art and book bots.

Paul Cezanne

wow ilx deletes the link I pasted for some strange reason

One thing I like about bluesky is the ability to add customised algorithmic feeds that suit your interests. However, I haven't managed to find any that actually do suit my interests.

anyone got a code to spare? this looks interesting

another code: bsky-social-b5f7l-mdoyu

I've been using and enjoying this social network for a couple of days now, actually works pretty well now. Just went through this thread and added most of you guys.

bsky-social-dkw8h-wnn2h

what do i do to get invite codes to give back?

wait

A few more:

bsky-social-uuwhf-drr7c
bsky-social-ddwfe-auyqa
bsky-social-53t3v-43orj

Can someone smarter than me make a Bluesky list for ILX? I’m al✧✧✧@b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧.

lol @allen.bsky.social

encountered my first "you're homophobic" "no you're antiblack" dustup on blusky, just like twitter! hastily unfollowed everyone involved in this dumb drama centered around a nobody weirdo. Blusky is going to have to try harder to find more compelling main characters.

what do i do to get invite codes to give back?

― you need magical thinking ayo my name is david blaine (Hunt3r), Friday, August 25, 2023 10:29 AM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think you get one invite code each week

that's a relief cause i ain't coupons again like on that OTHER network

lurkin on bsky @rozanna

Meet you all the way

so why do all the handles have .bsky.social in them? seems redundant

I think it’s some kind of future-proofing for when it joins “the fediverse” whatever that is?

Another: bsky-social-mihyg-w4due

I assumed it was a fediverse thing, but it turns out you can link your own domain to your account as well and that’ll display. makes sense, kind of a self-verification technique

Yeah, I bought a domain specifically for bsky handle use. Like $9 per year.

https://bsky.app/profile/mondosalvo.com btw

Are they going to get video at some point?

I hope they never get gifs or video

yeah I'm happy for it have neither of those things. photos only, links that work please.

https://media.tenor.com/mW38fLs0y14AAAAM/spit-laugh.gif

was really hoping to never see that again

how else will ppl know that you are laughing?

I would like video but I hope they never get gifs.

i'm finally on! @zachtbd

ok then

i'm @reesewitherspoon

― Clay

loooooool

has the fact that there is no verification and people can use the names of public figures been an issue yet? I just saw Elizabeth Warren post "my pussy hurts". this is all fun for now but obv at some point someone is going to raise a stink.

How do you know that’s NOT Elizabeth Warren? You’re making some assumptions.

that is true

prob of interest to no one but

i have a new job. my first day was yesterday but i felt too stressed to announce. monday feels like waiting forever. might as well announce now? i joined @bluesky as a software engineer.

— danabramov.bsky.social (@dan_abramov) August 26, 2023

how do u know i'm not reese witherspoon hmm

that is interesting to me. that's a good move for bluesky.

clay, you are reesewithoutherspoon if anything

i need to spend some time looking in the mirror here

not sure if anyone else has encountered this, but on the desktop version (on chrome, i know, i suck), when i click "Home", it sometimes brings me home (shoutout for that) but just as often clicking Home brings me to a variety of other places, like the website i was visiting before bluesky, to my notifications page, or a profile that i had visited many clicks earlier.

hasn't happened to me. try really clearing your browser cache, there might be something stuck in localstorage.

i need to open the extensions settings in chrome and powerhose it tbh

feel like ive had similar things happen on mac-chrome, been chalking up some of the clumsiness to the fact that its built on top of a weird protocol, but havent really looked into it or thought it through as far as that making sense

think thats why they dont have video too, the protocol

just text would be best tho, no images no video

they should just focus on being the twitter clone with momentum ditch all the decentralized fediverse blockchain protocol stuff and copy pre-elon twitter as closely as possible

also the feed is weird. it shows me every single reply from an account i follow, even if they're just replying to a random account i don't follow. but at the same time sometimes it doesn't show threaded replies by the account i do follow to themself

For replies, go to settings, then click on home feed preferences. You can turn off seeing replies altogether, or you can adjust the slider to where it shows EVERY reply or, on the other end, replies with a minimum of 25 likes.

yeah but neither of those is desirable. i want to see replies between people i follow regardless of the number of likes. twitter had this right

Yeah, gotcha

other criticisms

- the word "skeet" has a vulgar connotation and is embarrassing to use in earnest. is tweet not up for grabs now? what's the legality here

- the logo is a photo of a blue sky with white clouds. way too literal. i was pronouncing it "blueski" in my head, sometimes playfully contracting it to just "bluesk" and laughing to myself. feel like they should go more in this direction. similar to how twitter dropped the bird stuff and "twitter" "tweet" took on more intrinsic meanings

- search don't seem to work very well and recommendations isn't very streamlined. thought it would be easy to re-populate my feed with people from twitter but it's annoying hard to find them, even after i've followed a bunch it's not recommending me everyone else

just click on lag∞n’s profile and follow who he’s following. easy

bsky tweets = bleats

just click on lag∞n’s profile and follow who he’s following. easy

― mh, Sunday, August 27, 2023 9:34 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

high level social strat

- the logo is a photo of a blue sky with white clouds. way too literal.

i like it

i miss CD-DOMs, they were the pop-up book of their day

lol yah i respect it

bring back seedy dom

ALSO ETHAN

(dont bring back dom tho)

looooool, skeet? and RESKEET?

has anyone at blueskeet ever heard of urbandictionary.com? lol

every single day is another day that goes by when bluesky.com called their tweets skeets

the users did it, because it was funny

the bluesky organization tried to make skeet not happen but that only made people lean into it iirc

its kind of perfect tbf

oh dang, it's a user initiative!

it's just funny because i see some people using it straightforwardly, like it doesn't mean cum. my mom, for many years and to this day, says "are you hung?" as shorthand for "are you hungry?". no one has ever had the heart to tell her, and it's way too late now. this reminds me of that :-o

my mom, for many years and to this day, says "are you hung?"

Well? ARE YOU?

she knows

my stock answer for so many years has been "yes, I'm hungry" or "no, I'm not hungry". she also refuses to break away from she and he, claims to not understand "they" and how it works, etc. sometimes life throws you a curveball and you just have to deal with a parent asking you if you have a boner in slang they she doesn't even understand

you should should try to steer her towards hungie reply yeah im hungie its fun she wants a fun way to say hungry

Wait I thought it meant well-endowed.

this is true! i have made a boner regarding hung

also lag00n otm, we need to divert her toward new fun words for being hungry

once you start with hungie you can also talk about being cranky and sweepy

sweepy

feelin' skeety iirc

I ask my cat if he’s hungy but only in the privacy of my own home

When my grandmother wanted to do something else than watching TV, she used to ask "Shall we have it off?".

here's my question about bluesky now: i hear dorsey doesn't even really support it, beyond having funded it at early stages he's now directed his interest toward Nostr. Who runs bluesky, and what is the revenue model?

it’s in the faq: https://blueskyweb.xyz/faq

Dan joining Bluesky was a deal at Meta.

they mad

Yeah. He also still has some good ideas. I feel like this is a good move. He was encumbered by React.

i will miss him explaining react on twitter

tho he kinda stopped after people got mad at server components, which is too bad

the bluesky app icon/logo is good.

has the fact that there is no verification and people can use the names of public figures been an issue yet? I just saw Elizabeth Warren post "my pussy hurts". this is all fun for now but obv at some point someone is going to raise a stink.

there is verification. you make your handle your domain, which is only possible if you control the domain, e.g. you can only set your username to https://bsky.app/profile/wyden.senate.gov if you control ron wyden's senate.gov domain.
so when the real reese witherspoon joins she can have reesewitherspoon.com.

i'm skeptical of their "moderation? oh that's nothing to do with us. we're just building a protocol" approach to a lot of stuff, but this approach to verification is really good. it requires essentially no resources from them and it's less open to the stupidity associated with blue checks on twitter (before and after musk).

i'm the real reese witherspoon

its true, i vouch for clay-reese

If you use your own domain does it still use bsky's servers? The thing I hated about Mastodon was the seperate servers - it was really hard to find/communicate with siloed people on all these diff servers. And then the one I'd picked, shut down unnanounced one day and I lost my login/account. Not that I'd really used it.

bsky isn't federated yet, so there's no jumping between servers for anyone there. Not really sure of the pros and cons of using my own domain at this point, but I imagine if I ever need to know why there will be oodles of explainers out there.

one feature of twitter i wish they'd copy: hover over the username to get basic info/bio/followers

oh ffs I thought twitter stopped that feature a long time ago, but I just discovered that it only stopped working in Firefox and not my other browsers.

bsky-social-xhecp-hvuie

Thanks calz. I am here: @quartzcity.bsky.social

got ya!

I’m on there now @scampo sorry for making up those fake codes earlier — here’s a real one: bsky-social-p8tiy-gjwpo

not going near that tbh

Why would you, you don’t need a code

ha elvis i didn't get that quartzcity is you til now-- enjoyed the hell out that podcast ep, still am

the amount of weird drama I somehow see on a daily basis on bluesky boggles the mind. I think some of these people are some of the same people I had to unfollow on twitter or something a while ago, just non-stop allegations of racism and ableism back and forth all day long, impossible to follow.

I've blocked enough folks who are clearly tools, others have gone, essentially I only see a couple of things about it now so it's all somewhat calmer for me on the feed at this point.

Geez all I'm seeing on here so far is a lot of Ned posts!

...sorry Ned but its true :P

But yeah people who are Chronically Online esp on Twitter/Tumblr and are obsessed with calling everyone out, are just tiresome and honestly toxic to genuine causes. I'm not interested in that kind of discourse at all.

I just mute or block anyone obsessed with circular site drama.

I think that’s the big issue, up until the advent of widespread twitter use (and post-weird twitter) the better intersections were about something. Talking about something you made, wrote, read, or listened to. The just posts, no content thing came up later and was people doing a bit, but getting marginalized if you did it poorly

Without things to react to, people just feed off of attention and drama. And they’re apparently on discords specifically for crafting posts?

Every now and then I come across someone who is like “being nice to people is ableist” and the number of people co-signing them makes me want to hurl myself into the sun

It’s usually a (to me) child with an avatar that looks like they failed an audition to get into Burning Man

I suspect the consumption is very passive now and people actively avoid non-algorithmic discovery which is wild to me. If I see something interesting I click through to someone’s feed to see what they’re about, see who other people follow, etc.

I can only think that few people do that because some huge accounts have a profile where it’s pure engagement farming.

i've seen almost no racism/circular site drama in my timeline, not sure why

the only thing that's stood out to me so far is that if i encounter a post by someone i don't know or haven't heard of, it's like 2-to-1 that poster is trans

the Discover feed had some interesting ideas over the weekend and kept recommending gaymers (guys wearing briefs posing in front of video game memorabilia) and furry artists

it seems to have swung back to a mix of people now

to be fair to bluesky, the being nice to people is ableist stuff still exists on twitter. there's no escpaing it.

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-new-economics-of-twitter-outrage

On August 20th, a freelance writer named Bailey Herdé vented on Twitter about the agony of trying to make small talk with people who don’t reciprocate. “Sorry if this is rude or whatever but I really hate people who refuse to endure even the tiniest bits of small talk. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked up to a table at work and said ‘how are you doing today’ only to be met with complete silence and a blank stare.”

Herdé’s tweet has been shared over 5,000 times and I’m comfortable saying almost every single reply to it is bad. As podcaster Michael Hobbes wrote, “The platonic ideal of a Main Character tweet: A reasonable, low-stakes gripe about a relatable situation... and 10,000 people in the replies making up scenarios so they can call her a terrible person.” If you don’t feel like clicking over, the (incorrect) consensus was that Herdé was being ableist.

Oh I’m not at all saying it’s exclusive to Bluesky at all, just noting the ongoing phenomenon

Makes me miss the “fellas, does eating a hot dog make you gay” version of this

bsky-social-yhrsq-u4clu

the only thing that's stood out to me so far is that if i encounter a post by someone i don't know or haven't heard of, it's like 2-to-1 that poster is trans

I honestly like that!

Geez all I'm seeing on here so far is a lot of Ned posts!

The takeover continues.

i followed random resto bot but had to unfollow it 5 minutes later cause there are so few posts that 8/10 posts were restaurants lol. will follow it again once/if things pick up

Makes me miss the “fellas, does eating a hot dog make you gay” version of this

the Seeking Derangements podcast compiled a list of the ridiculous things people said make you gay on twitter and were running through it. one of the more long winded episodes but some funny bits

brb time to ride a bicycle to hot dog brunch

bsky-social-ive37-4ee7b

get yr bluesky

i'm having trouble figuring out what to post on bluesky, which i think means i should probably not post. it's not an internet-wide issue for me; i feel fine posting here. i like to post.

i might eventually do little mini-stories or something? like evil guide dog but not as problematic? i don't know. what is the internet good for? why are we on this thing

I'm on @cannaregio. I am following Ned and no one else for the moment.

you should just leave it there tbh! some things are just perfect from the get go

perhaps… too perfect

the Seeking Derangements podcast compiled a list of the ridiculous things people said make you gay on twitter and were running through it. one of the more long winded episodes but some funny bits

brb time to ride a bicycle to hot dog brunch

I dimly recall someone asserting that a man performing oral sex in a woman was gay? Did that happen or am I imagining it?

xpost Well that's hey wait

oh that 100% made the list

if you include the absolutely weird young republican edgelord types, then having sex with a woman if you are a straight man is gay

ooh there’s an old VSB list but there are definitely new additions to the canon since then: https://www.theroot.com/a-running-list-of-things-straight-men-cant-and-shouldnt-1827758710

that list doesn't even have the OG, "eat quiche"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/ff/Quichereilawjd.gif

recall being confused by this book as a child

I just learned that guy wrote the screenplay for "Tomorrow Never Dies" and co-wrote "The World Is Not Enough" (which is the most generic Bond title ever, I don't even remember what movie that was)

feel like quiche has kind of fallen out of the culture. do the children even know?

I don’t post very hard over there; but noticed a few ILX0rs, so I changed my handle to the obvious (if anyone’s interested in following).

If anyone's still on there...I'm on Bluesky as @every80spopsong.bsky.social (Casey Skeets-Em) posting on every 80s pop song that charted or was a pick in Billboard, Cash Box and/or Record World, chronologically.

Oh that’s you, hi!

does anyone need these still?

bsky-social-qlkc7-lrp7w

another:

bsky-social-pucvn-bm5vf

bsky-social-unfte-4xc6f

I've seen reports that spammers are scraping the internet for invite codes, and doesn't look good if/when they get banned and you "invited" them - so would probably keep your codes for DMs.

bsky-social-kxjyh-z3njg

hidden this one!

I got another one. I don’t know how to DM or hide text. If you need an invite, tell me how to get it to you.

To hide text (eg spoilers or sensitive text): text you want hidden behind a 'show this' link

spammers can read this

lol that hid the important part. use bracket h bracket hidden text bracket /h bracket bracket=[]

bsky-social-hnk5e-6gbja

I'm a gambler and will take a chance that an ilxer will get the code before a spammer does, if it is taken by a spammer - nobody dies and ultimately idgaf.

testes

I did it!!! Does that actually help though?

code: bsky-social-aterz-fdu5i

bsky-social-wanke-6pissninja' is a genuine invite code

tbf they will get spammers anyway

Okay, is there some way to change the feed so that every reply to a thread doesn’t come up as a separate thing? There’s a vigorous discussion that I don’t care about and every other post in my feed is someone arguing with a guy that i’m following.

feel like quiche has kind of fallen out of the culture. do the children even know?

― mh, Saturday, September 2, 2023 6:41 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Feed the world
let them know it's Quichemas time again

xp You can adjust your settings (Home Feed Preferences) so you only see replies from ppl you follow that have a certain number of likes... or not at all.

jack deleted his account lmao

Erm... didnt he start this platform? lol

he started the protocol but has moved on to another one, the name of which escapes me.

I find AT Protocol and the open source app pretty interesting myself. I think it has legs and will grow. Bsky isn't federated yet, and now one has really figured out what that will lead to, but that is kind of interesting.

His thing is Nostr, where he hangs w/other like-minded luminaries.

I am totally armchair when it comes to the nuts and bolts of this stuff, but how come when I look at Bluesky I'll see, like, 25 posts in a row from one person? Is it just a toggle I haven't toggled that I used to have toggled on Twitter? Maybe I had reposts turned off?

yeah I've noticed that

I'm not really that into Bluesky, feels like going through the motions or trying to recapture this once genuine phenomenon that's gone. nothing wrong with it per se, more a me thing.

I have decided sitting on my firstnamelastname handle on bsky is against my newfound ethos in life and I’m going to do the domain name thing because I’ve remembered I have a funny domain to use

As a Discourse- and Take-avoider, I find that Bluesky has very little "use case" for me... I religiously avoid the general feeds... I follow a few folks from here, and have found a handful of other accounts to follow (mainly by browsing the Newskies feed, and filtering through all the furr1es, "titillating" selfies, and anime art); and engage in light music discussion via other feeds. But I could also never visit it, and not feel like I'm missing anything.

yeah I'm with you and ums too. I find checking in on it every now and then can be momentarily distracting, but as it grows it mostly reminds me of why I never really loved twitter. and luckily I haven't found it habit forming at all

Its dominant/default style (as reflected in the main feeds, so I guess the posts which receive the most engagement) is for sure a form of posting that I avoided on Twitter. That said, I've noticed large & growing communities for science, comics, etc., so I'm sure it has value for folks with specific interests.

anyoen have an invite? i have resisted asking so far but i need something to obsessively refresh if twitter is gonna try to charge me

bsky-social-l72rh-osjvh

bsky-social-gm3cw-z4jsy

many thx

bsky-social-iko7a-euu6k

bsky-social-i7mpk-dijfv

A few more

bsky-social-muoty-mpalf

Any invites going spare? Many thanks in advance

bsky-social-sa5pa-blyln

Hook a man up? I don't want to bogart glumdal's

Thanks mate!

bsky-social-jgfpa-zpyos
bsky-social-znhop-fsygd
bsky-social-zfryn-ojuuo

i'm in

what's yr handle?

And any new people know how to find me easily enough...

just got on. I'm @critterjams.bsky.social, everyone else if you want a follow drop it here

same got on yesterday - same user name as i use here

bsky-social-mtmri-m4gev
bsky-social-yihkt-sp37m

thanks!

bsky-social-ot4no-bhufx
bsky-social-c6qcd-wcw34

Please follow me lol @jeremysteel.bsky.social

Anyone got an Ello invite?

i don't pay any attention to curating my feed and neil gaiman and friends now have entire control of my feed what is even happening

I think people who post a LOT really dominate the feed on Bluesky. Sometimes I feel like Albini is the only poster there.

yea I kinda dig the mini Twitter vibe though the site in general seems pretty janky and not ready for primetime yet

this one i posted upthread is still live fyi all invite wanters bsky-social-znhop-fsygd

One more code:

bsky-social-q4srx-3bhia

I think a good number of ppl join and never post (or post only very rarely) – maybe due to intimidation? I'm currently following 114 accounts, and my Following feed is still pretty quiet... only a handful of folks that I follow post regularly.

(In other words, of the now > 1mm accounts on BS, I suspect that a relatively high percentage of daily posts are coming from a relatively low number of accounts... whatever "relatively low" would mean for a social site.)

I reckon ppl aren't posting yet because they're on twitter.

If there's a way to link the posting that would be good

Anybody still need a code?

yes :(

bsky-social-navga-r6tdw

I’m too slow on the draw

kinda mourning twitter today. possibly just bc my day so far has involved a lot of waiting around lol.

like, a single guy just totally wrecked this vast thing. it’s wild.

bsky-social-krq4n-g75t5

success. you are both heroes tyty

I wonder if people will realize that an algorithm feed can be good.

Find me a good algorithm feed first.

I've been pretty happy with the "For you" feed on another app, which I use as my primary Twitter replacement (...and which I won't name, to avoid getting into a battle-of-the-socials convo).

its spoutible isn't it

Haha, no... I bailed on that one after a good try

an hour ago i unsub'd from their mailouts.
i had totally forgotten about that place to be honest.

I wonder if Bluesky hasn't taken off because You Still Need a Fucking Secret Invite Code To Get In?

that's because it's still in beta mode? I mean the site is mostly functional but it doesn't seem production ready yet.

Like if I was a Twitter user with hundreds or thousands of followers, I'm not going to peace out and say "See you on Bluesky. Hope you got an invite, losers."

until recently my feed was dominated by neil gaiman and steve albini,
but then i tweaked something and boom, my feed has become a lot more interesting.
then again that could be cos they aren't posting as much and i have added a lot of accounts that i follow.

it's production ready, it's just missing features people want. I'm not sure how big the team is there; there are like, three people from there that post on bluesky even semi-regularly, and the main one is their front-end dev who might be the only person filling that role (not sure), and he forwards feature requests to someone who seems to be product.

it's dominated by 1% of users like any other social network. the problem is it's still small enough that timelines seem very repetitive. (also there's fewer people willing to be the main character and generate primo content like unperson.)

fwiw though some time in the last couple of weeks i reached the point where my regular following feed on bluesky (with replies turned off, just posts and reposts) has significantly more content than the same on twitter. my twitter following feed is down to like 4 posts an hour. i follow twice as many people on twitter than on bsky.

Bluesky is still slow and clunky, if they open it up to everyone it’ll probably crash.

a lot of econ twitter ppl have started to migrate if you're into that niche. jamelle bouie, tressie mcmillain cottom, and adam serwer are all active, too if u like them (i do)

Maybe I constructed my feed all wrong but the site still sucks for following sports, movies, breaking news. Too much arguing about the supposed rules of the site and other boring internecine topics.

sport stuff will not move there until it has video. same goes for breaking news to an extent.

i vowed not to follow any pundits on bluesky

u follow me tho

im not perfect

I wouldn’t expect video any time soon but I’m confused about gif support… it’s just a file type. Sure the files can be bigger than pngs or jpegs, but not that much. It feels like a conscious decision to not support.

im not perfect

― lag∞n, Thursday, September 21, 2023 10:03 PM

hush, sweet lag∞n

Kinda like it barely supports video and so on. Just a quiet, clunky place where we can post is classic early internet.

One more code:

bsky-social-3d4wb-n63qn

Agree that videos and gifs would be bad

iiuc they have not added gif support because they are not old people.

gif reactions might be one of my top three least favorite things about twitter, and that is saying a lot given what a shitshow it is now

otm. they were dying but then twitter's worst users moved to the top of the replies and they're back.

a carefully selected gif used to have cachet, but the concept of the gif library - just choosing whatever bottom of the barrel no royalties bullshit that comes up when you type in 'surprised' or w/e - is so bad, and also one of the worst things about work slacks

whatever.gif

most of them are from TV shows I don't watch and I know because there's usually a giant logo at the bottom

the fact that so many of them have a broadcast tv logo at the bottom is how you know these jokes are all 10+ years old.

suspect a lot of the not having stuff like dm and video has to do with the protocol its built on, if they were just making a normal website it wouldnt be too hard to implement that stuff

also theyve said the invites arent just a beta thing its part of their moderation scheme, bad actors cant just make a million accounts

agreed about gifs. I definitely spent some time looking for a way to block tweets containing animated gifs a couple of years ago but didn't find anything.

yeah dm is a protocol issue.

video is at the very least a compute and storage problem (everything needs to be re-encoded and stored). i'm pretty sure they're anti-gif, but afaik video is missing because it's hard.

yeah idk how much money they have, imo they shouldve gone all the way and done text only

animated gifs are weirdly huge thats why all the gifs on twitter are really just videos

twitter didnt used to have images you had to host them on a third party site, when text was king

i agree re txt only would have been a good way to keep things clean and simple (and cheaper for hosting)

~ he says having posted several album covers in last few days ~

just add a media url option to skeets and clients can implement a little embed off of a video provider

supporting external embeds (video, image, whatever) is an abuse threat and potentially a security complication. you can do it but it's an operational burden.

xp The thing is though those weird spam accounts are proliferating. and they say “Report them if you notice them, we can trace them via the invite trees”… but they don’t seem to do that effectively(?)

(sorry I was responding to the invite thing)

i do think it's more likely they will support embedded video from youtube before they support hosted video (because of the storage issue which goes back to me wondering how they are planning to pay for all this shit if it really takes off, because it has no revenue model).

what’s mastodon do re: video?

Depends on how your Mastodon server is set up. I think the default max file size is 40MB but YouTube embeds work fine.

In case anyone needs an invite:

bsky-social-rdvwf-sujqp
bsky-social-5v6sg-ez5e3

All right, I'm there: @burningambulance.bsky.social

bsky-social-ffyub-pwtco
bsky-social-z7xeg-k3u2m

bsky-social-wps7h-frnlu
bsky-social-mf1er-6rfyn

bsky-social-cq7r5-cieba

In the name of community I started following a bunch of people, but I've already had to start unfollowing annoying (over) posters. (None of you people, though.)

bsky-social-9uiqa-gwsw4

suspect a lot of the not having stuff like dm and video has to do with the protocol its built on, if they were just making a normal website it wouldnt be too hard to implement that stuff

― lag∞n, Friday, September 22, 2023 1:33 PM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

dont mind videos but not having dms is annoying

also the feed is weird. it shows me every single reply from an account i follow, even if they're just replying to a random account i don't follow. but at the same time sometimes it doesn't show threaded replies by the account i do follow to themself

― flopson, Sunday, August 27, 2023 1:34 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

they fixed this in the new update btw. feed is pretty readable now

i've been enjoying bluesk tbh. there's a provincialism to it that's in some ways unappealing--lots of the discourse you see has this vibe of like, "this is the safe space away from scary mean twitter", to which i rmde--but it is nice how relatively small it feels. i missed out on early twitter (think i joined in 2013 or 14) but kinda reminds me of the first couple years

I joined twitter in November 2006 and I am one thousand years old

at the time I thought I’d missed the good wave when it was popular at sxsw (also rip) and maybe was right

I don’t think early twitter can quite be recaptured, but it’s interesting how each alternative (and I’ve tried… seven (7) of them) has its own vibe & culture, without necessarily promoting itself that way. Seems to happen somewhat organically, you know?

loving how you can configure your TL so you only see posts of folks you follow and nothing else.
there are lots of feeds to select from that tweak your feed, but for me 'OnlyPosts' is the one that sorts me out.

early twitter was so great

I joined in 2009 but it really started to devolve around 2014 or so

2015/16 was the real turning point (for obvious reasons); early 2010s Twitter was the peak I think – "weird Twitter" era, plus real-time engagement w/"events" but not in the oversaturated way that came later.

once tv news started showing twitter screenshots it was cooked

I dig the new website design, with your feeds listed in a sidebar that you can easily click around in.

once tv news started showing twitter screenshots it was cooked

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Thursday, September 28, 2023 12:06 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

...cop starts breakdancing

2015/16 was the real turning point (for obvious reasons); early 2010s Twitter was the peak I think – "weird Twitter" era, plus real-time engagement w/"events" but not in the oversaturated way that came later.

― Chavez video on MTV, July 1995 (morrisp), Thursday, September 28, 2023 11:52 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

some of the early 2010s weird twitter humor hasn't aged that well imho. the best tweets of that era are classics but on the whole there was still lots of residual "so random larfs"/"epic bacon" type of millenial humor in the mix

yeah a lot of it in retrospect was kinda lame but i think people liked it cause it was goofin off online not cause it was genius or whatever, then brands and the pundits et al came along and those are anti goofin off groups

it's weird how classic dril tweets just seem normal now, i remember them being so unlike anything at the time. also, i wish normal_now would come back.

the other day the discourse on bluesky was everyone dunking on a post by will stancil making the pt that if everyone on the left ceded twitter/X for the "walled garden" of bsky then no one would be left to bully the media and shift the discourse except nazis and centrist tech people. and everyone was dunking on it but like, the whole "posting is praxis" thing was definitely something that a significant share of ppl very earnestly believed from 2015-19. and imo it's now underrated how effective it was

Weird Twitter def. could feel forced or goofy, but there were also folks making such creative and cool uses of the medium (including the character limitations). Even close to "the end," I would occasionally run into accounts doing offbeat things that were so funny to me. I see a little of that elsewhere now too (like Bluesky), but it feels like the time for it has passed...

wait goofy is bad now

tough crowd

I like goofy... it's hard to do well tho, like many things I suppose.

I feel like even though twitter is obviously way past it's best, in any given month there are a fair few very funny tweets that can hold there own alongside the all-time funny tweets, are there equivalent very funny posts on bluesky, or are people still saving their best material for twitter?

weird twitter went downhill after horse ebooks stopped posting

everything happens so much less now

and imo it's now underrated how effective it was

― flopson, Friday, September 29, 2023 2:15 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

anyone whos seen some big name pundit driven insane by a bunch of nobodies knows that shit works

anyone whos seen some big name pundit driven insane by a bunch of nobodies knows that shit works

― lag∞n, Friday, September 29, 2023 2:41 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ya exactly. not just pundits either tho, like the decade-long campaign by keynesians and MMT armies of twitter randos who'd bully anyone who said the word "deficit" pejoratively definitely made the biden fiscal stimulus bigger. possibly by like an order of magnitude

My favorite aspect of Twitter (besides all the official/gov't accounts) were these smart, funny, and/or interesting posters you would run into who weren't necessarily recognized experts in a particular field (or if so, they were posting anonymously), and weren't blue checks (in the traditional meaning) – but were clearly coming from a place of deep knowledge and/or analytical skill, and it's like... who are you? you're just a random account with a jokey username and cartoon pfp, but clearly you know what's up.

There were a few posters who I was really hoping would migrate over to another platform (and were the main reason I stayed on Twitter as long as I did), but they set up accounts and still haven't started posting regularly elsewhere, so I guess they don't plan on it. It's a bummer

buckle up babies cause charles_72sss is about to take yall on a wild climate ride

and imo it's now underrated how effective it was

― flopson, Friday, September 29, 2023 2:15 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

seriously think this is why a lot of elon's SV friends are cheering him on.

totally

The paranoid part of my brain sometimes thinks that was the entire point of the acquisition.

posted this a couple months ago:

This is correct afaict https://www.garbageday.email/p/paying-to-use-a-site-you-cant-use

The reason for its success, if you can argue that it was ever really successful, wasn’t that it was cooler than Facebook. It was because of its proximity to power. The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture. The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were. And I don’t think it’s an accident that a deranged billionaire broke that, nor do I think it’s accident that we’re suddenly being offered smaller, insular platforms or an offshoot of a Meta app as replacements. The folks in charge clearly don’t want that to happen again.

I don’t know about “since it launched in 2006”… for a long time it was mainly comedians and bands and your IRL friends.

(I also don’t agree that it was a good thing for all those journalists etc. to gather in one place, in fact I think it really wasn’t, but views obviously differ.)

I don’t understand Dril. I’ve read articles about him, followed him, and I simply don’t get it. My brain doesn’t work that way. It’s like those magic eye optical illusions. Never could see ‘em.

The Bluesky iOS app has a bug where if you type a reply that's more than a few lines, the screen doesn't "scroll"; and so you can't see what you're typing, or whether you successfully attached an image (it's all "buried" beneath the bottom of the screen).

I submitted it as a bug report awhile back... I know they're a small team and have a lot to work on, but I assume their devs use iOS as well, and you'd think they'd iron out this pretty fundamental irritant.

Yeah I've experienced that on Android as well.

tag that guy Paul on bsky and complain and he will probably look into it

also, may want to try Greysky, I am hearing it is now further along in some features and has fewer bugs.

this guy is currently working on the apps https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov

it’s probably been a few weeks now, but a handful of people were run off of bsky for being weird, and one of the weird bits was that they were using a discord to just sit around and workshop their posts, which they would then throw out there and repost and strategic hours

I get the entire 1. get a social media following 2. ?? 3. profit scheme but it’s weird to see it start from zero and ramp up

I should note this wasn’t “weird twitter” kind of weird, but “your interactions seem to imply you’ve got a sidebar of interactions going we can’t see and there are no direct messages here”

lol board detectives got em

Were they good posts at least? (A lot of posts I see on there could use more “workshopping”…)

that is fairly inoffensive. some people got run off last month because it was revealed they were colluding on discord and then piling up on people with unfounded accusations.

this weekend's drama that I witnessed involved a woman who publicly declared she had begun to kill herself, and then when people reacted and called for help, apparently the cops showed up and now everyone who tried to help her is evil because ACAB.

the accusation stuff is just weird and just created on the fly. there was a group on twitter that seems to be attempting to migrate whose entire m.o. was to find someone actually popular, find something they said that could be misconstrued, and then blast that as a talking point to pull in anyone who might be susceptible

what are you even doing online if this is what you’re up to? at least muting and blocking is being more normalized

you can absolutely ignore, block, mute anyone who thinks the fact emergency services showed up for someone in trouble means people who tried to help are pro-cop!

before musk took over i blocked and muted basically no one on twitter. i block and mute tons of people on bluesky. it's a good system. should have done it sooner.

the other day the discourse on bluesky was everyone dunking on a post by will stancil making the pt that if everyone on the left ceded twitter/X for the "walled garden" of bsky then no one would be left to bully the media and shift the discourse except nazis and centrist tech people. and everyone was dunking on it but like, the whole "posting is praxis" thing was definitely something that a significant share of ppl very earnestly believed from 2015-19. and imo it's now underrated how effective it was

― flopson, Friday, 29 September 2023 bookmarkflaglink

"Posting is praxis" ppl haven't decreased to a significant degree?

From a ukpol perspective there was a five minute window to make some changes. That has been firmly shut way before Musk took over.

This post on bsky...

"i've noticed since this most recent wave of invites went out, a lot of new people are here posting like shit, being super aggressive and scolding people in their replies and i just want to say we don't do that here, go back to twitter if you can't act right"

Is funnily enough the first time I've encountered something like twitter behaviour on there lol. Though I am still only looking now and then. Timeline is growing.

I do feel like Bluesky has a lot more schoolmarm types

the this is our little website behavior is very funny, its not actually their little website

if only they knew about ilx

people did really used to have their little websites now they have to pretend on some libertarians venture funded app, sad

I’ve seen aggro jerks/trolls on Bsky for a while, that’s def not a new phenomenon

this weekend's drama that I witnessed involved a woman who publicly declared she had begun to kill herself, and then when people reacted and called for help, apparently the cops showed up and now everyone who tried to help her is evil because ACAB.

I saw this and to be fair it was the woman herself who went off on the people who tried to help her and said they were evil and no longer her friends, not just some collection of bored bystanders.

unstable people will do that and imo you should either not take sides or at the very least not take the side of the unstable person

if they’re speaking like that online, you have no idea whether they’ve reached out to people irl and it’s a tough call whether to take action but if their life is credibly at risk you’ve gotta do what you gotta do

anyone have any new codes to share

bsky-social-htira-6c6ic
bsky-social-6cjik-537vu
bsky-social-wmgoq-nouxc

👑

bsky-social-fdchn-ba7j7

to be fair it was the woman herself who went off on the people who tried to help her and said they were evil and no longer her friends, not just some collection of bored bystanders

yes i know, and that's what I meant. and at that point I decided this person was either 1) very seriously mentally unwell (tbf, she does admit this, and claims a whole onslaught of issues from PMDD to autism to something else) 2) just an attention seeker who got the wrong kind of attention (she seemed upset that she lost 50 followers as a result of this).

there is a contingent of people in the world who want to loudly proclaim every single mental illness they suffer from to thousands upon thousands of strangers and I don't think I'm ever going to understand these people; ultimately I lose empathy with them. they are tiring and they inevitably ask for money. It strikes me as a deeply disingenuous type of grift.

bsky-social-kq2er-rses5

bsky-social-mx3dk-bmivu

he whole "posting is praxis" thing was definitely something that a significant share of ppl very earnestly believed from 2015-19

someone please explain to me what that phrase means

praxis term used on the left meaning putting theory into action eg protest is praxis, but is posting praxis are you actually doing anything, a question posed to the online left

now you are exactly as stupid as the rest of us lol

shitposting is shitpraxis, prove me wrong

got it. half the time when I encounter something fucking stupid its origins are in the online left. (the other half of the time it's coming from the online right)

I think Sean McElwee's narrative arc really killed the posting is praxis thing

so yr saying the on-line left stupidity in fact came from the stupid on-line centre 😦

the death knell for sure

is random restaurant on bluesky yet?

anyone have any luck finding good art bots?

it is on there but someone just used my code to make it, which is fine lol

dang

tbf i didnt do it and i posted the code and they credited me and i did not complain

re: artbots

the twitter crew migrated en masse to mastodon and carefully set up there -- but i just peeked and it looks like they stopped bothering to update in march :(

there are a handful on bluesky who are maybe planning to expand the project (i don't know to what extent or if it's the twitter gang moved again): basquiat is the one i see most often

some of them did actually return to twitter tho most are far less as active than used to be and some seem to be suspended (i tried to work out what this narrative reminded me of and lol it's when franklin's ppl remanned the unfrozen terror and erebus and sailed them the the north to the south of king william island)

the bluesky artbot ppl are the twitter ppl: it's basically this guy https://twitter.com/andreitr = https://bsky.app/profile/andreitr.bsky.social

i think the sluggishness setting up may be that it's taken a while to solve some coding and automating issue

I was expecting the artbot accounts to have flowered a bit more by now but they all seem to follow the same 4 accounts. Guggenheim Collection is a good one.

Bluesky is still so clunky. You click on new notifications and the NEW NOTIFICATIONS number doesn't go away; you have to refresh multiple times, to make new notifications appear.

The threading setting is quite neat.

I dont think I must use this kind of socmed the same way you all seem to. I just want to hear from my friends. Do people just randomly follow everyone they come across?

The few IRL ppl I know who still have social media accounts* very rarely, if ever, post.

(Insta being the exception… kid photos and such)

FWIW I am still actively using bluesky, indeed more than I was a month ago, and am getting many new followers every day, whereas I've completely stopped with Threads.

I know a good bunch of people who mainly talk about books and a bit about music on Twitter, who are slowly shifting across. Once enough of them have I can bin the Twitter account. I don't really know anyone in the real world I can talk to about these things.

Deleted everything from Bluesky and split. Lots of scolds and folks going all-in on political shitposting.

To fine tune it... With Twitter, I could at least mix up the scolds and shitposts with recent photos of Saturn, updates on pirate radio stations on shortwave/HF, LA police pursuits, and what kinds of cupcakes are available at Erin McKenna's on Larchmont (my faves in town!). Without all that, I'm finding Bluesky in its current form feeling a lot like Facebook of all things. Endless loops of nostalgia memes punctuated by #resistanceshitpost whenever political turmoil happens.

tsar bombadil: if you have notifications you've checked in on and want the NEW NOTIFICATION notice to switch off, click to the home thread and back

Bluesky is still so clunky. You click on new notifications and the NEW NOTIFICATIONS number doesn't go away; you have to refresh multiple times, to make new notifications appear.

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Tuesday, October 3, 2023 8:07 PM (yesterday)

i've had to do this on twitter since forever (even before elon took over)

i doubt anyone ever unironically used the phrase "posting is praxis" to describe their own view, but many people believe (imho not unreasonably) that by posting it's possible to "shift the overton window"

thats what people will say when pressed but mostly theyre just posting because they like it

depends on who and when. the praxis motive peaks during democratic primaries or around the passage of major legislation by dem administrations. there's also a subset of posters who have their pet issue and are dedicated to replying to anyone who posts about it. kinda like a stan army for politics

Cheers, Mark S

5 more, if anyone is still looking:

bsky-social-gwrtl-gu7iv
bsky-social-qrhwu-ffsxd
bsky-social-khnpe-kwzy5
bsky-social-u4dtd-a3bgw
bsky-social-wnll3-ufj4o

It’s happening

https://bsky.app/profile/michelleperez.bsky.social/post/3kawvetilrz2e

Who is that

I'm at @jimbooo, although lord knows I don't need any more things to distract me online.

The Following, Discover, and Popular With Friends tabs all show me the same people and posts... why is this site so half-baked

When I've tried using 'Discover', it keeps showing me posts I've already seen, sifted in / resorted with posts I haven't (i.e., it doesn't show me posts once and then keep adding new ones; it seems to keep throwing old ones back in). So I don't use it anymore...

Honestly I barely look at my other saved "Feeds" any longer, except maybe the Bob Dylan one

Back on the “fake accounts” tip…

not sure if this impersonator guy is who he says he is

yeah those arne't 'fake accounts' they are obvious spam junk accounts. I mean I guess those are 'fake' but they don't appear to be impersonating anyone

Yeah I didn’t mean impersonation accts, that’s a separate issue (I’ve reported one a few times that I guess just won’t be acted on).

You’d think they would have restricted certain other words from appearing in handles back during that last episode, but I guess not

I mean look it’s not a surprise; when they rolled out their moderation system based on 3rd-party labeling, and ppl were pointing out how it could be used for targeted abuse, that guy Paul made it clear that the idea hadn’t even occurred to them… like they hadn’t spent a minute thinking about it beyond “this enables us to avoid taking responsibility for moderation, which is the goal of this enterprise”

is there no way on web to view quote posts of a post

are there any feeds that have good posts ive got "what hot classic" (bad posts) and "popular with friends" (almost entirely posts from people im already following)

I got followed by Satan, so there is that.

Agree that "Popular with friends" is useless. "For You" and "Home+" are better than "What's Hot Classic".

do these links work?

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2wqomm3tjqbgktbrfwgvrw34/feed/home-plus
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wqowuobffl66jv3kpsvo7ak4/feed/the-algorithm

yeah looked at for you it was better but still a lot of selfies and other shit im not really interested in in there

if you don't like my selfies then just mute me

listen man you just gotta invest in one of those ring lights

can you just post the list names, because the first time I clicked through it timed out twice, and the second time it just took me to my following feed I had open -_-

theres one called for you

“For you” is official as in maintained by bsky.

There’s one called “home*” which iirc was the first contributed feed that was algorithmic in a more complicated way than “>n likes” or “about subject X” but it seems to be broken for me right now.

Home+ not home* sorry

this site is starting to get good imo.

i need to follow more people but im trying not to follow too many jounalists-punits, trying for a feed of chill funny people but idk its tough

'OnlyPosts' is the feed i check the most other than 'Following' as it does what it says
i.e. only the posts of folks you follow and nothing else.

some codes:

bsky-social-cejb2-pezyy
bsky-social-qspjk-cai4o
bsky-social-annkt-5gka4

Yeah the filters like only posts are v useful.

Thanks for sharing the codes, Roz. Gonna give this platform a try

bsky-social-dm55f-air3m
bsky-social-452ru-cph3r
bsky-social-b6ov2-bsu2p

is the strategy is to keep requiring codes until nobody cares anymore

then they'll be able to handle the traffic i guess

they say its part of their moderation scheme, if scammers spammers the banned etc cant make infinite accounts theyre much easier to control

it's a decent tactic. just keep requiring codes until everyone who is actively seeking to join a new social site has it, then move on to general use

reminds me of the very old days where gmail initially required an invite, and facebook was limited to certain universities, then by college email addresses for a couple years

you also end up with more people who have actually engaged with others on other social networks. if you can't get a code, you either have no one to ask, or the people you're asking are not giving you a code for a reason

ty truly-- i don't know/haven't learned what data and history actually seem to show about the strategy-- to bystander me it's just "wow, they're still passcoding."

reminds me of the very old days where gmail initially required an invite, and facebook was limited to certain universities, then by college email addresses for a couple years

Yep, I had to get an invite for my first Gmail account. Don't even remember who gave it to me.

Anybody else need codes?

I've also got a bunch of codes, I'll post them if anybody needs them

i made like $200 selling gmail invites on ebay back in the day

lmao

I remember Gmail codes! I think I ended up with an early adopter gmail because they gave them to people who also had... something accounts. I forget what, now. Photobucket or flickr or something.

Probably not flickr, they were in the pocket of Big Yahoo!

Anyway, I tweeted that I had 4 bsky codes a couple nights ago because everyone I'd offer one to in a dm is already over there. Hoping to cast a wider net among people I follow/follow me and I got *crickets*. tbh the migration seems largely complete based on who I've always followed on twitter. Not everyone is a regular user yet, and some never will be, but almost everyone's there already.

My tweeting and retweeting has gone way up during this ongoing genocide. There’s mostly like 5 people on there who still pay attention, and it wouldn’t matter much even if it was thousands more, but I’m compelled to do it. No offense to anyone who’s getting anything out of it but I check in to look at bluesky and it feels irrelevant right now.

fwiw, I never used Twitter and don’t want to use Bluesky, I mostly lurk in these threads because I want to see these platforms fail lmfao

I'm on Bluesky and Twitter, still get better interactions + better content on the latter.

I am very happy with Bluesky; in re Chris L’s point I’m seeing plenty of discussion and posts about Gaza there, so I guess it’s all down to who’s being followed. I take Alfred’s point about conversation feeling smoother on Twitter in comparison but, well, if you’re at a party and trying to have a chat, when the host is yelling all the time and welcoming the Nazis to the front door, why hang further?

That's it, though. Maybe I've curated my feed well, for I don't see much of any haranguing unless I'm looking for it.

Bluesky is feeling pretty Twitter 2010 to me rn which is good.

Bluesky's directed me to excellent Levant-related content, I'll say.

The big difference is I have been reading and trying to retweet numerous Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, none of whom would be on bluesky.

on bluesky if a post you replied to is deleted seems like your reply is deleted as well, kinda sucks, a cool thing about twitter is replies are first class posts in their own right

I think a lot of it is user-facing behavior? If you block someone, you don't see your replies to them anymore, either. Unblock them and it's back.

oh maybe it works the other way too when theyve blocked me

i can still find my reply in question in search but when i click on it i get this post has been deleted

it actually says

Post not found
The post may have been deleted.

https://bsky.app/profile/friendo.bsky.social/post/3kd3azj6ete2s

The Stephen King account says: "There is an impersonation warning on my account, but it’s really me. Just hasn’t been used lately." (The warning reads: The moderators believe this account is lying about their identity.)

They're gonna need some sort of verification system if they ever want public figures to join in real numbers.

yeah seems like theyre going for a pretty bare bones approach so far which is prob wise, theyve only raised $8m so far from what i can tell, staffing up stuff like verification moderation celebrity concierge service etc will be expensive and prob comes later

verification is already implemented in the way they plan to do it, https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial

Sounds like a big lift.

also it doesnt prevent anyone from impersonating you

(I guess I see how the "newsroom" thing would work, for organizations that would take the time to do that – but yeah, I don't understand why I couldn't buy a domain and say I'm "Tom Cruise" or whoever.)

Bluesky is not going to affirmatively verify anyone which is complicated and expensive. They rely on domain control for that. But they are actively flagging accounts as impersonation which is cheap. They would flag @iamtomcruise.com quickly based on current behavior.

Sounds like a big lift.

― Girl (1956) (morrisp), Wednesday, November 1, 2023 5:09 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

So was getting verified at Twitter?

Getting a blue check in 2022 involved sending Twitter photo id and making/receiving phone calls and physical mail. No celebrity is going to send photo id to a shitty startup.

Well I guess it will have to wait until they're no longer a shitty startup(?)

It'd take little effort for a domain registrar to give you a little walkthrough or one-click "set up my bluesky identity" option. And if, for example, the nytimes wanted to verify reporters they could set up a reportername.bsky.nytimes.com relatively trivially, too.

Most orgs are going to have a domain, and if someone enterprising wanted to do a verification service specifically for bluesky, you could make a "verified.user" domain or whatever company that could give tomcruise.verified.user or w/e and it'd be on them to be reputable

who is the hypothetical person who wants to be verified but has no resources?

I'm a little testy because I have been annoyed by the complete junky mess that federated identity became that left us with "log in with google, facebook, or apple" as opposed to what it could have been

seems liked itd be better to just not start a social media site

It's not about having no resources. If Stephen King didn't bother to do it (assuming that's really him), why would any other random celeb / public figure who's mildly interested in signing up, but not enough to bother with the domain thing? Maybe I'm wrong, but relying on "crowd reporting" plus some moderator oversight to identify potential impersonations feels unsustainable.

FWIW, I've seen ppl complaining about verification issues on other sites, I know that this problem isn't unique to Bluesky (or easy to deal with).

Huh that domain as verification which piggybacks on the verification that was done there is cool. Not as good as my idea which is to use use your social sec no. as your handle, i mean so much verification.

Not everyone is an American with a social sec no.

Says he, completely missing the joke, argh.

I admit I also don't really understand how the domain thing verifies anything other than the fact you own or control a domain.

It verifies you are the same entity as owner of the domain. This is only useful if people trust that the owner of nytimes.com is The New York Times.

Right, and if you don't have a storied website at a domain (or plan on building one)...?

"storied" is a bit strong. just needs to be a website that people who know who A is also believe belongs to A. A doesn't need to be famous.

(i said x but had to change it because that was confusing. fuck that guy.)

Having to build & host a website which convincingly establishes your identity is not only a very 1998 idea of being online, but it surely a greater lift for verification than whatever Twitter required for all those blue checks…

it kind of unclear exactly what theyre going for, you cant see posts unless youre logged in, thats not a twitter replacement, twitter is all about blasting posts out to everywhere put them on tv in the newspaper etc

i don't think there are many people who would have "deserved" verification in the ~2022 blue check sense (i.e. celebrities, journalists, businesses)
who do not have their own website or work for someone who does.

i get that it's not perfect, but i can't think of anything better, and twitter 2022/instagram's approach is not viable for a startup.

you cant see posts unless youre logged in

this is admittedly very weird. it's not even true in any technical sense. it's just a limitation of how they've built they're first party front end. there are a bunch of places you can go to see a given user's feed if you know their username.

yeah its weird all posts are available on the skychain

the way to do verification is achieve scale by allowing jokers to impersonate celebs then you have enough money to hire people to kick the jokers off

When T2 launched (which is truly a janky startup), they were doing it via scheduling a Zoom call with one of the founders, where you wave your ID in front of the camera (for like $5). And ppl were doing it! Then they switched to some 3rd-party verification service. I can get why, like, Paul Rudd wouldn't want to do that; but I would think a writer may prefer it, over having their verification tied to their current employer? Idk

By the way (so as not to end the night on a down note) – I've been using a custom feed which I built via blueskyfeeds.com. It's easy, and a nice way to pull together posts using your favorite keywords, if you're so inclined.

(The bummer is that you still see Bad Posts, and now they're Bad Posts using your favorite keywords, so... they may seem extra bad.)

yeah i think the "journalist that changes jobs" situation is not clear under this verification model. i'm not sure if you can change usernames yet.

I think people impersonating people who are known mostly for being posters is a bigger threat than people impersonating celebrities unless you’re counting scams.

Anyone with a presence in media or something like a CEO is pretty easy to verify by going to their job’s website and seeing if the handle linked there matches the one on social media

if you think lebron james wants you to enter your social security number and credit card number to send you bitcoin you probably have bigger issues

what if he has 10 macbooks to sell

that could be a deal

It definitely makes sense for something like a brand, a gov’t agency, etc.

i really dislike the .bskysocial at the end of every handle. it’s one of the lamest ugliest and most “mastodon energy” things about the site. and i don’t want to register a domain to be at the end of my handle, i just want nothing. as long as they keep the invite-only system, if they just ban people for impersonating, shouldn’t be too much of a problem since it would be costly to get back in each time. so those two design features seem complementary

it is exactly like mastodon because the intention is to allow posts to be federated and they’re hoping multiple providers pop up and join the network

I do see accounts with other suffixes, so I guess ppl are setting up their own AT Protocol servers?

IIUC those are just people using custom domain names as handles. Federation is not turned on yet.

suspect that all this federation protocols etc is just gonna end up a largely pointless hassle, most people dont care they just wanna post, bluesky doesnt even have dms gdamn

xp Ah, thanks... I wasn't sure what was happening there.

TBH, I'm not even totally clear of the value of federation in the ActivityPub "fediverse." From what I understood, getting two servers to talk to each other (whether they're running the same software or not – Mastodon or any of the others) is all dependent on whether the folks running the server you're on decide to flip the switch... and you could switch servers, but... It just feels highly speculative in terms of future benefit, for something that folks in that world are so focused on.

Yeah there’s a tension right now because bsky is pretty close to what people want, but their roadmap is to turn it into one part of a system that no one except tpot libertarians, blockchain people and other cranks want.

I do like how the AT Protocol allows you to bring your posts & followers with you if you switch servers; that def seems like an improvement over how ActivityPub works (not that I really understand why folks on Mastodon go around switching servers all the time...).

I think federation is overall good but no one has done it in a way that people like with twitter-like social media. That and the fact that people don’t really think of things as service providers, they think of them as platforms.

I ostensibly have an email account that my internet service provider has given me, but I never use that. I use mostly gmail outside of work, because it’s convenient and I shrug off the monetization aspect. But I at least recognize that email is an open protocol and I could jump providers at any time.

The pedant in me finally stopped cringing due to my associating things this way. “Do you have a facebook?” always bugged me because you have a facebook account or facebook page. Your entire presence there isn’t yours at all, and it’s not portable.

If I have, say, a wordpress.com site I can export the entire thing and host it elsewhere with no one being the wiser as long as I’m not using a bunch of obvious proprietary junk. So you have a website.

I know phone numbers are passé for nearly all messaging but even those are portable. I’m not asking someone for their Verizon.

Sorry, felt like shouting into the void

I've been "enjoying" (more or less) using three different platforms, for different purposes. When I post, I mostly post different stuff on each one, and in a different "voice" (not in a performative way; more in the sense that the vibe & features of each platform sort of mold how I post there). Occasionally I'll post the same thing to a few of them, just to see what happens. (Nothing much, in my case...)

bsky-social-qzync-tysnp

they are testing federation now for whatever reason and whatever good that will do

under the covers, the replication and distribution that sites like twitter do are basically internal federation. it's just transparent to the users and means that only one provider controls the entire network

bluesky itself could tank but users could shift to another provider in the federation network

I dislike fediverse structure because any server can just go away at any time, which is precisely what happened to me when I tried mastodon for a bit - luckily I hadnt invested any time/real posts but the server was shut down presumably by whoever ran it so my account just vanished without warning or notification.

It just makes me think of the old IRC server structure. I feel like the people I know who like this crap are the same ppl who wish Usenet would come back.

Don't tell FediTips (@fedit✧✧✧@ms✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧), who insists that being on a big server (specifically, mastodon.social – the one I'm on), is bad for Reasons ("it just recreates the centralized experience," or something); and the ethical thing when joining Mastodon is to be on a small, boutique server.

(ha, weird, I didn't know those redactions would be triggered)

I had a different Mastodon account earlier in the year (before shutting it down and rejoining more recently) – that server would have an hour or two of downtime most nights, it was absurd.

bsky-social-cy6at-52no4
bsky-social-z5v4o-3daik
bsky-social-j6no3-7ms4f

I won't let this slander pass - Usenet was distributed exactly to avoid anyone being able to close a part of it down by taking their ball and going home.

It also spawned ILX, for better or worse.

Yeah tbh I liked Usenet as well. I was just shortcutting to "very oldschool user" trope.

Finally on: ephender.bsky.social

wait usenet spawned ilx?? i thought new york london paris munich / freaky trigger spawned ilx because wordpress comments didn’t work

Right, but a significant portion of the Freaky Trigger nucleus came from alt.music.alternative

Ned was a mainstay of a.m.a in the early 90s

Even pre alt.music.alternative was rec.music.misc, which had some future ILXors (including me).

Or maybe they were concurrent, but I remember us abandoning r.m.m for a.m.a when the former started to become more spam than content (which happened to a.m.a as well).

yeah I was a Usenet head from about 1992 to 2007 or so - this is the only place which has a similar vibe.

My Usenet haunts back in the day was alt.techsupport.recovery and aus.gothic.

Years worth of inane dribble, lost to the ether. Well not completely lost - its all still there in Google Groups but the weird formatitng makes it impossible to follow really.

sorry it was aus.culture.gothic. Confusing my Usenet and my IRC!

alt.music.pearl-jam babyee