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

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