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

Im on threads but my strategy is to only have one thread. I’ve been posting to myself for months on my one thread, and I don’t think it notifies anyone. This is a good thing! It’s a social media network so I understand how it uses an algorithm to try to make more interesting to others, and in my case it has quickly determined it can make any money off of me! It’s just like damn, no, threads hates you and that is probably right

oops, sorry, *can't make any money off of me

but of course,

** yes it can make money off of me anyway, but only a little bit

cute, lack of a head is kind of troubling tho

https://i.imgur.com/lS5FKtC.png

it's the colonel sanders bowtie and collar area

new bluesky app logo looks bad

oh that’s what lagoon posted abt

i keep tryna imagine the secret way it’s actually good and i def cannot. maybe making it blue like the burd will give somehow anal musk a stroke

I guess I don’t realize how much they were aping the Twitter look until I saw the new (iOS) app icon on my phone.

it's bad. i think the ceo likes butterflies?

Btw, the logo’s designer hinted today (…on Threads…) that a UI rehaul is also in the works.

lol
https://bsky.app/profile/boobliette.bsky.social/post/3kht55d7fry2o

i have no issue with the butterfly?

BTW, media embeds (video, from youtube, critically) now work, I see

Finally got my invite today. Who is worth following on this app?

feel like the moby-dick bot has somehow gotten better on blueski?

bsky-social-cy6at-52no4

bsky-social-kvvl7-3pgnk

bsky-social-iktpj-iyzku

bsky-social-mimvo-nlnox

bsky-social-ngtxv-7zbyz

bsky-social-l3ho7-nhgdr

bsky-social-mmcqm-wklnz

blue sky more like poo sky haha jk

did not expect poosky.com domain placeholder to be a full screen goatse reference

(it's a safe for work goatse reference, for the goatse heads that are at work right now)

heh

https://i.imgur.com/K8ZDhgM.png

https://bsky.app/profile/zig.computer/post/3kkjkxmor6c2s

I bailed around the holidays… checked back in briefly this week before deleting the app from my phone. Glad it’s a place that works for some folks, everyone needs their spot online.

I think invite only has really blunted its impact. Understand they don’t want to be swamped with new accounts and break their infra, but the slowly slowly rollout isn’t helping them gain traction.

what would qualify as gaining traction

i'm still using bsky but I feel like a lot of people I followed who came over from twitter have massively slowed their posting. Agree that they really need to open it to everyone, I'm not sure why they haven't now.

the invite system is clearly part of their moderation system so is prob not going away anytime soon, we can conclude from that theyre not just trying to grow as fast as possible, so what are they doing, idk lol trying to make a good site maybe, just messing around

Don't know if I want it to gain traction, small number of accounts from people I like, that's all I'm looking for

what would qualify as gaining traction

I guess shaping the zeitgeist in the way Twitter did back in the day. Appreciate they may not want to go that route given how it became a mega(maga)phone for some toxic discourse.

i dont think theres gonna be another twitter or facebook for that matter, the age of mass posting is over, maybe there can be a baby twitter tho with journalists but without bieber

it seems like they need an infinite invite system, like, you can invite all your contacts or whatever, but those invitees cannot invite off your invite code. they'll get their own code, and have to do the same.

I don’t think invites are a meaningful bottleneck. If everyone gets one invite a week and it actually gets used they’d double in size every week. Everyone on earth would be on it by now if the invites were actually getting used.

you still need to get one tho someone cant just see a post in a news article or whatever go to the app store and get on bluesky

i want a graph displaying the rate of individual inviters. who are regular repeaters? like i should go check mine i must have a score of em now.

I think basically everyone who wants to get on AND who they want there is on. The problem is a lot of people aren’t bothered so it’s kind of a small set. It’s big enough for me. I like it.

bsky-social-veqjv-bgjxn
bsky-social-z3hl4-pq6qs
bsky-social-fzhr6-qgojy

be free little butterflies, be fruitful!!

let say bluesky has a viral post thats circulated far beyond their site/app, a whole new group of people become aware of bluesky, and they cannot get on

its good, and i can probably convince a couple of friends to get on once there are dms, but i cant imagine it ever being as big as peak twitter, not that it should be

Xp eh maybe. I haven’t seen someone ask for an invite for months.

cmon man

I don’t think the invites are really the problem either, although they probably contributed to a certain “culture” taking root early and remaining dominant

Various people from Twitter whom I would’ve wanted to follow did make accounts there, and just don’t use them (many of them have stayed on Twitter, which is a separate issue that isn’t bluesky’s fault)

it’s good! I like it! All I’m saying is I don’t think invites are the reason it’s seems to have stabilized as a culture. I’m sure they help with moderation but I don’t think they’re keeping out good faith users who want to be there at this point.

i'd guess that quite a few people, upon leaving twitter for a few weeks without a comparable alternative, found that they enjoyed not using it anymore. everyone is always saying "ugh, i want to quit social media", but it's addictive (and often quite useful for all sorts of reasons) so they keep using it. quitting twitter without having an alternative is akin to being absolutely addicted to donkey kong country and then the SNES catches on fire and it's all over. it makes all the sense in the world to get another SNES and move on to diddy kong's quest, no one would blame you. but also it makes a lot of sense (for some people) to replace the device with more irl activities, like going to the library and finally checking out that oversized 3D illusion book

i will never check out the oversized 3D illusion book

Quitting Twitter was such a boon to my state of mind, no joke… I still use “nitter” to check back in on one guy there, but honestly even that makes me feel not great

I do enjoy social media though, and have been using more stress-free alternatives

invites prob havent stopped bluesky from being huge tho theres no way to know that, but they could at some point, and for sure many people see the invite wall just bounce off and move on with their lives, generally onboarding is a big place where apps lose people, and then you add the need to hunt something down and ask around its not hard to see how this is a big barrier to getting new users, most apps these days are going in the other direction allowing for unverified quasi accounts that are easy as possible to start with then bug you to complete the sign up process once youre hooked, they do this because people give up at every step, just the need to click a single button will shed people, this of course is very obvious and i resent having to type it out

the bluesky people for sure know this so they must really like the invite system, at least for now

I've been trying to use bluesky to replace twitter as my app for news posts, still feels clunky but it's ok. I have a lot more fun on Threads, but mostly follow musicians there.

threads is an excellent counter example if you have an instagram account you already had a threads account no need to sign up at all, and they turned that, along with free advertising, into the fastest growing app ever, and all your favorite brands are there lol

to be clear im not saying that bluesky is wrong in using invites, im curious to see how it turns out, but it makes it much harder than normal to get on the app, maybe thats good tho......

from their faq https://blueskyweb.xyz/faq

How many people are on the app? What is the plan for invites?
We brought a few hundred beta testers onto the app in February, and by the end of April, we reached over 50k users. We plan to grow the invite system at our discretion in a way that preserves our focus on protocol development and creates a network where healthy conversations can happen.

We also want the network to grow organically, so we periodically distribute invites to existing Bluesky users. Additionally, we monitor the social graph, and if certain users are inviting other trustworthy participants, we give them more invites.

Why use invite codes?
Social networks can be abused by spammers and bad actors who might want to manipulate the public conversation. It’s much easier to limit sign-ups and let them spread through an existing social graph than to try to retroactively clean up rampant network abuse.

Long-term, we view this invite code system as a piece of the open source tooling we’re building to help server admins (people running services) to help curate and moderate their communities.