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!

ha yeah

i continue to be very bad at social media. this week i've finally switched over to the "explore" feed, because i have like five friends, half of whom, like me, forget bsky exists for weeks on end. and it starts feeding me all this, like... politics crap. of course "everything is political", there's a difference between implicitly political and explicitly political tho. my thing is that i want to shitpost a couple times a week and see cool shit. i don't consider political discourse to be "cool shit".

in all sincerity bluesky may not be for you. I do see posts about non-political stuff, but it's pretty hard to avoid it entirely (not that I'm trying tbf), and I think it's fair to say it's the dominant mode of the place. tumblr might be worth a shot?

I got on a urban planning starter pack but had to drop some follows because I got tired of hearing for the millionth time about wooden single staircase buildings

I agree Bluesky is way too political, I miss all the weird bots and insane shitposting Twitter used to have, idk if that exists anywhere these days

in all sincerity bluesky may not be for you. I do see posts about non-political stuff, but it's pretty hard to avoid it entirely (not that I'm trying tbf), and I think it's fair to say it's the dominant mode of the place. tumblr might be worth a shot?

― rob

i tried tumblr briefly. maybe i should try it again. i keep meaning to post some stuff on medium, but god, actually getting essays written and in a form i'm satisfied with is so challenging.

I guess it depends who you follow but I see way, way fewer political posts on BlueSky than when I was on Twitter.

The most-followed accounts on Bluesky are largely people who post about politics. Because of their following, many of their posts become very popular, and those popular posts then get mixed into Discover and other algorithmic feeds. Following politics is kind of the main reason I'm on Bluesky, though I get annoyed at the normie lib posts from some of those top accounts, so I've hidden the Discover feed and just read the accounts I do like.

the ILX starter pack is helpful (it's linked way upthread): https://bsky.app/starter-pack/did:plc:wuleipisheoo6bifzixau6la/3law7ygzj6p2h

I prefer not to see a lot of political stuff on Bluesky, so generally I only look at my Following feed. In addition to finding accounts to follow through searches related to personal interests and people/sites I follow elsewhere, if someone seems like they are interesting and good at Bluesky, I like to look at who they are following and follow any of those accounts that seem worth checking out.

Another thing that probably contributes to the quality of my Following feed is that I never follow anyone back unless I know who they are.

Bluesky's pace is so much slower than it's hard to directly compare to X. One thing I like is that by the end X seemed to throttle and curate posts so much that it was like speaking to an empty room, and you wouldn't be served your friends posts either. Bluesky feels a nice close group of people and I see posts from all of the ILX people I know, in some cases been a nice reunion.

There are some weird interactions whereby someone whose politics you share has a way of seeking conflict even tho you don't really disagree but in general it seems good for little communities and the daily jokes or smaller interactions I guess.

that*

I mostly avoid the Discover feed and picked people to follow via branching out from those I knew, their reposts, etc. but skimming through some of the lists gave me enough to populate my main feed to the point where I can glance at it a few times a day and miss very few posts. My first three tabs after re-ordering are:
- Following
- Popular With Friends
- Quiet Posters

the latter is useful for catching the stray posts from people who seldom post but I'd want to see

someone whose politics you share has a way of seeking conflict

we call this "posting on the internet"

Agreed, even on Bluesky there's a sort of manic feeling to the discover feed.

xpost weirder on Bluesky where most people really closely agree but some are still addicted to getting furious

ooh Quiet Posters is a good tip, thx

LG I enjoy yr bsky posts

Thank you my friend!

the jokes about an "eternal November 2024" or whatever are kind of true. it's a very odd to see the people who are known in one derogatory way or another ("blue maga," "blue wave," etc) from the US and died in the wool internet socialists both interact with higher profile writers but the groups don't really mix

a very high number of confused grandmothers reposting the worst Trump AI-generated images with an inscrutable smattering of hashtags in the former group who have no idea what's going on

ohhh ok i like the ILX starter pack... i'm @boofgal.bsky.social fwiw. i also, like, just figured out the idea of different "feeds" now? this is cool, it's like "webrings" back in the old days. i like the quiet posters feed, helps keep me from my feed all being that one extremely online friend who shares all kinds of political stuff.

mostly my frustration has been with the "discover" feed. some useful context is that i didn't use X at all. i don't want a super active online life, i just get bored and isolated and have trouble finding people to talk to.

Yep, Discover and For You feeds are good to avoid if you prefer cultivating your own experience and avoiding having lots of nonsense shoved in your face.

k8 I followed you, join me for more fun

i use deck.blue to recreate the tweetdeck experience of olde and its good, will probably never have the volume of sports stuff that i used to follow on twitter but enough castaways from there in other domains (politics, education, journalists) that make it a worthwhile daily place 4 me. its kind of settled into a groove where its not visible enough to go viral across all the internet and still has enough juice to have good conversations/threads.

if you think of discover as “rising and trending posts” and realize you’d like comfortably warm content and not HOT content then you shy away from it imo

I appreciate that the sports posts are on the rise, but I’ve somehow calibrated so I just get “baseball is stupid” connected to funny incidents and deadspin/adjacent content

had a fun few months on bluesky that i remember fondly. an app where there just aren’t that many people posting, so you can log on once at the end of the day and read the ten new posts and that’s it. it’s a unique but bold concept, makes for an interesting experience

it’s crazy that there’s less than a million people on there. the number i saw was 650k. puny

Wonder if this was the pace of early twitter (which I joined in the mid 2010s)? Bcz yes there is just not as much content and it took me a while to make it a point to catch up.

xp do you mean active, posting accounts? there are like 38 million registered

this was the chart i saw, shows number of unique posters per day

It's been very nearly a year since the first big burst of Bluesky growth, driven by the brief Brazilian Twitter ban. As a result they're soon going to have negative year-on-year growth in posting, activity has been grinding lower since the inauguration. pic.twitter.com/tgFEAaBH5u

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) September 1, 2025

i think the equivalent number for twitter is around 100 million?

well sure, if you count the nazi bots

It will never go above twitter. But this only matters if the motive is profit.

here's a look at how that DAU number stacks up with the others lol

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Similarweb-data-2025-07-07-at-11.13.37AM.jpg?resize=1440,440

Honestly if Threads and X want to fight each other I am MORE than content. I'm thoroughly happy with Bluesky going on two years plus now.

yeah it's clear that smaller pools are better for this kind of thing. If anything Bluesky should kick out all the basic reply losers - i die inside a little when I see the kinds of replies that smart, funny writers like Derek Guy gets

I love Bluesky pic.twitter.com/845moTr0x7

— Brooks Otterlake (@i_zzzzzz) December 1, 2024

god wait until they find out about ilx on X, only 40 posters in the past five minutes! we'll never take over X at that rate!

this is the thing that's always confused me professionally, why do people value _quantity_ over _quality_? everything is always bigger, better, more, more, more with some folks. i check my bsky this morning and mandrake the magician is being held up by a horse and there's an upgrade to danny devito's "hot dogs for gaugin" and a sonic youth danceteria concert from 1982 and _this_ is what the internet is SUPPOSED to be for

those VC dollars aren't gonna flow with that kind of attitude

the extremely literal people who don't understand shitposts are pretty prevalent, but I think it's a subset of the liberal scolds

you don't get any of them if you never get popular enough to make it to the Discover feed!

the thing is that i'm not on the internet to change the world or end capitalism or any of that other stuff. i'm on the internet to have a good time. "having a good time" is a surprisingly hard thing to do these days, especially on the internet. particularly since a lot of "having a good time" is doing things in _moderation_. that's most of why i take so many naps these days - trying to not overdo it.

OTMFM

the thing is that i'm not on the internet to change the world or end capitalism or any of that other stuff. i'm on the internet to have a good time. "having a good time" is a surprisingly hard thing to do these days, especially on the internet. particularly since a lot of "having a good time" is doing things in _moderation_. that's most of why i take so many naps these days - trying to not overdo it.

Something I posted the other day:

Here's a surefire tip for how to improve your Bluesky experience 1000% overnight:

Develop interests outside of electoral politics.

it's funny that Nate Silver basically admits that "Blueskyism" is people who used to annoy him on Twitter.

lol nice one, Alfred

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

the extremely literal people who don't understand shitposts are pretty prevalent, but I think it's a subset of the liberal scolds

― slowly imploding (mh), Thursday, September 4, 2025 2:15 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, i mean one of the nice things about ilx is that this basically never happens

hahaha

hah

it's funny that Nate Silver basically admits that "Blueskyism" is people who used to annoy him on Twitter.

― jaymc

god nate silver has got to be one of the smarkiest men alive

uh, wait, "smark" is a pro-wrestling term, short for "smart mark" - someone who knows the outcomes in wrestling are predetermined, but who nonetheless is entertained by following the "sport". some of my sibs are pretty big pro wrestling fans, so i've gotten to learn about that side of things.

the most important thing to know about smarks is that a smart mark is still a mark. any smark worth their smalt will tell you this. some smarks, you see, they get airs, they get to acting like they're better than all the other rubes and suckers out there. my sibs always held these sorts of smarks in contempt. they gave me the impression of being sort of ashamed of loving the game - we were taught "don't hate the player, hate the game". i get that perspective. i also don't think it's wrong to love the game or to hate some of the players. right or wrong, we love what we love. telling ourselves what we should or shouldn't love doesn't really do any good.

at the end of the day, dave meltzer is just another fucking mark like the rest of us. that's what makes him different from a guy like bill apter. just cuz meltzer's made his living off this stuff doesn't make him not a mark. he's got feelings about what makes something a "good work", but at the end of the day, he knows it's a work and isn't gonna pretend otherwise.

shit, i don't know. maybe a guy like nate silver isn't a smark after all. maybe he's just another dumb fucking mark with money.

kind of broken at the moment yeah ?
"internal server error" messages whenever i try and post with an image/link.

i like the artbots, good timeline cleanse

working ok here in USA east coast