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!

Ranch dressing is gross.

I see the specific strain of England hating coming from a Ron Swanson mentality.

The UK feels more Americanised every year and yet we don't have American products like Boston baked beans wtf

The app is asking me to do age verification. WTF, is anyone else getting this?

prob cause of a state law

yep me too, in Nicaragua

Ranch Style Beans have nothing to do with ranch dressing; in fact, they predate them by about 20 years.

9am: "I'm not going to mourn evil bigot Anne Widecombe, may she rot in hell"
4pm: "It's in very bad taste to make light of the potential murder of Anne Widecombe"

https://i.postimg.cc/L6Jv5Lt9/image.png

All Murders Matter

Posters coming back to clarify their position on bludgeoning is very funny tho

all power to the Onion for buying Infowars but I think I'm going to have to mute "infowars' because half my feed is just people reposting Tim Heidecker stuff which I find profoundly unfunny and annoying

I appreciate that he is out there but his general brand of humor is nails on a chalkboard.

my mute list shall forever remain secret

I’m just gonna drop this loaf in the punch bowl

https://bsky.app/profile/theverge.com/post/3ms744kwgha2n

‘Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."’

Not designed to attract one specific group of people but rather designed to attract many and various groups of bots and concern trolls. Like Reddit but even somehow much shittier and more toxic.

gotta love that new ceo energy

Lmao!

(I had realized that my earlier impression of the app as appealing lowest common denominator was largely based on failure to grasp the specific nature of their algorithm as effectively bubble-based. I wrote out an essay but never posted it, will see it if has any merit on reflectively. Anyway I think I need to go get a root canal today so that should make a nice break from the discourse.)

*on reflection, plus other typos

The full interview is worth reading:
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneider-interview-ai-atproto-atmosphere

And here is the context for that pull-quote:

We’ve been in the weeds of how the technology works and how it’s governed. And right next to that is, well, it’s an election year here in the United States. And a lot of people truly believe that Bluesky is the wild progressive social media network and it is a bubble of one kind. X is a very different kind of bubble. It’s the hard-right network that has vastly more AI-generated anime porn on it. There’s not some thing that is actually the global town square. That thing has maybe gone away and all the social networks have fragmented.

Do you want Bluesky to have the reputation it has? Do you want it to get bigger? Do you think that the right answer is someone starts a MAGA Bluesky and it interoperates the way that it needs to? This is the perception of the consumer product. Do you want that to change, and how would you change it?

Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people. It works for anyone. What we see is there is a lot of political discourse on Bluesky and any of these open networks. People are very engaged. What we’ve seen in the lead up to the election so far – we’ve hosted a lot of live election feeds, and we see a lot of really good feedback from our users, a lot of engagement, a lot of, “This is actually really interesting content about this topic.” Whereas on other platforms, I think these election topics just get completely overwhelmed by slop and spam. It’s just noise and chaos. What we’re focusing on is to deliver a live experience.

We do it around elections. We do it around sports as well, very successfully, where the people on the network that participate get a really good experience and get really good content. Once we have that, then hopefully we can just keep expanding to more and more types of users and use cases. We’re an open network for anyone and we don’t want to serve just one type of user base. I’ve seen it already in the last few months, really trend in the right direction where we just have more and more people show up and build their own corners of the network. It sort of balances out over time. We don’t just have a few topics you’re super deep on, but it just gets more and more diverse.

In my opinion, yes, it’s a public square, but we don’t need everybody talking at the same time. Policy is very loaded, but if you’re super into sports, you’re not going to be into all sports. I’m super into the San Francisco Giants, so that’s what I want to follow. I don’t need to follow all of sports, and that’s fine. It can be like that with all topics. It just needs to be civil and positive and we need to have the tools that if it goes off the rails, people can regulate it and can have a good experience instead of it just devolving into a shouting match.

...

Political pundits say “the Bluesky crowd,” and that signifies whatever they want it to signify. I’m just wondering if you want to break that branding in any meaningful way.

Yeah, we want to expand it. “Breaking” is maybe the wrong word, but yes, we want to expand more and more so that Bluesky means not just one thing, not just liberal politics, for example. I will point to sports as an example from the last year. We’ve made a very concerted effort to bring on sports leagues and sports writers, and it’s worked really well. There are a ton of sports conversations now on the app, and those people come here for the sports, not for the liberal politics. It’s possible to expand.

In politics, it’s probably our hardest challenge because we have one type of user base there that’s very active. That’s good too. They are super active, and they’re very much at the forefront of politics and very engaged and very informed. But we can just keep adding more communities so that it balances out.

they need to remove the ability to restrict replies on posts and then get a bunch of Nazis over there ASAP!

unfortunately the ceo (admin) is correct that blue sky would be much improved by sports

Yeah, libs talking about baseball is heavenly.

i dunno my feed is political until football season then it’s all NFL

Sports are already there if you want it and you can mostly ignore that if you don’t.

Our Age of Social Media Engagement Farming is collapsing, Toni.

https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/matt-damon-the-odyssey-740x493.jpg

basketball bluesky is not very good

but bluesky in general is not very good so i guess that stands to reason

music bluesky is fine, I have a good time on there chatting with people 90% of the time. you have to do plenty of blocking & muting and delete the discover feed, but that's obvious by this point. sometimes I encounter people from another bluesky, the resistance lib bluesky for example, but just means I need to review my muting.

imho its just pretty boring compared to say peak twitter which was often quite amusing, it just doesnt really as they have the juice, but overall thats prob a good thing because then i go on there less

i dont really block or mute i dont see too many lame posts but i just use the chronological feed, the fact that you still cant turn off peoples rts is insane tho

There's an "Only Posts" feed

I never found my Twitter experience a toxic one; maybe I did a decent job blocking trolls. And so far Bluesky's been fine *shrugs*

There's an "Only Posts" feed

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, August 4, 2026 8:40 AM (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

good to know but what i really want is just to turn off rts for select accounts

There have been times where I think “oh, this poster is smart, I want to see what else they post” and I click on their feed and omg they do nothing but post/repost constantly 24/7 and then I begin doubting their smarts.

unfortunately many of the best posters have posters madness just the way it is

I had an old coworker who was a 24/7 retweeter, and I think she earnestly believed in the virtues of "signal-boosting." But the signals she boosted eventually stopped reaching me because I had to mute her.

it's no different than getting notification email messages constantly with no differentiation between what's really important and just points of info. you ignore all of them, and eventually you're sending/posting useless info yourself because your ability to discriminate is busted and it's just people retweeting back and forth

I'm ok with RTs usually, but if they figured out a way to hide repeated RTs of the same post over and over, that would be a killer feature. I hate when my feed is just the same post/story shared by a million different people.

i usually click hide post when that happens

I like the Quiet Posters feed where it's just people I follow that don't post a zillion times a day

i do have a problem with social media in that nobody reaches me and i don't reach anybody... i just... i don't know, at a certain point on social media i start saying "well, i'm not enjoying this at all", and i quit.

wait is that just my years-long clinical depression again? maybe.

I had an old coworker who was a 24/7 retweeter, and I think she earnestly believed in the virtues of "signal-boosting." But the signals she boosted eventually stopped reaching me because I had to mute her.

― jaymc, Tuesday, August 4, 2026 9:40 AM (twelve hours ago)

yeah i (still!) desperately need the ability to cut off reposts by user

i mean i *like* the what a fucking record guy but then he bumps his own 30 daily posts every three hours

i feel like a shit for calling that behavior out but come onnnnnn

early bsky had a bunch of presumptive comedy writers who would post a half dozen things and then repost the two that had any traction every few hours to boost and it was insufferable

oh i hate that shit too

it’s like passing out the same flyer to a friend for the 3rd time

I would make an exception for What A Fucking Record, because I often miss their posts because of my time zone. Apparently Aeronaut is the only client that can properly mark where you last left off and there's no iPhone version of it yet.

if you really want to see What A Fucking Record's posts (and i often do!) you can just look him up! he posts at roughly 8pm ET/vaguely midnight GMT depending on summer time

or you could catch it in one of the 8-10 times he reposts it. (also he needn't put every alternate cover of virginia plain in a separate post)

The really obnoxious thing is when someone RTs someone’s 50 post thread lecture on AI or one of the three other topics — but they RT the WHOLE thread, one post at a time

Anyway a Gen X indie singer is antivax and that stancil guy said something dismissive of Terry Pratchett (stopped clock lol) so the whole site will be insufferable for about a week it’s a perfect storm

there are also certain people who repost every single reply to their own threads, which one might consider excessive