PSA: if you still have a Twitter/X account on Nov 15 their new TOS go into effect. 5 days to opt out and delete all, if you want.

Prepuce of Doom · November 18

15 minutes ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

Anybody having random trouble all day long reaching Blue Sky? Thinks like information server errors, Data Rate Limit reached etc ...

I've been using it intermittently all day and haven't had any issues until checking just now.

I think it's probably still going to have some growing pains here and there with such a precipitous acceleration in its userbase.

atomheartbevo · November 18

1 hour ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

I think it's probably still going to have some growing pains here and there with such a precipitous acceleration in its userbase.

Yeah, there's been some glitches here and there that they've mentioned due to the increases (now up to 19 million+). Not only have they been hitting 1 million new users a day or close to it all week, but the amount of posts, likes, follows, etc. have been rising substantially as well, as people settle in and find others.

I am interacting with a helluva lot more people than I was on Threads, even though Threads is close to 10 times larger.

atomheartbevo · November 18

4 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

Anybody having random trouble all day long reaching Blue Sky? Thinks like information server errors, Data Rate Limit reached etc ...

Yeah they had some issues

https://downdetector.com/status/bluesky/

Horn Under a Bad Sign · November 19

Chopper · November 19

On 11/17/2024 at 8:18 PM, Hornius Emeritus said:

Anybody having random trouble all day long reaching Blue Sky? Thinks like information server errors, Data Rate Limit reached etc ...

Apparently it's been the #1 app dl'd on apple and google for a couple days. The CEO said they're working to scale it.

atomheartbevo · November 19

59 minutes ago, Chopper said:

Apparently it's been the #1 app dl'd on apple and google for a couple days. The CEO said they're working to scale it.

They are closing in on 20 million users tonight, and my feeds have been popping with a whole lot of people talking about it as if it's a big class reunion but I'm dealing mostly with history/academic types, and some retro gaming/computer folks. Seems like everybody is a lot more vocal on Bluesky than they had been on twitter in a long time.

I would be curious how @Hornius Emeritus sees it - I'm assuming most of his activity is on places like Facebook (Lord knows my mom quotes enough of his stuff).

bolverk · November 19

7 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

They are closing in on 20 million users tonight, and my feeds have been popping with a whole lot of people talking about it as if it's a big class reunion but I'm dealing mostly with history/academic types, and some retro gaming/computer folks. Seems like everybody is a lot more vocal on Bluesky than they had been on twitter in a long time.

I would be curious how @Hornius Emeritus sees it - I'm assuming most of his activity is on places like Facebook (Lord knows my mom quotes enough of his stuff).

One thing that bothers me about Threads is having it attached directly to IG and indirectly to FB. No, thank you. I don't want to interact with those idiots I knew in high school and would rather retain my anonymity in that type of space.

atomheartbevo · November 19

37 minutes ago, bolverk said:

One thing that bothers me about Threads is having it attached directly to IG and indirectly to FB. No, thank you. I don't want to interact with those idiots I knew in high school and would rather retain my anonymity in that type of space.

I had Threads accounts tied that were not linked back to me (even through Instagram) so never worried about it, but if you're not doing that kind of stuff, yeah, don't risk saying stuff that's easily linked back to you. Threads is kind of a bust for me at this point with the hashtag bullshit and with the lack of DMs, and with trying to force you to keep Instagram around. I gave it a shot for a long time and held out hope that it would eventually add DMs and change up the hashtag crap, but nope, Zuck and Co. are not going to risk people bailing on Instagram.

The main thing a lot of people are complaining on Bluesky is that it doesn't have "Trending" but I have my feeds and honestly "Trending" on X.com ends up wasting a lot of time to keep you clicking. I get wanting things to go viral though, but...

Chopper · November 19

If you're seeing a lot of unwanted partisan accounts in your replies or getting reposted into your feed, I recommend using the blocklist "Right wing propaganda and their followers" by ‪@numb.comfortab.ly‬ and opting to mute them all. It catches almost all the accounts I see people complaining about.

Chopper · November 19

8 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

The main thing a lot of people are complaining on Bluesky is that it doesn't have "Trending" but I have my feeds and honestly "Trending" on X.com ends up wasting a lot of time to keep you clicking. I get wanting things to go viral though, but...

There's a feed that behaves like trending, or so I'm told - "Discover"

rage-a-holic · November 19

15 hours ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

I swear I've seen that pic before somewhere...oh yeah

atomheartbevo · November 21

On 11/13/2024 at 8:45 AM, atomheartbevo said:

They went from 5,700 (I think) Starter Packs to 8,200 in just a few days.

And now they are at 81,000 starter packs.

Bluesky Starter Packs - Bluesky Directory

And BlueSky and Mastodon users can now talk to each other

Bluesky and Mastodon users can now talk to each other with Bridgy Fed | TechCrunch

An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their posts, and like, reply and repost them.

Those same people will be able to see the others’ posts in return, too.

The technology making this possible is Bridgy Fed, one of the efforts aimed at connecting the fediverse with the web, Bluesky and, perhaps later, other networks like Nostr.

....

Bridgy Fed

To bridge an account from the fediverse to Bluesky, you simply follow the Mastodon account @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy. The account will follow you back. You’ll then automatically have a new, bridged account available to Bluesky users under your fediverse/Mastodon handle (where the second @ is now a dot) followed by “ap.brid.gy.”

Edited November 21 by atomheartbevo

Pimphand · November 21

On 11/19/2024 at 10:18 AM, rage-a-holic said:

I swear I've seen that pic before somewhere...oh yeah

This forum is replete with dipshits who are still mentally captured by their tormentors. Elohim space alien worship cult slaves all of em.

Pimphand · November 21

The hilarity is I am nearly 1,000% certain not one of them have a clue all the telemetry their phones are recording about them when they agreed to the terms of service they didn't read LMFAO

atomheartbevo · November 21

3 hours ago, Pimphand said:

This forum is replete with dipshits who are still mentally captured by their tormentors. Elohim space alien worship cult slaves all of em.

So leaving twitter for another platform means they are still mentally captured by their tormentor?

3 hours ago, Pimphand said:

The hilarity is I am nearly 1,000% certain not one of them have a clue all the telemetry their phones are recording about them when they agreed to the terms of service they didn't read LMFAO

You should be happy as hell because almost everybody you hate has left twitter.

atomheartbevo · November 21

Bluesky network analyser

"find people followed by lots of the people you follow (but not you)."

Hornius Emeritus · November 21

Despite Threads having a massive lead, BlueSky has caught up in terms of active daily users.

atomheartbevo · November 23

Threads Is Trying to Make Itself More Like Bluesky | Lifehacker

Mosseri: "We are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today. For you creators out there, you should see unconnected reach go down and connected reach go up. This is definitely a work in progress – balancing the ability to reach followers and overall engagement is tricky – thanks for your patience and keep the feedback coming."

----

It's a good change, and resolves a problem Threads itself created. Threads, like other social media platforms, offers users two feeds. "For you," which displays algorithmically sorted content from both accounts you follow and those you don't, and "Following," which only shows posts from accounts you follow. The problem is, Threads always defaults back to the "For you" tab, even if you last left off on "Following." So each time you open a new Threads session, you're seeing content from people you don't follow, whether you like it or not.

---

In addition to algorithmic changes, Threads also rolled out custom feeds this week. These feeds let you choose a specific topic or set of accounts to follow, rather than simply scroll through the general For you or Following feeds. As it happens, Bluesky also has custom feeds, and has for some time now. Fancy that.

------

atomheartbevo · November 23

I don’t think that captures it all - BlueSky is much better on the web because it has feature parity with the mobile client with the web client being a better way to do a lot of things, but Threads is also meant for the whole mobile/Instagram experience.

For those missing trending, somebody ginned up a trending topics/hashtags.

https://flo-bit.dev/bluesky-trending/

Hefeweizen · November 23

I like the dog pictures better on Bluesky. Now that Traces of Texas is in there I’m all set.

Hornius Emeritus · November 23

36 minutes ago, Hefeweizen said:

I like the dog pictures better on Bluesky. Now that Traces of Texas is in there I’m all set.

Ha ha. Thanks, amigo.

Hefeweizen · November 24

1 hour ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

Ha ha. Thanks, amigo.

You’re one of the reasons to bother having social media. Not kidding at all.

flatdawgs · November 24

5 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

Ha ha. Thanks, amigo.

I'm not from Texas, none of my family is (although I've been many times and have criss-crossed the state), but I love Traces of Texas. You really catch the spirit of what Texas seems to be. It's one of the best things I've found via my delinquency on Shaggy/Surly.

atomheartbevo · November 26

BlueSky doing AMA on reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1gyfram/hi_were_members_of_the_bluesky_team_ama/

Bookmarks are coming
Trending topics are coming but they will be implemented carefully (sounds like to avoid the doom scrolling bullshit)
Bots:
- Spoiler
  
  That said, I don't think that a bot-filled network is inevitable — I hope not! One great thing about Bluesky's open architecture is that the public data is available for developers and researchers to investigate as well. One example is Conspirador Norteno (hope they don't mind my shoutout): https://bsky.app/profile/conspirator0.bsky.social. This person proactively spots spam and bot networks, and Bluesky benefits from these reports as well. So then combatting bots feels much more like a collaborative effort and the whole network (all of the users!) benefits from this ecosystem of researchers.
  
  Another example of us all benefiting from an open network is Bluesky's stackable approach to moderation. I'll keep the description here light in the interest of time, but basically you can subscribe to other people's mod services and if they spot bots before Bluesky the company does, you can still benefit from those mod decisions.
  
  (I'll also add that not all bots are bad, and Bluesky's open firehose for developers makes it super easy for people to create useful bots too, like the Earthquake bot, public transit alert bots, etc. )
Moderation and blocking
- Spoiler
  
  This is something we care a lot about. People have described Twitter as "PVP." It's combative by nature. We think that's a major reason people are so exhausted by social media. It's not fun to be constantly fighting with people.
  
  We put in a lot of tools to reduce negative interactions. We have a philosophy we call "stackable moderation" which layers our moderation with community-operated tools.
  
  Blocks on Bluesky are very aggressive. They hide all previous interactions between the blocker and the blockee for everybody. We also have mutelists and blocklists built in, so communities can collaborate on protecting themselves.
  
  You can also detach quote posts, which is a major defense against the most common form of harassment: quote dunking.
  
  Thread authors have a lot of control. You can set who is allowed to reply, even after posting. If you set "Who can reply" to nobody, you effectively lock the thread.
  
  Another huge tool is "labelers," which are moderation run by other users which you can subscribe to. Labelers have the ability to accept reports and place labels on users and individual posts.
  
  There's still lots of work to do on this, but it's an area we take pretty seriously! Social media should be fun, actually.
Verification
- Spoiler
  
  We actually do have verification already! On Bluesky, you can set your website as your username. Here's our guide for how to do this: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial. Some examples of users that have done this already: news organizations like @/npr.org and @/washingtonpost.com, U.S. Senators like @/wyden.senate.gov, President Lula of Brazil with @/lula.com.br, corporate brand accounts, and more. If you have a personal site, you can make that your username too.
  
  We're working with many organizations behind-the-scenes to help them get their username set up. We know it seems technical and complicated at first, and we're thinking through ways to make the user experience even better for this. (One example: You can purchase and manage a domain directly through Bluesky at account.bsky.app, and then you can easily set that domain as your username.)
  
  Another angle from which we're approaching this impersonation/verification question is through moderation. You can report accounts for impersonation, which our 24/7 mod team will review. We've quadrupled the size of our moderation team in the last couple of weeks in order to review all of your reports more quickly and action impersonation accounts rapidly.
  
  We're thinking through what badges could look like so there's an easier visual representation directly within the app, but we don't have anything concrete to share on that front yet.
Community Notes: We looked into integrating Community Notes a while ago but we figured we needed more people on Bluesky for this to really be effective. (Their algorithm uses some logic around people who typically disagree with each other's ratings of Community Notes should agree in order for the Note to be shown.) We should revisit this, after adding 9M people to the network over the last couple weeks! *makes a mental note*
Drafts: I don't have a timeline that I can share for drafts yet, but it's on the roadmap! In the meantime, there are a bunch of third-party Bluesky apps that you can use that do have drafts. (Independent developers frequently ship a feature faster than we do, joys of an open API 😅) The ones that are top of mind are Tokimeki (https://tokimeki.blue/) and Skeets (skeetsapp.com), and there are plenty more out there too.
Official iPad client sucking: This one's my fault. When I first built the app, I assumed the native build wouldn't need to handle multiple screen types. I just targeted phone screens. The web build actually does handle tablet screens, so this was an unfortunate oversight on my part. It's doable, but it'll take enough time that it'll steal from other priorities, and so we haven't found a good time to prioritize it. My bad.
When they have a subscription plan:
- We won't promote the posts of paying users, and
- We won't give bluechecks to paying users (verification should mean something!)

Chopper · November 27

Bookmarks is probably up there with verification badges with the 2 items I've seen most requested. Bluesky users Hunter Walker and comfortablynumb created badges for starter packs of various journalists.

https://bsky.app/profile/hunterw.bsky.social/post/3lbt6wkxckk22

Hunter Walker is a reporter for Talking Points Memo and has been individually verifying reporters and journalists

Chopper · November 27

Washington Post reporter

‪Will Oremus‬ ‪@willoremus.com Gift link to my story on how social media has systematically devalued links for years — and how Bluesky is bucking that trend. https://wapo.st/3CHfmp6 or https://archive.ph/32kEj

atomheartbevo · November 28

Furk, the crypto bros are showing up in large numbers. I guess that means BlueSky is doing well (just hit 23 million users).

atomheartbevo · November 28

They are posts, but call them skeets if you wish.

Zuck getting personally involved to make sure Threads users notice that they are tweaking the algorithm for them

Edited November 28 by atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo · November 28

Shit, this is huge, somebody already has an easy setup for bridging BlueSky comments with personal blog/website comments.

atomheartbevo · November 28

Wait hold the horses, @immamac did you add BlueSky comments to the website?

immamac · November 28

7 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Wait hold the horses, @immamac did you add BlueSky comments to the website?

atomheartbevo · November 28

atomheartbevo · November 28

Animation working?

Speaking of the

What they think it looks like in 3D

Well, kind of, but that's fine, twitter would kick me out to the website or client as well.

atomheartbevo · November 28

Updates, and you can also block accounts straight from any post - just click the three little dots, no longer have to go to account

Horn Under a Bad Sign · November 29

Really cool ... you can keep up with Blue Sky's user growth in real time here.

https://bcounter.nat.vg/

Horn Under a Bad Sign · November 30

7 hours ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

Really cool ... you can keep up with Blue Sky's user growth in real time here.

https://bcounter.nat.vg/

16 days ago Blue Sky went over 15 million accounts, so it's added 8.5 million new accounts in that time.

atomheartbevo · November 30

4 minutes ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

16 days ago Blue Sky went over 15 million accounts, so it's added 8.5 million new accounts in that time.

And they are pretty active. I forgot where I saw it, but at 24 months, Twitter was starting to hit 300,000 tweets a day.

At 20-21 months, BlueSky is hitting 7 million a day.

It’s not a perfect comparison, because social media was not nearly as big when Twitter started, and this is a case of people active on one platform shifting to another (Shaggy -> Surly), but it’s impressive and the momentum is staying there.

PlayStation recently joined Xbox on BlueSky, and once Nintendo leaves MySpace when the Switch 4 comes out, maybe they’ll follow suit.

David Dennison · November 30

On 11/27/2024 at 11:06 PM, immamac said:

atomheartbevo · November 30

6 hours ago, David Dennison said:

And influencers and organizations/companies are now realizing just how much they were being throttled on Twitter when posting links, partly thanks to Musk admitting earlier this week that they throttle links, but also the engagement is much more on BlueSky.