This was a great little article. Very fair summary of the situation.<p>After the demise of Twitter, I first tried Post.news — which had great branding but failed to get the everything-is-a-tweet model right (comments were 2nd class citizens to posts).<p>Then I moved to Mastodon, which I enjoy. Mastodon’s biggest issue is the enormous UX hurdle to pick an instance before even signing up, though. That and the lack of a unified view (mentioned in the article) will probably keep it niche. Also lack of quote-tweeting, a deliberate choice.<p>BlueSky is the first truly worthy successor. It’s better than Twitter in its prime, before it went algorithmic. It allows quote-tweeting but gives the quoted party control over the scenarios that Mastodon was trying to prevent by avoiding the feature entirely.
It's so user-friendly that you get banned for sharing any remotely controversial opinion. Just like the good old days of Twitter!<p>Twitter/X is actually a balanced discourse site now. CNN even admitted that the party affiliation of its users went from majority-left (65/31) to split down the middle, 48/47. <a href="https://x.com/ScottJenningsKY/status/1861445812175147353" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ScottJenningsKY/status/1861445812175147353</a>
Every time there's a Bluesky or ATProto post I comment with how I think their killer feature is video.<p>Their smart use of domains makes it so that their equivalent of "channel" can be an actual website, that will offer you recommendations when you watch videos on it exactly like YT, except you control the algorithm.<p>Users will get much better choice and experience over the already excellent YouTube, but most importantly the creators will be able to express themselves however they wish. They will rent hosting from a provider, shows ads from an Adsense-like service, and actually own both their content _and_ their subscriber list.<p>I've been wanting to build it, but I'm always deterred by how ATProto is still tightly linked to Bluesky itself.
Getting tired of these samey sort of 'look what a revolution Bluesky is' posts. Yes, it's doing well. A boom. A <i>recent</i> boom. But I also anecdotally am not seeing huge swathes of engagement or migration depending on <i>niche</i>. It was like that when the whole Mastodon exodus happened a few years ago also - both in the numerous excitement posts, and the niche-specific migration. Let's just see where it goes. The thoughtpieces are endless and lack any real insight or substantive data.
I switched to Bluesky yesterday due to the bots/zero engagement on X.<p>It's basically become yelling into the void. Started out in 2007 and it was great for finding people and getting interest in your projects, but now, I just get a bunch of spam bot follows and on an account with 3,600+ followers, only 30-40 views at most per post (w/ no engagement).
Bluesky wont happen no matter how hard they push right now. Its not offering anything fundamentally different. It will pull from X but will stay niche.