Agreed. I think this succeeds or fails based on the ability to follow different kinds of things from users separately. If I can follow someone's Threads and not their Reels, I'd be glad to have such an easy migration path off of Twitter (I'm having a lot of fun on bluesky, but it's not ready). I'm not optimistic about that though, because you already can't choose to not follow reels separately from pictures.
I never got a Bluesky invite and I've seen a couple comments mentioning "it's not ready" so I'm wondering why people keep saying that? It has been in development for a while, so I would assume it is ready at this point in time.
It's not. Bluesky is still quite primitive. I wouldn't even call it a "beta", more like an alpha.
They gave invite codes to some "influencers", and it got a lot of hype and media attention, but after the hype died down somewhat, it's become basically a nothing burger. I've stopped giving out the invite codes that I'm accumulating, because my feed is pretty boring and dead. Bluesky is far more "promise" than reality.
Meta has 1000x the engineering resources of Bluesky.
You should post any codes you have here, I imagine the HN userbase is more likely than most to be interested in trying a project like that out (or maybe it's just me :))
> diversify the user base to generate more content
That's an incorrect assumption. I've given out codes before. It didn't generate more content, because people quickly lose interest.
The grass is not greener on the other side. It's a dead party. Inviting a few more people isn't going to help. If they open up the gates to everyone, that's a different story, but they're not nearly ready to do that.
It's not a large team, and it's very barebones in terms of features, like DMs. They also weren't ready for the small boom in users trying to sign up the other day, so networking is still a concern for them. Also they haven't been working directly on the app itself this entire time, they also created a new protocol due to Jack's desire to re-evaluate everything rather than "create a twitter clone".
Bluesky feels like a beta. It's missing: DMs, private accounts, gif/video embeds, and any sort of advanced notification controls. They don't have a trust and safety team, and they're using the invite system to slow down their growth because they can't keep up with demand. It's fun at its current small scale, but they aren't ready to be a Twitter replacement yet.
The invite system just really gives off Google+ vibes and I'm wondering if we end up in the same place after Threads launches. Facebook/Meta seems really poised to eat Bluesky's lunch in a few days.
Gmail also had invites to start, back in the day, and that's the de facto email service now.
But that had a compelling day-1 offering that was clearly better - massive free storage allocation. Bluesky doesn't have a compelling reason to sign up like that, so the invite system feels flawed.
GMail's invite system worked because you could use GMail to talk to your non-GMail friends. G+ failed for many reasons, but one of them is that if you got in before all your friends there was just nothing you could actually do there.
> Do people actually talk about bluesky outside of HN?
I see a bunch of people talking about it on Twitter in the context of "I'm on Bluesky, follow me there in case this implodes". But yeah, >90% of the Bluesky mentions I see are on HN.
I'd expect that Bluesky would launch invites in next few days or so, to those who left their emails. I mean, their competitor is up so why not sent these invites or even open registration for anyone
Unless of course they first want to see how much interest it gains
Well sure, but to be fair they let a lot of "influencers" on some sort of working platform and it got a lot of hype, but since then... You don't hear much anymore. I was just wondering what was going on, they've been working on it for a while now.
My experience with mastodon was the same for a while until Elon took over twitter. Now I do see discussions on stuff I care about although I am starting to see discussions regarding the threat of Meta federating with some big instances of mastodon.
Yeah, seemed like a lot of chatter from people onboarding Mastodon was 'how does this work' or 'how do I use it to build and find community or news' or 'why this is better than other options'.
That seemed to fade fast on an individual basis once there was critical mass to support conversation on other shared interests between users but flares up again from time to time when a new 'wave' of people join. Maybe bluesky just lacks critical mass for user interest overlap other than 'being on bluesky'.
I think this right here is what makes me curious about Bluesky in the first place, the meta discussion on HN about it is weird and I want to see it for myself.
I think it's too barebones and they are still working out the moderation and safety problem. Besides, it looks like it scales like shit. It's not ready for wide adoption, I have to agree about this one.
Social media is definitely not socialization. In a Venn diagram, the cross section of social media and socialization is tiny.
- A very, very small part of socialization may very, very occasionally happen on social media.
- Social media allows for multiple phenomena to happen, but the overwhelming majority of it won't be socializing.
The issue here is the redefinition of "socialization" intrinsically made by the "social media" marketing campaigns. The solution is a better understanding of what human socialization actually is.
This is not a critique of social media. I like and use it, even though I'd like more diversity. But stop mixing it up with "socialization" because it is not, even if the marketing of social media relies on trying to mix them up.
