THE SHORT PITCH Twitter is a cesspool and I’m only posting there now to tell people to find me elsewhere. That elsewhere? Bluesky, a new social media site that’s become the best place on the internet for me… and maybe you too? If you’re not already on social media, congratulations — you should proba...
Just pointing out the author mentions they used mastodon for a time too, their argument is that bluesky interface, content and moderation are better for them.
Unfortunately not. For me the main problem is discoverability. There's no recommendation algorithm except for boosts. I'm not suggesting Mastodon integrate some kind of machine learning or other advanced stuff, but number of likes from followed accounts and a threshold would be nice for a start. As it is, Mastodon is just bad for entertainment purposes. Maybe it works for other purposes, but for entertainment I'd rather have the algorithm-fuelled quote-tweet dunking on Twitter.
There's the explore tab in the mastodon app that shows you trending hashtags, and recommends people to follow based off who you already follow. There's trending accounts that just post about trending items too. Use them as your algorithm.
There's definitely an opportunity for someone to run their own curation service for personalized feeds based on a user's activity on other social networks.
I tend to just check All periodically for the first couple of months and follow tags and people that suit my own interests and build my own feed from zero. But that takes effort and time, and for folks who want an option further toward the convenience end of the privacy/convenience spectrum I suspect it would be a fairly popular option.
When it's built around lage aggregators, running which privately is rather hard, there's a bias in favour of centralised, large operators thereof, which mitigates some of the advantages.
The one drawback to Bluesky’s block feature is that a user’s block lists aren’t private. Through third party apps, you can find lists of everyone anyone’s blocked. That probably won’t bother most people, but it’s a potential issue for those who worry that public block lists could be used perniciously by persistent stalkers or harassers.
The only missing function is the ability to lock your account or go private as you can on Twitter, which would let you hide your account from non-followers while still posting to folks who already follow you.
But Bluesky has gotten considerable criticism at key points over the last year and a half for failures in handling anti-Black racism in particular. Rudy Fraser wrote extensively about some of these issues along with a deep dive into his goals and challenges as the creator of the now legendary Blacksky feed in a great post a year ago.
Every time someone recommends me Bluesky, I learn something else about it that makes me never want to make an account. Any one of these three quotes should be a dealbreaker on their own
See the thing is........you have to microblog like a crazed hobo yelling things into the void. It doesn't need to make sense. It's better if it DOESN'T make sense.
Yup, I've tried Twitter and hated it. I remember when Mastodon launched, and it was described as "federated Facebook" IIRC, and now people are claiming that it's more like "federated Twitter." I hate both Facebook and Twitter, so I use neither.
So honestly, I don't really care about Twitter/X vs BlueSky vs Mastodon, because I don't want to use any of them. Reddit/Lemmy is a much more interesting format to me TBH.