The article nails Twitter's problem: spambots and promoted tweets. Checking Twitter now feels like checking my spam folder. Bluesky at the moment feels like a group chat with old friends.
It will get worse as it grows—that's how these things seem to go. However, two things give me a bit of hope: first it's been a chance for a complete reset and I'm ruthless curating who I follow. Secondly, and most importantly, hackability and API access makes it easier to filter out the stuff I don't want to see. You don't even have to built it yourself! There are already AI tools that will hide screenshots from Twitter / Insta / etc for example.
> Active daily user numbers in Japan of Facebook-owner Meta's Threads have picked up from about 500,000 to 1.5 million, while for Bluesky it has gone from about 50,000 to about 500,000.
Thanks. I don't have a subscription. I was mostly venting about the first two paras that I can see and the many other articles using SimilarWeb data which don't include this info.
It's interesting that the numbers give do not show a 5x quintupling, but actually 10x growth
There was an intermediate state on Twitter -- where the default experience was poo but one could make Twitter palatable by using third party clients and other tools.
The promise of Bluesky is that this intermediate state won't be yanked. There are some steps they've taken to fulfill this promise, but it's not fully realized.
I mean, if it just gets as bad as pre-Musk Twitter (which was basically financially stable, albeit certainly not printing money), then I think a lot of people would be okay with that. People were tolerant of a lot of shit from Twitter; there's a reason it was affectionately known as the hellsite.
Indeed! In particular in higher-education and research many people moved over to Bluesky in the past two weeks. In fact, the biggest "starter pack" on the platform is the French “#HelloESR” pack (ESR means "enseignement supérieure et recherche", literally "higher-education and research").
It will get worse as it grows—that's how these things seem to go. However, two things give me a bit of hope: first it's been a chance for a complete reset and I'm ruthless curating who I follow. Secondly, and most importantly, hackability and API access makes it easier to filter out the stuff I don't want to see. You don't even have to built it yourself! There are already AI tools that will hide screenshots from Twitter / Insta / etc for example.
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