Bluesky is my favorite Twitter clone yet

[Imranmt]

Content source

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/15/23683846/bluesky-twitter-clone-at-protocol-favorite

Right now, the small community is delightful to be a part of. And thanks to the AT Protocol, the service has a promising future.

Bluesky is really, really fun.
Yes, the platform is essentially just Twitter but decentralized. And yes, the Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky is one of many services emulating how Twitter looks right now. But after spending a few hours in Bluesky since getting my beta invite this week, it’s so far the service where I feel the most joy.
Similar to Mastodon, Bluesky is a federated social network, which, at its most basic level, means that users can participate through different providers instead of a huge central one. The easiest comparison is email: if you have Gmail, you can send an email to somebody on Apple’s iCloud, and they can reply back to you.
Bluesky lets you pick from different hosting providers. When I joined the app on Tuesday, I picked the default, which is Bluesky’s own system. (There’s an option to join other providers, but I don’t know what options are available or how to set them up. This may be user error or ignorance.) From there, I set my username, which reads more like a domain — jaypeters.bsky.social — and I’ll talk about that a bit more later.

When I first got to the “Following” feed, it was empty, but as I explored more, it didn’t take long to discover that Bluesky already has an extremely active user base that’s now dealing with an influx of newbies like me. Very soon in my Bluesky journey, I stumbled upon a post from Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, that helped me get a sense of what I was in for.

“It was getting pretty scene-y here so we just emailed 5K people from our waitlist, say hi when you see them trickle on!” Graber wrote. In a reply, Graber added “densely connected subgraph of twitter power users who just joined, meek 5k people who gave us their email and filled out a form ”
Cruising the “What’s hot” section that day was a mishmash of simple internet delight.

• One person quoted Graber to apologize for the “scene stuff” and to encourage new users to jump into conversations.
• One person wrote “The goat, fr” with a picture of two goats.
• Several people shared photos of “this is where i post from.” Many seemed serious, like a cozy room and a tiny home; others were not, like one picture of an alligator.

Somehow, somebody followed me within a minute of me joining the platform. Minutes later, a handful of other users followed me, too. It turns out I’m not that special; they all already follow more than 20,000 people, so they probably just follow every new account as it joins.
Bluesky kept feeling good throughout the week. My feed wasn’t littered with angry posts about HBO Max’s change to Max, for example — instead, the people I follow seemed most invested in maintaining Bluesky’s currently positive culture. Graber posted about why Bluesky hasn’t launched yet “against Jack’s wishes” until the team builds out moderation tooling. On Friday, people were posting pictures of their bookshelves: “shelfies.” It was enjoyable to scroll.

The challenge for Bluesky will be maintaining its positive environment, and that’s just what things its federated system — the AT Protocol — is designed to do. The protocol is still in development, but Bluesky’s stated focuses for it are decentralized social networking, algorithmic choice, and portable accounts. That means that, maybe someday, I’ll theoretically be able to hang out in a domain that isn’t also used by everybody else in the Bluesky app, choose an algorithm that serves mellower posts, and if I want to leave, easily bring my account and followers with me to another app. (It’s worth noting that Twitter owner Elon Musk has expressed an interest in letting you choose your own Twitter algorithm, but we’ll see if that actually happens.)
Bluesky’s moderation tooling could also be key to the platform’s future. The organization wants to let you apply custom filters and labels and even rely on preferred third parties to do that work for you, which could let users better tailor their social feed for what they need. “Centralized social sites use labeling to implement moderation — we think this piece can be unbundled, opened up to third-party innovation, and configured with user agency in mind,” Graber wrote in a blog post. “Anyone should be able to create or subscribe to moderation labels that third parties create.”

 

[CyberTech]

Bluesky might be the Twitter-like we’ve been waiting for.

Yes, I know it’s still invite-only. Yes, I know there are only thousands of people on the platform right now. Yes, I know that it’s still missing table-stakes features like video uploads and DMs.

Still, I’m starting to feel that Bluesky is where it’s at.

It happened over the last few days. Bluesky — the decentralized Twitter alternative spun up by Twitter itself — has suddenly filled up with tech media and other people I follow on Twitter. Over and over again, I would check Twitter for one thing or another and see somebody begging for a Bluesky invite, then just a little while later, that person would be in my Bluesky skyline (timeline) and skeeting (tweeting). While that means I might be able to use Bluesky for actual newsgathering, which is what I rely on Twitter most for, I was most happy to see the vast majority of those news hounds and former Twitter obsessives posting with a raw, deranged energy that I haven’t seen in a very long time.

The rest:

Bluesky is starting to feel like Twitter

Bluesky could replace Twitter for me.

www.theverge.com

 

[CyberTech]

Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx of new users has been a problem.

“We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues,” Bluesky wrote in a post. “We’ll keep you updated when invite codes will resume functionality. We’re excited to welcome more users to our beta soon!”

The rest

Bluesky temporarily halts sign-ups because so many people are joining from Twitter

Everybody wants an invite.

www.theverge.com

 

[CyberTech]

Elon Musk's latest decision to limit the number of posts users can read per day has not only caused lots of confusion among its audience, but it's also caused many of the social network's members to try something else.

CNBC reports that Bluesky, which launched in 2022 and has ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on its board of directors, received what it called "record-high traffic" on Saturday after Musk announced Twitter was temporarily going to put a cap on the amount of posts users could read each day.

At first, Musk said the limit would be 6,000 posts per day for verified accounts, 600 posts for unverified accounts, and posts for new unverified accounts were limited to 300 per day. A few hours later, he said the cap would go up to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 for unverified users, and 500 for new unverified users.


Musk said he made his move to limit read posts because he felt Twitter needed to "address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation." However, that didn't stop lots of people on Twitter from posting screenshots this weekend and today that indicated they had now also joined Bluesky.

Officially, Bluesky is in beta and is invite-only for now. However, it temporarily stopped signups for that beta this weekend because it had seen "some degraded performance as a result of record-high traffic."

Signups for the beta were back online late on Sunday. So far, Bluesky has not revealed how many people it has added to its beta test over the weekend.

Twitter could also be facing some more competition very soon. The Verge reports that, briefly on Saturday, an Android version of Meta's upcoming Twitter-like service Threads popped up on the Google Play Store before being taken down. That could mean that Meta is close to actually launching Threads.

Source:

Bluesky is getting flooded with signups after Twitter's move to limit number of read posts

After Twitter decided to limit the number of posts users could read on its social network each day, the rival service Bluesky saw a record number of people trying to sign up for its beta.

www.neowin.net

 

[spiritedawaymadmax]

Sometimes it feels like Dorsey sold Twitter to Musk just so he can later laugh at him from another competitor platform he had envisioned beforehand... Really suave!

 

[Imranmt]

Bluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only

The day isn't even over yet Bluesky has already seen its biggest influx of new users in a single-day

Would you pay to use X, the platform formerly known as Twitter? Apparently, all of these new Bluesky users don't seem so keen to do so.

Bluesky, the "decentralized" X-alternative social media platform, just had its biggest influx of new users ever on Tuesday. This happened just one day after Elon Musk made headlines during a livestream with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he plans to charge all of X's users a "small monthly payment" to use the platform.

As of 2:40pm ET, more than 42,000 new users have joined Bluesky, making Tuesday, September 19, the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year. At publishing time of this article, Bluesky had 1,113,820 users in total.

The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website "Bluesky Stats." Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.

It's impossible to know whether Musk's comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.

Bluesky is a direct alternative to the platform formerly known as Twitter. It's backed by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. (Although, we should note that Dorsey is not involved in the day-to-day running of Bluesky. The CEO of Bluesky is Jay Graber. Dorsey sits on the board of directors.)

In fact, before Musk acquired Twitter, the company now known as X, it even funded Bluesky. It provided $13 million in order to build a new "decentralized" version of the platform.

Furthermore, Bluesky's previous record-setting signup day was July 3, when 32,325 new users joined the platform. And that occurred amid the July 4th weekend in the U.S., when Musk abruptly made other unpopular changes to Twitter that restricted the content people could see without signing up, a move that alienated casual Twitter users, and benefitted those with paid subscriptions. Rather than paying, it appeared that tens of thousands of users preferred to just get their social media needs met elsewhere.

Source : Bluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only