Over a year following its post-election surge, Bluesky’s mobile app is seeing a continued decline in active users, though its remaining community is still relatively engaged.
I tried Bluesky before I found Lemmy. I really wanted to like it but after a few months I decided it wasn’t for me. It’s got a chicken-or-egg problem and you need to bring your own fanbase if want to have any interaction.
I never liked Twitter and don’t feel it’s a particularly good model for actual socializing. I think it was created back when people were still hacking together ideas, it sort of worked, and it hasn’t changed much since.
It’s great for disseminating stuff, terrible at creating space for discussion.
The founders seem like a bunch of young ultra-capitalists who sensed an opening in the market and are just shooting their shot. The app reflects this in subtle ways.
I never really participated in Twitter, actively deleted my X account when it was created for me.
I did try a little on Bluesky, but felt like the whole thing was a goad to get you to self-promote. If you don’t say popular things, nobody will read anything you say kind of thing. Anytime I would post I felt myself sub-consciously gauging “what’s this going to do for/to my visibility profile, will I gain or lose followers?” F that. I have better things to do with my life than worry about people I don’t know adding me to their circle or putting my account on block lists.
The big problem is it’s really hard to have a conversation you can reply to someone and they can reply to you but the UI does not lend itself well to having a multi-person conversation, so at the moment you try and involve more than two people it just becomes a mess.
Plus I cannot stand with the fact that when somebody quotes a comment their response is placed above the original quote. Meaning I always read them out of order and don’t understand it until I remember that I need to read it bottom to top and now it makes sense.
Yeah. I also think it’s quite a bad platform for sharing ideas and discussing them, when compared to the reddit/lemmy model. As you mention, there’s no real threading of usefulness, and the posts have to be too short to really share a complex idea. And even if you do share ideas, it is unlikely to reach people who are interested in these ideas, unless you stick to a single topic for your posts. And that means you also can’t find ideas that interest you as easily. Generally you get a hodgepodge of stuff, some of which is interesting, but much of which isn’t.
These platforms have always seemed to be a vanity thing of who can garner the most likes and make viral quips but that actually most people are constantly posting and doing very little interacting with the content of others. It’s a social network for narcissists rather than those interested in ideas IMO.
It struck me that the only way to have “real” idea exchange was to use the Bluesky / Twitter posts as pointers to other content - which pretty seriously hampers the whole back-and-forth aspect of a discussion.
Well said. It’s almost as bad as YouTube. At least twitter sort of has nesting (wherein yt doesn’t), but it’s still just about impossible to comprehend when 3 or more people are conversing.
I tried Bluesky before I found Lemmy. I really wanted to like it but after a few months I decided it wasn’t for me. It’s got a chicken-or-egg problem and you need to bring your own fanbase if want to have any interaction.
I never liked Twitter and don’t feel it’s a particularly good model for actual socializing. I think it was created back when people were still hacking together ideas, it sort of worked, and it hasn’t changed much since.
It’s great for disseminating stuff, terrible at creating space for discussion.
The founders seem like a bunch of young ultra-capitalists who sensed an opening in the market and are just shooting their shot. The app reflects this in subtle ways.
I never really participated in Twitter, actively deleted my X account when it was created for me.
I did try a little on Bluesky, but felt like the whole thing was a goad to get you to self-promote. If you don’t say popular things, nobody will read anything you say kind of thing. Anytime I would post I felt myself sub-consciously gauging “what’s this going to do for/to my visibility profile, will I gain or lose followers?” F that. I have better things to do with my life than worry about people I don’t know adding me to their circle or putting my account on block lists.
Yeah I just can’t really get into any of the twitter like platforms.
The big problem is it’s really hard to have a conversation you can reply to someone and they can reply to you but the UI does not lend itself well to having a multi-person conversation, so at the moment you try and involve more than two people it just becomes a mess.
Plus I cannot stand with the fact that when somebody quotes a comment their response is placed above the original quote. Meaning I always read them out of order and don’t understand it until I remember that I need to read it bottom to top and now it makes sense.
Yeah. I also think it’s quite a bad platform for sharing ideas and discussing them, when compared to the reddit/lemmy model. As you mention, there’s no real threading of usefulness, and the posts have to be too short to really share a complex idea. And even if you do share ideas, it is unlikely to reach people who are interested in these ideas, unless you stick to a single topic for your posts. And that means you also can’t find ideas that interest you as easily. Generally you get a hodgepodge of stuff, some of which is interesting, but much of which isn’t.
These platforms have always seemed to be a vanity thing of who can garner the most likes and make viral quips but that actually most people are constantly posting and doing very little interacting with the content of others. It’s a social network for narcissists rather than those interested in ideas IMO.
It struck me that the only way to have “real” idea exchange was to use the Bluesky / Twitter posts as pointers to other content - which pretty seriously hampers the whole back-and-forth aspect of a discussion.
Well said. It’s almost as bad as YouTube. At least twitter sort of has nesting (wherein yt doesn’t), but it’s still just about impossible to comprehend when 3 or more people are conversing.