🦋 Bluesky Social

Not quite a knockout, but close.

The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users since the election. It hasn’t all been easy.

It’s not just an Alf pics repository.

In the war for disaffected users of the platform once known as Twitter, Bluesky has had a great week. The decentralized social network has added at least 1 million users in about the past seven days. That growth is the latest point on a trend line: When Elon Musk either degrades X’s usability or makes news for one right-wing political maneuver or another, people look for an exit hatch from his platform. In October, Bluesky added 500,000 users in a day after Musk blunted X’s “block” feature. Bluesky also grew lots when Musk said (so far without following through) in September 2023 that his site would put up a paywall. It also got a big influx when Musk fought with Brazil’s supreme court in August.

Bluesky has not exactly won the Twitter Wars. By conventional metrics, it has not come close. The platform reports about 14.5 million total users. Meta’s Threads, which it built on the scaffolding of Instagram, reports 275 million in any given month. But the Twitter Wars are really a series of small border skirmishes, and Bluesky has momentum in a major battle: the one for news and live events.

Threads, like Musk’s X, is hostile to both news organizations and news as a concept. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri made clear from the moment of Threads’ launch in the fall of 2023 that the platform would not be friendly to news and politics. Meta has seen to that over the past year. It is seemingly impossible to get the Threads app to remain in a setting where a user only sees posts from accounts they choose to follow. External links do not travel well in the site’s algorithmic feeds. To the extent Threads is a home for “news,” it is because it is a nexus for the weirdest liberal election conspiracy theories out there. Threads is doing well with politically vapid influencers and people who understandably just want to try out an app that is connected to their Instagram account. It is a black hole for the exchange of news.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/19905102

In 2022, Bleeding Cool got the word that DC Comics had encouraged its talent pool to make accounts on the social media app Hive and to build their audience using the hashtag #comicstwitter rather than on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, in the wake of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Basically, no one listened. And Hive frittered away fast. Mastodon has stuck around a bit. Threads is basically Instagram and Facebook, and it may prove to be a contender. But newcomer Blue Sky or Bluesky seems to have taken the lead in Twitter/X alternatives in the last year or so. And with the recent election results and more changes to X regarding blocklists and the like, more people are looking for alternatives. We mentioned JH Williams III the other day, but Greg Pak has recently set out the state of play.

Greg Pak posted to X after a long time having not. He writes "this has been my Twitter profile image for months. Please feel free to use it yourself if you're locking down and walking away. And on his website, he writes, "Twitter is now run by someone who regularly platforms bigotry and transphobia and shares unconscionable lies and conspiracies. The site is also becoming less safe all the time, allowing harassers and even literal neo-Nazis to post and, most recently, promising to deprecate its block function. So almost exactly a year ago, I deleted most of my posts and stopped using the site for anything other than pointing folks to other, better sites to use instead. The best of those alternative sites? I don't generally love cheerleading for corporations and realize that any product can fall apart at any time. But after a couple of years of trying almost everything, I'm pretty sure the best Twitter alternative for me is Bluesky — by a long shot."

He also lists a number of prominent comic book creators, journalists and the like on BlueSky, and talks about the advantages the site has, such as the Nuclear Block.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21922900

Are there any bluesky android clients which allow hiding thumbnails / image previews on the timeline? I took a look at several but didn't see anything.

Im going to migrate to bluesky, but i dont want to use bsky.social because too many people joining may overload it (and also many people joining the same service makes the whole network vulnerable to censorship and puts it in risk of being taken down), so im looking for alternatives, especially if they are outside the US

"I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will

When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage – when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile – that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21445676

Apparently openvibe isn't open source, you might say sorasns but my iPhone 8 doesn't get iOS 18, I can't be bothered to Download an app for both Mastodon & Bluesky each