Trying Bluesky

November 16th, 2024
bluesky, tech
Recently a bunch of my friends, primarily in the contra dance world, have decided to give Bluesky a try. I think a lot of this is a post-election reaction to Musk and X (Twitter), but since I'm not on Twitter I'm mostly seeing the Facebook side. Regardless, I'm happy to see energy for migration: I'm pretty unhappy with FB [1] and if we can get critical mass on a better platform that seems good.

Playing with Bluesky it seems fine. I turned off Reposts (Settings > Following Feed Preference > Show Reposts) because otherwise my feed was full of things from people I don't know that I wasn't interested in. I like that it seems to be run by people who value openness. Not sure yet whether it's default algorithm is any good, but I like that I can experiment with other algorithms or (if I'm willing to put in a bunch of work) I could write my own.

If I end up liking it I'll write a comment bot like I did for Mastodon. Speaking of which, I'm still cross-posting there [2], from a previous effort to move to a more open platform, and I'm still reading it with with Shrubgrazer. But more friends have joined Bluesky in the past few days than ever joined Mastodon, so this seems more likely to take off.

If you'd like to add me I'm @jeffkaufman.bsky.social. [EDIT: now I'm @jefftk.com]


[1] Very high ad load, keeps trying to push reels and groups, increasingly buggy (for months long comment threads only load if I switch each one from the default of "most relevant" to "all comments"), doesn't show me posts from most of my friends, still quite bad at predicting which of my friends to show my posts to, broke my comment bot enough times that I've given up on it, doesn't support good search because people find it creepy, terrible flow for review if one of my posts is accidentally removed, etc.

[2] As platforms proliferate I'm glad to be using a POSSE ("Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere") strategy.

Referenced in:

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, bluesky

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