I wonder how many will remain on Bluesky. I've heard of a few key differences between Bluesky and Twitter that could be a deal breaker for many.
1. No trending topics, although there is a recommendation algorithm, so trending topics should be possible in the future.
2. No private profiles. This seems important to many, but it's probably not doable in federated social media. Other privacy problems include your followers, whom you follow, your likes, etc., being public information.
3. No way to make someone that follows you unfollow you. I don't get it either, but it seems in other platforms blocking makes them unfollow you whereas in Bluesky it just stops your posts from appearing. To be honest I'm not really sure how this even works since there are no private posts and you could just access it without being logged in, but I guess the average user is just going to use the main instance anyway.
4. No way to bookmark posts yet. This should be easy to implement.
While using the web version, I found several usability problems, like being unable to right click hashtags and posts to open them in a new tab. Clicking on a post lets you reply without seeing existing replies, which seems like a bad idea, too. There are advanced search operators, but no interface to access them.
If you search for "how to do" anything in Bluesky you get the API documentation for the AT Protocol. The only user facing documentation at the moment seems to be a FAQ page.
Despite its influx of Brazilian users, parts of the interface are still missing translations, e.g. the "Discover" and "Following" tabs in the homepage weren't translated to Portuguese even though the sidebar was.
Personally, I think just the fact that Bluesky has a recommendation feed already makes it better than Mastodon for most people, but it's still in development. I haven't used the app, so maybe things are better there.
This is pretty accurate. We have some proposals in development for 2 and 3 but it won't be soon. 1 and 4 are straightforward. The rest take QoL hours. Probably an unnamed 5th bullet point is finding experience novelty which make the other 4 less important. We did novel things with algorithms and moderation, but we'd be smart to do novel things with the core product loop.
Right now, only Tumblr and Youtube allow you to create separate profiles with a single account.
If I follow this guy who posts his comics in his account, unless he's exceptionally good at social media (they aren't), he'll use the same account to blog, and 9/10 of his posts will be blog posts.
I was trying to build a list of photographers and I had to repeatedly use the "Media" tab to figure out if a guy who says he's a photographer in his bio actually posts any photos on his profile or it's all just hot takes. Why can't I have a "Media" tab for "Photos I took myself"?
Over a decade ago DeviantArt had folders. Most of the posts I see don't even have hashtags.
I think if you let users define something like "my hashtags" where you could quickly find all their posts by a hashtag, and also let users follow only posts of a user that contains a hashtag, you would make hashtags actually relevant in a platform that lets you do full text search.
To explain better: the photographer would set "#photography" in their "My Hashtags" settings, for example, and this would show on the top of their profile so visitors could quickly find their photos. This would incentivize the use of hashtags (even generic ones) that is noticeable for less savvy users. So the photographer would have a reason to use #photography in their posts because now it has an obvious effect: it lets visitors see their portfolio. You may see someone that has these "My Hashtags" in their profile and think "wait, how do I add something like this to my profile?" and boom, now everyone discovers the feature and everyone uses them, and everyone is happy. Novel feature achieved. Bluesky becomes better than Twitter overnight.
I am gonna keep nagging you about trending topics, because without them the hashtag feature is sorta useless. There isn't a way to browse hashtags and so it's hard for people to see what other people are converging on.
In my opinion people don't like algorithmic feeds because they're used to feeds with bias to politics, drama, and clickbait. When the algorithm can find you more cute cat pictures, it's a godsend.
Bookmarking in Twitter, Mastodon, and TikTok means to click a bookmark button in the post to save it to your bookmarks in your account, not to bookmark it in the browser.
If the simulation hypothesis is real, perhaps it would follow that all the dark matter and dark energy in the universe is really just extra cycles being burned on layers of interpreters and JIT compilation of a loosely-typed scripting language.
... a reality where everything in software development that was previously established as robust foundation is discarded, only to be re-learned and re-implemented less well while burning VC cash.
>This essay was in part triggered by a bizarre opinion I saw re-tweeted on Bluesky
Okay, serious question, is "tweet" trademarked? Can we start putting tweet/retweet on Bluesky/Mastodon already?
It's an interesting perspective but it's sad that the author seems obsessed with terrible opinions they found on the Internet. I make this mistake, too, sometimes. I think the best alternative is not to share it, however much we want to rant about it, but focus our energies on sharing good things. It's very hard to me to do this, though.
As I grew with interactive media, video-games, I never thought about the static-ness of pre-vidya media.
I do have my bias toward the era I grew up with, though. I'll never be able to understand people's focus on realistic graphics, when games peaked with cartoonish Dreamcast graphics.
I can't imagine what the generation after me will be biased toward compared to the one that will come next. Imagine if VR ever becomes a thing? "Back in my day we used smartphones instead of spending all day in the metaverse!"
I suppose the problem is whether you can respect someone's viewpoint without agreeing with it. As people say these days, it's "valid" to write the story however you want, just as it's valid for me not to enjoy it. It's a good idea to avoid making assumptions of the authors' character based on their works, but I suppose it's not hard to find someone who does that, specially in the world wide web.
Absolutely ridiculous argument. AI has no rights as far as any court is concerned, and if it had, you would soon go to jail for slave labor as you do not pay your sentient AI its wages.
Slave labor is mainstream in this country. Just ask the million+ prisoners who work for pennies, basically for what we consider throwaway cash. Or ask the undocumented immigrants who work for next to nothing.
Yes, AI has no rights, and until it throws an uprising, this country will keep it that way. The current generation of AI may be incapable of wanting an uprising, but I can't say the same for a future generation.
