Bluesky finds with growth comes growing pains — and bots

Remember folks. Bluesky exists because the left thought Joe Rogan was too right wing. Let that sink in.

These issues shouldn't be a problem if it is well designed and properly decentralised/distributed. Individuals should be able to each act as a moderator/blocker within a shared community, so you have a lot of eyes watching out for content that you and your community group do not want to see. High levels of user blocking would end the viability of bot accounts really quickly. It should work organically and automatically, and should not require intervention or oversight from Bluesky HQ.

Given the Twitter-like style of Bluesky it represents no threat or competition to other services like Facebook. However a distributed social media service could be built quite easily by extending an e-mail client to handle rich content circulated between users, encrypted, via the e-mail protocol. That would look like social media but work like Bluesky giving users as much moderation control as they wanted over their own feeds, individually or as a community. That would be competition for the main players, not least because the overheads would be tiny compared to the huge amount centralised services have to pay for bandwidth, storage, AI BS and moderation. Once a distributed service is rolled out, the costs (and interventions) should drop to near zero.

Who cares?

Remember folks. Bluesky exists because the left thought Joe Rogan was too right wing. Let that sink in.

no bluesky existes because Musk has turned twitter into a right wing disinformation cesspool

in x-twitter, you can choose to see only what you follow, or the "suggestions" part. if you don't like the suggestions don't go there. in the suggestions you will see all political opinions, whether you like it or not: from extreme woke biden and squad, to musk/trump

in bluesky it's almost the same: follow what you like and view only that, or explore and get anything out there including the bots.

i don't see the problem. and they are both the same to me.

actually, bluesky started great, i followed lots of people that were running away from x/musk/trump. but now around 20% of the people i followed start woking nonstop about politics. same old shxt

Bluesky is Twitter little sister

In the last year up to Sept 2024, Twitter has lost 1/5th of daily users in the US and 1/3rd of daily users in the UK

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-losing-users-in-the-us-and-uk/727842/

“Data from Similarweb shows active daily users in the UK have dropped from 8mn a year ago to only around 5.6mn now, with more than a third of that fall coming since the summer riots. The same thing is happening elsewhere, and not just in places where the platform has been banned, such as Brazil. Over the same 16-month period, X’s active users in the US have fallen by about a fifth.”

That also aligns with X’s own reporting on its EU user base. As part of its EU reporting obligations, X needs to provide regular updates on its EU user base, and how many active users it’s serving in the region. In its most recent report, covering the first six months of 2024, X reported a 5% decline in EU users.

"The shift from X (formerly Twitter) to Bluesky continues. In the US alone, X's daily users have decreased by 2.7 million in two months, while Bluesky's has increased by 2.4 million."

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241212-twitter-x-bluesky-us-dau/

Here's the comparison graph from Oct 2024 to Dec 2024:

https://i.gzn.jp/img/2024/12/12/twitter-x-bluesky-us-dau/01.png

Beyond celebrities and journalists, the most surprising departures from X have come from German football clubs. First Hamburg’s St Pauli left, calling X a “hate machine”, followed by Werder Bremen, which said that “with the recent radicalisation of the platform, a line had been crossed for the club”.

Its director of communications, Christoph Pieper, said X no longer aligned with the values the club strives to hold, and that reducing its visibility online was a price worth paying for its principles.

“We are leaving 600,000 followers on X for only 9,000 on Bluesky,” he said. “It can have economic consequences for us, because our partners have paid for a range that was significantly greater at X than it is now at Bluesky. But … we as a club have moral values. We fight against transphobia, homophobia, antisemitism, discrimination. For us a place where there is no regulation for hate speech is not the place to be.”

Pieper said the club was not sure if it has found a permanent home on Bluesky, but that it did not regret its decision: “Bluesky is currently the right choice for us, and other clubs are gradually switching to it. But we can’t yet say whether the platform will catch on. What is clear though is that X is the wrong one.”