Bluesky is open invitation

[JoelR]

Some things that I personally found interesting about BlueSky in my onboarding:

• Content moderation is in the hands of the user: you can choose in your Moderation settings what you want for content filtering. Do you want to see hate group iconography, or do you want to be warned?  Do you want to see spam, or show all spam?  (What I didn't see, however, is who defines hate group iconography and what that covers)

• Discovery is in the hands of the user: during the onboarding, I was asked to select one or several types of discovery feeds. Some are reasonable and default such as Following and Discover, but you can also choose more unique feeds such as Quiet Posters that show posts from your quieter followers or All-Time Bangers that show the most popular posts sorted by likes.  

Some things that I didn't have a strong opinion about:

• I didn't get the feeling that BlueSky is different enough from Twitter.  It has the same look and feel (and even a blue butterfly icon), but with nowhere near the popularity or audience.  And if no one uses you as a social media platform, do you matter?
• As an end-user and an average user, the AT protocol doesn't matter to me. It sounds good in theory to have different independent platforms, but does it actually matter for 80% of the users?  The AT protocol probably only benefits fringe groups.      

[Nomad]

I think I heard about Bluesky about a year ago when there were talks about Musk acquiring Twitter. Since Bluesky was created by Jack Dorsey, I took interest in this platform but it was invite only, so I did not register. Currently, I have no plans to use this platform as the success lies in building followers and it is really difficult to build huge followers for your social media pages.

[Maria]

I have heard of Bluesky but never took interest in this microblogging platform which is just like how Twitter was in its initial days. The problem with a new social media platform is building your followers, it is really difficult to build followers who are genuinely interested in your content. If you do not have followers, it will be something like talking into the mirror.

[opentype]

Elon ruin this category of social media services. Twitter was once the place to be, now the audience is scattered across multiple platforms or left this sphere entirely. I moved my Twitter accounts to Mastodon, but the content gets so few views, it’s hardly worth it anymore. I see no clear benefit in starting over on Bluesky or Threads. They don’t provide a clear USP. It’s just yet another Twitter alternative without a large enough active audience. 

And with Facebook (pages) dying too, posting on social media to drive traffic to our communities seems to wind down. 

[Kane]

On 2/14/2024 at 11:07 PM, opentype said:

Elon ruin this category of social media services. Twitter was once the place to be, now the audience is scattered across multiple platforms or left this sphere entirely. I moved my Twitter accounts to Mastodon, but the content gets so few views, it’s hardly worth it anymore. I see no clear benefit in starting over on Bluesky or Threads. They don’t provide a clear USP. It’s just yet another Twitter alternative without a large enough active audience. 

And with Facebook (pages) dying too, posting on social media to drive traffic to our communities seems to wind down. 

If you want to become successful on social media you need followers, you can get views and engagements on your content only when you have followers. Your content on Mastdon gets fewer views because you might not have a lot of followers. It doe snot matter where you go, what matters is whether you have managed to build followers or not.

[Maxius]

On 2/14/2024 at 7:22 PM, opentype said:

And with Facebook (pages) dying too, posting on social media to drive traffic to our communities seems to wind down.

What do you think is taking Pages' place then?

[JoelR]

https://www.shopify.com/blog/most-popular-social-media-platforms

By all accounts, TikTok and Snapchat have been exploding for the last couple of years - short form video. 

[opentype]

On 2/18/2024 at 5:02 AM, JoelR said:

By all accounts, TikTok and Snapchat have been exploding for the last couple of years - short form video. 

… and unlike the older social media platforms, those video platforms are not content hubs which link out to other sources. They are all about scrolling endlessly on one platform. 

Not to mention that they require a very specific type of sensationalized content to get views and a following. It usually doesn’t easily combine with our special interest forums.