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  • Hacker News
  • there's nothing you can do technically to fix bluesky.

    people just hate social networks at this point in this timeline.

    by jimmydoe
  • Is there a different timeline?
    by edoceo
  • Twitter's not doing too bad: 550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates

    So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.

    by nxm
  • As an anecdote, I switched a year or two ago along with most everyone I followed on X.

    It’s nothing like the vibe on old Twitter. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ideologically siloed. I’m quite left of center, but everyone on bluesky seems to be a caricature; the blue-haired loonies the right memes about. People there are seriously intolerant of anything other than their perceived orthodoxy. I don’t know what made it this way but it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.

    by semiquaver
  • > it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.

    You are describing X here. It kind of turned into a very toxic political platform. The exodus to Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky happened for a good reason. After Elon Musk took over it didn't exactly improve.

    I'm on still on X, and on Bluesky and Mastodon. For my network of perfectly normal people, most of them did not delete their X account but just aren't very active there any more. Quite a few showed up on Bluesky in the last year or so (30-40%) and some also on Mastodon (~20%). But that just leaves a long tail of random accounts I followed on Twitter that I don't really miss that much. Many of them have gone silent in any case.

    I actually don't mind Bluesky. I pretty much ignore algorithmic feeds and just consume content from people I happen to follow in the order it is published. If what you see is blue-haired loonies, might I suggest following less of those.

    Organizing people in lists is helpful as well. Mostly the people I follow are the same people I used to follow on X. Their political leanings didn't really change and they still talk about the same kinds of topics. It's just that the noise of random nut bags that I wasn't following to begin with dominating my X feed is completely gone. I don't miss that at all.

    by jillesvangurp
  • You choose what you see on Bluesky. I see little politics while using it. If everyone you followed moved over, just limit it to their posts.
    by nitwit005
  • I find it interesting that most conversations about Twitter or Bluesky is about the "political vibe".

    Why is that so important?

    On Mastodon, if someone keeps posting political stuff to the point where it's a big chunk of my feed, I merely unfollow. As a result my feed has very little politics. Can't you simply do that on Bluesky?

    Of course, if you actively want politics, but want just the right kind of politics, then you've dug yourself into a hole.

    by BeetleB
  • A lot of people on Bluesky are pretty normal and if you make a point to block on the first bit of political NPC behavior you can find people that are interested in cat pictures and software and such.
    by PaulHoule
  • In terms of politics, yes. It's a bit like the worst of reddit. Nobody reads the article, everybody gets outraged in the same cliché way. If you try to provide nuance you get derided or blocked. (Blocking seems to be held in high esteem, which I think is also part of the problem.)
    by gniv
  • Reddit is dominated by the left, but there are other voice audible.

    Twitter has plenty of leftists. They are very, very, very easy to find, as is every other shape and size of political, ideological, or spiritual thought; far easier than, say, a non-leftist viewpoint on the worldnews or politics subreddits, which because of their default status are much more inescapable than any one Twitter account.

    There are very, very few non-left people on Bluesky. "JD Vance Becomes Most Blocked Person on BlueSky Days After Joining App" <https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-bluesky-blocked-social-med...>

    Even Bluesky's top users say so.

    "Bluesky is backfiring. Mark Cuban says the 'lack of diversity of thought' is actually pushing users back to X" <https://fortune.com/2025/06/12/bluesky-backfiring-mark-cuban...>

    "Bluesky is not the good place" <https://www.ms.now/opinion/bluesky-elon-musk-twitter-replace...>

    But it could be worse. Bluesky has block list dissemination (à la how, if you make one comment in a "wrong" subreddit, a whole bunch of others will automatically ban you despite never having even heard of them), but I don't think even it ever gets so bad as individual Mastodon instances' ability to self-destruct in spectacularly amusing fashion. mastodon.lol example over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As rvz said in the link,

    >This is just one of many Mastodon instances which are undergoing an extinction event which involves: turning against themselves and destroying each other. This time, it is over a children's video game.

    That said, I suppose that such self-immolation might be a good thing; sort of an immune system-like response. There are many, many mentally ill that steep far too long in Bluesky (and 80% of Reddit)'s ever-boiling toxic soup.

    by TMWNN
  • What does this comment even mean? Substitute "left" for any other adjective, like "purple" or "embobulated" and it's equally meaningless: "There are very, very few non-embobulated people on Bluesky."
    by inigyou
  • nobody fucking cares what mark cuban has to say.
    by Bluescreenbuddy
  • Reddit is dominated by the left? We're having very different feeds...
    by smalllangmodel
  • > Twitter has plenty of leftists.

    How, when according to you, they're dominating Reddit and Bsky?

    Baring the possibility that people on the left use all the platforms, and people on the right don't for some reason, an excess on one platform has to mean a shortage on another.

    by nitwit005
  • Basically Bluesky is an echo chamber.
    by vachina
  • Huh I had no idea this is happening my entire feed is just photographers lol
    by wookmaster
  • The only promising social network to me was that browser extension that let you comment on every single page, but it was shut down when people freaked out that it (obviously) sent the URL of every page you visited to their servers. I've wanted something like that for so long. There just isn't enough thread-based discussion happening online. It's all buried in what are essentially darkweb chatrooms (unindexed Discord chats)
    by halyconWays
  • The article is about Bluesky, but what I find hard to believe is that Threads has almost twice the MAU compared to X?.. I’ve never met a person that uses Threads in any capacity. Never even heard anyone mention about anything on Threads.

    Are these numbers skewed somehow?

    by oseityphelysiol
  • X was popular but never had that many users, not even back in the Twitter days. This is a big part of why Twitter was so easily acquired.
    by yen223
  • Because they are regional specifics, twitter or X is only big in some countries like US and Japan. Threads is doing what twitter should have done but for the rest of the world who didn't jump onto twitter.
    by ksec
  • I'd expect it to be cross-pollination from Instagram being tied to Threads
    by xethos
  • Toni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more

    https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...

    by blakesterz
  • We have ample evidence that platforms whose goal is to shove everyone you've ever met into the same room isn't a good thing. Modest growth and a healthy community that doesn't have to include everyone to succeed seems like a good thing.
    by cdrnsf
  • Sure, but not if you've taken venture funding. We already have a public, community platform for building slow-growing tight-knit communities: Mastodon/ActivityPub.
    by tptacek
  • There are too many bots on BlueSky. Atleast in the niche I post within (game development). There are lots of automated accounts out there meant to like, repost, and signal boost. I appreciate the gesture but when all your engagement comes from these accounts it’s frustrating. I don’t want retweets and likes, I want people to engage with what I post.

    Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives? The most insidious bots are those that leave replies based on keywords in your post. It looks legitimate until you go to their profile and see they are cranking out replies every second to posts in a topic.

    by mikhmha
  • > Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives?

    I don't think there's anything other than - there are more people on twitter; due to first mover advantage and inertia

    by gota
  • Concern about engagement is IMO the root cause issue going all the way back to Twitter. Somewhere around 10 years ago people started focusing on "engagement" instead of just interacting with people organically. Worrying about how to improve their engagement. Not wanting to post on a site if they didn't good engagement. How to monetize engagement. And so on.

    Twitter was at its best when it was just a bunch of people figuring out what the fuck it was in the first place. Posting into the ether. Responding to random strangers. Chatting with friends. Whatever.

    These sites need less focus on driving engagement, less tools to direct attention to one's post, and more of a focus on organic posting.

    by jghn
  • If Meta had put Threads on the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub, things could have been so different... maybe there's still time. The engineering philosophy for AT / Bluesky is incredible, being able to develop your own timeline algorithms, distributed moderation agencies, etc. But whenever I give Bluesky a try unfortunately I just can't find people talking about my interests. This seems like a scale problem, which Threads solves.
    by dbbk
  • Anything on AP or AT can bridge both ways anyway
    by singpolyma3
  • Threads indeed could have used AT protocol to bootstrap Threads audence, but it's likely that a corporate sponsor would not want their brand associated with Bluesky's audience.
    by nailer