Technology

Have you met people?! I'm surprised it's only 20 million. It shows a near saint like self-control on Bluesky's part.

The amount of artists and creatives I follow on Bluesky aren't vapid trash media.

I had hoped that with the downfall of Twitter people would finally kick their addictions to vapid trash media.

And yet, here you are

Yeah. I think that's the appeal. You could just shout things and hope others would follow until a part of the auditorium would turn their heads to you. So, if someone shouted "it's an Earthquake!", and people nearby felt it and tweeted, implying it was true, everyone in the auditorium would know about it. Of course, other types of messages were send in Twitter, but most importantly, actors and robots started to use Twitter to plainly shout lies and noise.

Small notes to be answered rarely.

I've looked at the early Usenet archives, and typical posts there resembled this format quite a lot. It's later that Usenet became a place where you write long considerate posts, and also expect rather quick answers.

It's actually interesting to communicate in a rare terse format.

The reason I don't use Twitter, BlueSky, anything like that is - I don't have a scenario of it being useful for me.

In an auditorium with everyone shouting you don't get to hear anything. In Twitter you get to see what you want instead of what most people want like on reddit and Lemmy. I much prefer that to other people deciding for me. At least that way I can see something other than shitposts and US politics.

I’m with you 100%. The Twitter product has always been a clunky pile of bullshit for me. But somehow it became the default public space and choice of celebrities, etc and I think that has been 98% of its appeal.

Me too but here's one useful function:

Perhaps you are aware there is an ongoing event, say for example a football game, or an election, or an outage of your email service provider. You go to one of these "scream into the void" social sites, search on the topic, and learn what people are saying about it. Maybe someone knows what's really going on, maybe some of those people have some interesting insights and you engage with them, not unlike you and I are engaging right now. Others can observe, perhaps contribute, and after the event has concluded, everyone goes their own way. Hopefully in the end the interactions are beneficial for all.

About 15 years ago, I moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone. I joined Twitter because I like to try new apps as early as possible. It turned out to be a great place to talk about live music in my city, amongst other things. I met all my friends on Twitter.

At that time in my city, it was very much the town square that Elon wants it to be now. It was a place to discuss events in realtime; especially sporting events.

I suspect the advantage for Twitter was that you could communicate with people you didn’t know directly like celebrities, authors, politicians, etc. Not just write to them, but they write back because sending off a short message is much easier than making a call or writing a letter. Sometimes that is an unhealthy parasocial relationship but, it doesn’t have to be.

Kevin Smith basically started writing the movie Tusk in a collaborative way with Twitter.

Agree, it’s like I had a feed for reading only instagram/facebook comments. No, thanks

Except on Bluesky you create your own algorithm. You're not rage-baited by an algorithm that exists to "maximise engagement", and although spam bots exist on Bluesky, they have virtually no reach.

All that matters is the cesspool that isn't going to make Musk any money

Twitter, where the response to “I like Hot Dogs” is “Why do you hate Cheeseburgers????”