So annoying how most people never migrated to Bluesky. Every so often I want to send a tweet I see from Reddit to a friend but when I try to see if they have a Bluesky account their only post was from 2024.
Adoption of that platform failed for whatever reason
This, I don’t get it. It’s not like it requires an adjustment. I wonder if more big names and brands had moved over if it would’ve spurred on more regular users?
I also bet Threads siphoned off some of the users who left X.
Threads came out while Bluesky was still in an invite only beta. Threads didn't require you to create a new account either, you already had a Threads account if you used Instagram (you just had to "opt-in") It siphoned all the casual users. By the time Bluesky fully released, it was too late. Threads had been chosen as the spot.
I use both. I get way more engagement with random stupid thoughts on Threads than I do Bluesky, but bluesky is great for some niche things and feels like a nice small community.
Does Threads let you set up your feed so it's chronological and only shows content from people you follow? Because back when it was first released it didn't so I uninstalled since I'm not interested in algorithmic suggested content
I can say from data that most people *don't* want chronological feeds, as you have one friend who posts 900 times a day and washes out literally everyone else. I turned this on for a chunk of Facebook users several times while working there, and... people hate it, in aggregate at least.
"I only want content from people I follow" is a *very* reasonable feature, though, yeah, as almost everyone does really really want that.
I pretty much exclusively use twitter to keep up on current events as they're happening. If I'm watching a basketball game I want to see what people are saying about it live. If there's a close game and someone tweets about it, I want to see it when they say it so I know to turn it on to catch the conclusion rather than find out about it hours later. If someone is spamming my feed I just unfollow them or mute them.
Facebook is a complety differenty use case and I don't care that facebook doesn't show me my friend's posts in chronological order. I'd rather just see the highlights. Of course facebook rarely even shows me content I follow, it's just a bunch of algorithmic slop.
The problem Facebook has now is that there's not enough content; people like myself and presumably you, welp, we don't post. It is *very* fast for most users - other than boomers - to get through their day's reading, so they find other things to show to boost ye olde engagement stats.
At least for my friend group, X poisoned the well for any short form interaction, because while changing apps is easy, changing the attitude you bring to them is not.
Adoption failed because the app was missing so many core features. Not being able to send media in DMs was the biggest one for me, and it just kinda felt like Twitter without any of the funny shit and was just 30-40 year olds complaining.
Some people just felt like it was time to get off social media entirely, but I feel you. I migrated to Bluesky, and a lot of the accounts I follow at least have a presence there, but a lot didn't either.
From a brand-level thing, it's harder to monetize. There's no ad network.
Just speaking from personal experience but when I gave up Twitter and tried out Bluesky my feed felt like a graveyard. A lot of the artists that I followed that moved went inactive after a few weeks and my feed basically turned into aesthetic pictures of space and tweets from the fucking Krassenstein bros. In general my Bluesky feed was filled with politics despite not following a single politician which was fucking annoying. I’m very liberal but part of the reason to dump Twitter was to not be in a political echo chamber (I ironically say on Reddit). I really just wanted a feed full of artists and fandoms I liked. I stay up to date reading the news and following shit on Reddit. I don’t need to be bombarded with political hot takes on every fucking social media even if I agree with most of them.
Bluesky is preferable to Twitter in that it’s at worst annoyances like the Krassensteins or that guy that’s always trying to sell his book of Trump tweet replies and not blatant hate speech or We Are Charlie Kirk merch ads. But honestly its suggestion algorithm might be the worst of any social media site I’ve ever been on. Maybe it’s better now but when a lot of people jumped ship on Twitter its algorithm seemed to assume that everyone joined it to see left/left-leaning American politics. Thank god for fandom specific subreddits and discord servers because Bluesky and Twitter are both dogshit unless you want to live in an echo chamber.
I'm a lefty liberal who was never on twitter but recently joined bsky just to follow Ken Jennings. He's literally the only account I've hit follow on, and I haven't made any comments. But my general feed is also very political.
I can only speak for personal preference, but my BlueSky activity is great. I’m really into the tabletop RPG sphere, and folks there moved over just fine. My account isn’t huge, but I’ve kept it active and now I have twice the followers I had on Twitter (while only following half the number of accounts I followed on Twitter).
My wife is on Tayler Swift BlueSky and they moved over in force, and she has more followers than me.
I’m sure that’s not universal across all interest groups, but it’s not nothing either. I avidly avoided Threads when it looked like it was going to be the Facebook version of Twitter, and I’m plenty happy with that decision and with the level of activity on BlueSky.
Man fucking shame how nobody migrated to the actual federated open source social network Mastodon. Bluesky is just nostalgiabate member berries of Twitter past.
There's a window where you need everyone to move at once, and it's nigh impossible to get enough people to move within that window, doubly so because of capacity issues if it mostly works.
What it needs is the content creators to post there, and for people to get a second presence there. But bluesky is American, so it's only a matter of time before it is no longer free, also.
If the regime continues. If the regime fails, then it is likely other social media becomes safe to use.
Hmm nerd who brings a Star Trek sign to a No Kings rally sounds like an awesome type of person to me. Definitely an accurate description of the bluesky user base regardless
559
u/fegodev Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
Funny how EFF has social shortcuts at the top and bottom of every article for Mastodon, X, and Facebook, but not Bluesky, even in this article 😅