Graber is “optimistic about human potential, even though I’m realistic about human nature.” When Bluesky launched last year, it filled a gap that was desperately needed by people who were looking for alternatives to X, as it seemed like the ship formerly known as Twitter was possibly sinking. (Against all odds, it hasn’t yet.)
Bluesky wasn’t as confusing as Mastodon and wasn’t owned by Meta like Threads. Bluesky looks and feels much like Old Twitter.
There was only one snag: It was available as a beta launch, only with an invite code, which was initially so hard to obtain that even Joe Biden couldn’t get one. Starting Tuesday, Bluesky is finally out of “beta” and will be open to anyone — no codes needed.
Like Mastodon and Threads, Bluesky is an experiment in a new, “decentralized” way of running a social app, where users can create their own communities and moderation rules. (Bluesky also has its own moderation team.)
Jack Dorsey was involved in creating Bluesky while he was still at Twitter and now sits on its board. It’s organized as a public benefit corporation.
Ultimately, it may not be a winner-takes-all competition between these X alternatives; the new approach to social may be to exist happily in smaller pockets without needing massive scale to survive. (Although Meta certainly would love to win the battle with Threads.)
More here - https://www.businessinsider.nl/bluesky-is-finally-open-to-everyone-but-will-anyone-come-we-ask-its-ceo/
Not really interested myself: Never liked the Twitter-esque platforms to begin with, plus I’m pretty happy with Lemmy and Kbin.
Twitter is terrible for people like me. I like following interests: books, coding, landscape photography, linux, etc. Twitter is more about following people, and people have diverse interests. One thing I really liked about Reddit was that it had active subreddits dedicated to particular interests. You could just hang out in those subreddits and only ever interact with things on topic to said interests. Lemmy has a bit less of that, unless your interests are politics, linux, and programming, and shitty memes.
Lemmy is great in the same ways (and better in some) in principle, it’s just a scale thing that makes it more difficult to obtain that “build your own experience” effect like Reddit has. There just aren’t enough people right now to support the super idiosyncratic stream of content that you can curate with Reddit.
My advice is to just lean into it. Start with Ubuntu or Mint, queue up The Next Generation season 1 on your Jellyfin server, and keep contributing.
I prefer Stargate on Plex and praising the Lord with TempleOS.
See? There’s something for everybody on Lemmy!
Yeah, I’m looking forward to Lemmy having more niche places: That was, hands down, my favorite thing about reddit. I don’t really care much about following people, I prefer to follow subjects…
Speaking of niche communities, I’d like to take this opportunity to plug [email protected]
I feel the same, microblogging sites such as twitter never really felt cool to use because there was too much noise between the content I actually wanted. But as a photographer and a musician, I might join bsky to spread my art, which is definetly harder to do atm on mastodon imo
Agreed
I just don’t think I know how I’m supposed to “properly” use Mastodon. I just see 80% US political discussion, which is fine, but my broken zoomer brain just gets worn down by it very easily.
With Lemmy/KBin if I get bored with a topic, I can just switch over to a different community/magazine.
Totally agreed. I never used Twitter. I tried in earnest to use Mastodon for a couple years, because I wanted it to to succeed, just kind of ideologically.
Eventually I realized that the whole concept of “microblogging” is just fundamentally awful. (At least for me)