Every so often I pop over to Bluesky and it feels so much like it’s a popularity contest, squabbling for follows and likes. The vibe is just really… angry? Desperate? I dunno. Not for me really.
@CatherineFlick Bluesky does feel more Twitter like (for better and for worse). I’ve seen a number of academic exchanges get quite tetchy quite quickly. No idea why that is
@UlrikeHahn yeah I see a lot of that, it feels like a lot of the worst academic conferences somehow. I saw that on Twitter occasionally too, but it was diluted by lots of other stuff. With feeds it feels like it’s harder to avoid it (I wasn’t a big user of hashtags on Twitter)
@CatherineFlick Your point about dilution resonates! I’ve been looking at Bluesky feeds with great interest from a platform design perspective. I had thought having focussed feeds would be great, but, in fact, I’m finding it a bit off-putting. I’m still puzzling on that one… Currently suspecting it might be because there isn’t actually enough interesting/novel content for something trying to be real time continuous….?
@UlrikeHahn Yes! I find it off putting too. I feel like there’s a lot of gatekeeping on the feeds too, for some of them anyway. And the ones that revolve around likes just reinforce like-chasing which further reinforces a sort of posting that engenders likes/followers which tend to be some of the snarkier ones (which imo tend toward the less kind)
@CatherineFlick Hmm. I've experience the total opposite. Almost all of my gaming circles from Twitter have moved to Bluesky, so my feed is a bunch of people having fun talking about video games and mostly being friendly about it.
I only rarely see talk of follows/likes pop up, except when talking about how someone's socials are doing on each platform.
I still love Mastodon on a technical/usage level, but Bluesky is my "main" at this point.
@mollipen thinking further maybe this is why there is such a difference in experience, I think BS rewards silos because it relies on feeds for cross pollination. But the feeds IME aren’t that great either. Lots of gatekeeping and honestly I cba flipping through 10 feeds every time I visit
@CatherineFlick I think part of the bigger problem too is that a lot of communities that used to intermingle on Twitter are now finding separate new homes.
There’s no longer a good place to interact with the people you most want to AND also have access to others when you want/need that exposure without trying to be active on numerous different apps.
@CatherineFlick bluesky is more lively and less stern than here, but it's also somewhere to go to get attention. I think I prefer somewhere where trying to get attention automatically means you don't get any, which is here. But it has its good points; here is more correct but perhaps less fun. I'm not sure what exactly I want.
@sil I get plenty of fun here, but maybe my version of that is different. There are more memes there perhaps? But I’m ok with not knowing all the memes in my old age 😂
@CatherineFlick@sil I don’t quite get the “attention” thing here. Mastodon and bluesky are both drops in the bucket compared to Instagram or YouTube, but mastodon remains an order of magnitude ahead of bsky in terms of user numbers. If you’re choosing between the two and want attention, wouldn’t this be the rational choice?
@CatherineFlick I keep forgetting bluesky exists, because it seems to be people recreating all the bits of twitter I still didn't like after blocking the worst of it
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