My X never really degraded (I also spend a lot of time on Japanese-language X which is probably a different beast) but I have been spending time on Bluesky over the last year. For a while it was a fun network but fairly quiet. I could go an hour or so without any new posts. Over the last 3 weeks I've seen Bluesky become a lot more active and now it's feeling a lot like X where there's no way to stay on top of my feed. I'm really excited as I'm a firm believer that larger communities lead to more diverse views.

I also run my own Bluesky labeler and Firehose ingester so I've been following as event throughput has roughly doubled over the last 3-4 months.

Japanese language Twitter is indeed a very different beast. It's pretty much the social network over there, and most of Musk's changes that targeted or angered users were primarily targeted at English-language users, mostly in the US. So the Japanese users just kinda trucked on like nothing was happening.

The spammers and trolls will be there soon. Nothing popular is ignored for long.

Nice thing is that block works there.

The problem on x is that the spammers and trolls aren't moderated.

I'm genuinely excited to see if bluesky manages to moderate them.

I yet to find "utility" accounts on Bluesky. I use Twitter to follow news from games, game studios and publishers, news sites, bands, NASA etc. There is nothing like there yet and I don't care about random people (as I don't care about them on Twitter either)

I check time to time but basically it's 0/50

If you are looking for stuff from big publishers then yeah it's gonna be a bit slow/empty but there are a lot of small/indie devs on bluesky and it's awesome being able to interact with them directly without all the spam that usually came with posts on twitter.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Fortunately it appears that utility accounts are slowly popping up now that there's an audience.

For NASA, looks like someone has made an unofficial mirror account:

https://bsky.app/profile/nasa.extwitter.link

Also, some game companies do maintain a presence on bluesky:

https://bsky.app/profile/sega.jp

https://bsky.app/profile/panic.com

You will find a lot of games, studios and bands on Threads.

Since it leverages Instagram and has pretty fantastic photo features.

Yeah. Twitter/X after the Russian invasion quickly let me connect to serious professionals in US-Russia relations, war, etc. e.g. War on the Rocks and Mike Kofman, the Truth of the Matter by CSIS, etc.

Are there easy tools that allow you to post on multiple platforms from the same content, that also supports replies?

Yeah I've been missing these people too, but I just noticed them suddenly appearing on bluesky over the last 24 hours. Things are afoot.

I'm a web dev and follow a lot of companies and organizations in the web dev sphere and these all created accounts a week ago. Other sectors will probably also be jumping as lumps. When a sizable chunk moves, then the others follow.

For me, everything is settling.

Threads is a half Twitter, half Instagram hybrid strong in creative, travel, social etc type content. Bluesky is original Twitter with strengths in news, politics, science etc. These days not sure it will ever be possible to have one app that does it all.

Which leaves X as the new 4chan.

In terms of toxicity, X is way beyond 4chan at this point. But the style is very different. Algorithmic vs organic, retweets vs (You)s, anonymous vs semi-anonymous and much more. All the way to how replies are visually presented which is awful on Twitter and it's clones.

Honestly, I've had more positive interactions and learned more on 4chan than I ever have on Twitter. I wish the few tech people I care about who are still on there would just move (to clarify, move anywhere, not to 4chan obviously).

Twitter has always been one of the most toxic places on the Internet. It's why I have refused to use it, because I have better things to do with my time than watch terminally online people get into diatribes about their extreme left/right political views. I don't have any faith that any replacement will be better, considering that they are primarily populated by the people who are so extreme left that they couldn't abide the idea of new Twitter ownership.

Whoa, new 4chan is remarkably apt. It’s shit-posting for days. It feels degrading to use it at all.

Even worse... X as the new state affiliated/controlled 4chan. A truly nightmare scenario.

It's just getting a lot more attention everywhere, as evidenced by Google Trends.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...

There is an obvious need for Twitter-like platforms, but Twitter/X has become too right-wing for many users. The left needs a place to talk and vent about the election, and Twitter is no longer friendly to that. Therefore, Bluesky is taking off due to that event.

That's been my experience as well, in every sense. A sudden explosion of incoming people, many new options of interesting and salient people to follow, and the overall experience rapidly getting more engaging.

Yeah, I've had an account for quite a while now (from before registrations were open), but it was largely a ghost town. The last few days there is a lot more stuff happening in my feed. And so far free of all the drama, bots, etc.

Considering X is an app used by the world I don't see how there could be any real momentum. To begin with, the world is more conservative than the US.

The facts are that Threads has 275m MAU and has been #1 on the App Store almost continually since it launched. Bluesky is now #2 and rapidly growing. The momentum is real and significant.

And the world is sick of Elon Musk and US politics.

The facts are that the world is addicted to Elon Musk and US politics.

I don't think that's particularly true but even if it was, the site is overrun with crypto spam and porn bots that will drive people away. I know 3 people who have deactivated their account and switched to bluesky in the past week - and anecdotal evidence for many people on bluesky seems to suggest engagement levels are significantly higher. The network effects are really gaining traction as well.

I gave up on Twitter when I opened the app in public to find a porn video playing in the main feed, despite not following or interacting with any accounts of that nature previously. That was ~6 months ago and I haven't looked back.

Twitter is quite small as far as big social media platforms go (about 300 million, largest individual userbase by far US citizens [1]). Compared to Telegram with a billion users and Instagram, Facebook, TikTok/Douyin in the billions the constant talking about Twitter/Elon and so forth isn't that internationally relevant.

No offense but it's mostly Americans screaming at other Americans about how important America is. It's a little bit tiresome how much headspace that site and owner occupy these days on certain parts of the internet.

[1]https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/number-of-twitter-users-by...

If Telegram was used by a relevant country you might have a point.

I never really "got" Twitter.

I don't know why, but I always felt like the hype went over me head, and it was a bit boring.

Though I'm tempted to check out Bluesky, the AT protocol seems really interesting.

In its heyday, before the most recent acquisition, Twitter was really good for local info (ignoring celebrities, shitposting, and the like). Not just news but announcements, alerts, and other local stuff if you followed the right accounts.

Mastodon is cool, but it's hard to consistently find that local info. Bluesky seems like it has a chance of supplanting Twitter in this way, but it's not there yet. Some of the accounts I used to follow on Twitter are on Bluesky, but they don't post. If they started, I think they'd get tons of followers now.

That does sound useful.

I signed up for twitter once as it was an effective way to get customer support from my bank :-/

In general it seemed to be celebrities that I didn't care about and people posting shower thoughts.