The difference is your audience. Are you talking to people you know or are you talking to 'the world'. If I'm talking to a bunch of my friends in the pub, I don't consider that "self-promotion". If I'm stood on the street corner saying exactly the same kind of things, it would be. In fact, that means I think that posting a comment on Hacker News is more self-promotion than posting a comment on Bluesky. Which I do.

If you want to talk to people you know you have apps like Whatsapp. Bluesky is to talk to the world one way or another and so is the same as Twitter ultimately even if for the time being you may be able to filter what you see more.

I mean, just now I went to Bluesky's web homepage and what I saw is "discover" pointing me to "influencers"...