I definitely have my concerns over the decreasing DAUs on the platform and the crabby, toxic community that has come to really define Bluesky these days but I don't think the tech is the problem. For folks who keep pointing at Mastodon, remember that ActivityPub's predecessor OStatus originates from 2012 and Mastodon itself was kicked off in 2016. Mastodon is 9 years old at this point. Bluesky is only a few years old.
In AP land, for better or for worse microblogging is dominated by the ad-hoc set of standards that Mastodon pioneered, and too much of the community just treats AP as "HTTP+REST JSON APIs for social" and ignores the semantic components that AP can use to interoperate.
Yeah. I’m not a big short form social media person, so a world with or without Bluesky (or Twitter) changes little. Bluesky has good people and communities within it, but a lot of the people on it are just a mirror reflection of the American Right. Devoid of critical thinking, they follow whatever the left cause of the day is.
While that’s much preferable to Twitter in 2025 (and the right)… it’s not encouraging as for the future of, frankly everything.
Aheming about "the right" aside... there exists people across the political spectrum that think the way they do because of a variety of reasons. Some because they read the literature and arrived at the conclusion, some because that is the economically or socially advantage position to be in, and some because that is just their political position tautologically.
I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity (granted I would not "ban" it) and some level of limited posting ... or something like that.
It's a pipe dream I know, but on the surface social media could be really cool.
There is, it's almost every successful advertisement-driven social media site. Youtube, reddit, facebook, etc. have all adapted to remove negative and controversial comments and leave positive/advertiser-friendly comments.
Since Youtube made that change I found its comments much, much more pleasant. Meta made an early decision with Threads to deprioritize political content which they only recently went back on (now it's an opt-out slider I think) which did do a decent job of keeping the network lighter than Twitter but also made the network a bit less intellectual than Twitter or Bluesky.
When you introduce such a high level of moderation and ranking what you get are a load of reddit style "funny guys" that are desperately trying to be noticed.
I prefer random comments without ranking, because it gives you a more truthful view of public sentiment. The force that aggressively filters comments is the same force that takes away the dislike button. It is all about controlling public opinion. Everything is good all of the time, and everyone is in a controlled demographic where they are insulated from new ideas that might make them difficult to advertise to.
> I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity
Yeah, it's called the real world. We have millions if not billions of years of experience in dealing with in-person differences, tentative contacts with members of neighbouring tribes and smoothing out conflicts. One will find the risk of getting smacked over the face for being an absolute idiot to be a very effective motivator to remain on our best behaviour with strangers.
On the internet these days, you can only choose between an echo chamber, or all-out culture war.
Spot on. I've long said that internet discourse will not improve until the implementation of a protocol to slap someone remotely.
If that were implemented, it would be used before any reply is even read.
Doubtful that it would be an improvement.
I think the core Bluesky team has been discussing ways to limit toxicity so I definitely think this is on their radar. Substack also leans into the idea that their platform manages social media toxicity better than other platforms, at least in their marketing copy. I think in 2025+ toxicity is a major dimension to evaluate social platforms on.
Substack is biased towards long form, and long form is inherently antifragile against toxicity. Although bad actors with LLMs could in theory change this.
I probably read more viewpoints I disagree with on Substack than anywhere else.
This is the culture we have tried to foster over at Discuit (small open source feed-style social media site).
Granted, we had a huge Imgur user migration, so that's the current flavor of the content, but the OG userbase was aiming for a culture that is perfectly defined by "thoughtful positivity."