Just to say the obvious: the new CEO is a VC partner and former CEO of Automattic. That seems very bad, no matter how "committed" they are to the vision of Bluesky.
Just to say the obvious: the new CEO is a VC partner and former CEO of Automattic. That seems very bad, no matter how "committed" they are to the vision of Bluesky.
Ultimately the goal "build a nice community where people can enjoy social interactions" is fully incompatible with "build the next Everything For Everyone Social Website like twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/etc so that we can get 5 billion users and start pushing ads at people". Unfortunately once you take VC funding, you no longer have the option of doing the former.
From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine, but there's no investor who would take a look at the site's user statistics[0] and say "oh yeah things are going great." There needs to be drastic changes if investors hope to have any return on investment.
[0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
Another problem is that Twitter's demise left people who liked the format disenchanted and suspicious (and rightly so), and because of that, trying to recreate Twitter is bound to fail, at least until some more time passes.
>Twitter's demise
I just checked https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/6009 and X (formerly twitter) is the #1 news app followed by substack, CrimeRadar Dispatch Audio, and coming in at 4th place is reddit.
So if twitter's dead, what does that make reddit, 3 spots behind it? Well, not dead, obviously. Pretending that twitter is gone or dead is just not rational behavior.
For whatever faults the old Twitter had pre-Musk, it did establish a certain critical mass for a certain type of short form threaded discussion which seems to be largely dead at this point.
And it should well stay dead. Short form social media is just too good a fit for outrage farming.
Jack seemed interested in the protocol side of the house and making a good product that was in spirit of the internet, it also had a mix of people you might know IRL (with reasonable privacy defaults) and official sources/public figures. I don't think he was much interested in the censorship, it feels they got run over by a bunch of activist types during covid (who decided it was de rigeur to censor real doctors for perceived 'misinformation'). Jack started work on Bluesky and now is involved in Nostr
Speaking personally, supposedly Twitter now (X) still has a bunch of censorship and I don't especially like Musk (but what he did was valuable, showing Jay Bhattacharya he'd be put on a trending blacklist) and the site is... well, I should be able to follow threads without having an account but they crippled it so much. It reminds me of Instagram, "log in to see any PUBLIC page"
One of Twitter's strengths was that it was a constructive community where near services & informational/radiative bots chilled. It was a connective fabric, it made information available.
That's all been gone. The algorithm fav'ing paid blue check users massively made things worse from there.
Bluesky attempts to be better on all fronts here. Interesting apps/services are welcome, permissionless. There is no top down pro-facsism pro-racism pro-MAGA finger-on-the-dial algo-shaping.
Sure there's some who will just be burned out & not interested. But there's so many interesting structural safeguards & such a openness to play & creativity & tuning... I really encourage folks to give it a time. I would definitely hope that "bound to fail" is perhaps not a cast die, that, we tried something great once, it's gone, never again, is not how this works.
I remember being in 20 years old, at the start of my career, and complete broke. I thought Twitter was just a toy website, until one day I radically changed my mind.
I was a customer of a bank that treated me with nothing but contempt. Whenever I called the bank because of a problem, I would stay on the line forever to eventually talk to an unbothered representative. One day, instead of calling, I complained on twitter and tagged the bank. Half an hour later the bank apologised and fixed my problem.
> There is no top down pro-facsism pro-racism pro-MAGA finger-on-the-dial algo-shaping.
Yes, but there isn’t on X either, that’s a conspiracy you’ve made up because you dislike Elon Musk. The Algo simply picks the top n items you are most likely to interact with.
Elon Musk is all of those things personally (see: that heil-handing incident), and it's public knowledge that he made the Twitter engineering team amplify his own posts.[1]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...
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Twitter's main problem wasn't the network, but fElon Musk running amok.
Of course, but the damage was done.
> From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine
As long as you have the bluesky approved opinions you’re fine but if you suggest something that is normal and mainstream like not wanting illegal immigration, you will immediately receive death threats.
That user number is not reproducible last time I tried (~8 months ago). I was looking at the code the other day and saw what I believe is one of the reasons, but I still couldn't find several million accounts (>10%), which is pretty hard to lose. (8+ bsky run pds equivalents)
This also does not account for (1) people with multiple accounts (labellers, feeds, bots, intent) or actual activity (significant % are likely churned, didn't delete)
Even if the stats are off by a factor of 10 it wouldn't matter. You could remove the numbers from the user axis entirely and it would paint the same story: there were massive user influxes after the 2024 US election and the inauguration in January, but user retention has been on a steep decline for the year+ since.
Again, this is not a reflection of anything bad about Bluesky as a user. IMO a smaller and more focused is a good thing for the actual community, hence why I read/post on HN and not Reddit or Twitter. However as an investor there's basically no way to interpret those statistics as anything but bad.
Strong agreement, though I would say it looks to have reached a stable level for now. I've found several subcommunities that I can get good info from. I'm curious how the '26 election cycle will affect things, already seeing increase political discourse.
>From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine
From a content perspective nothing important is permitted to be discussed there. It's just another hivemind with the exact same opinions as reddit and HN. Completely pointless and nothing more than the output of a temper tantrum over not getting to be the censors in charge and the whole world knows it.
He's only meant to be filling in temporarily per the Wired article, but we'll see.
Fair enough, I've never been involved in a CEO recruitment, I can't imagine the candidate pool tends to include people like the previous CEO of Bluesky
It's not that unusual to have an interim CEO hold the reins (read: sign anything that needs the CEO's signature) while a permanent one is found.
That's not what the comment you're responding to is about.
Transitioning to an interim CEO is never a good look. Should have waited until conclusion of the executive search.
Apologies, I'm probably under a rock, but why is that bad? I see they're behind WordPress but am not sure what the 1:1 is. The WP Engine stuff?
There was some WP drama between Automattic and the WP community a while back.
Also the whole point of Bluesky is that they aren't supposed to be a big evil silicon valley tech company. But now you have a silicon-valley VC running the thing.
Matt M. was behind the drama from WordPress' side though. It looks like Toni Schneider left in 2014.
Toni was in fact the adult supervision brought in by Automattic’s board when the company was young and Matt was inexperienced.
And apparently adult supervision was needed.
And still needed...
They'd already taken VC money hadn't they? It's got to be said though that tech startups are getting very formulaic. Monster of the week vibes.
"Some drama"...yeah, the way there was drama between Germany and the Soviet Union back in 1941.
Automattic's Matt Mullenweg is downright insane. Just google their war with WP Engine and by extension the entire WordPress community.
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The vision of Bluesky isnt compatible with it existing in a capitalistic society.
To be honest, I was never entirely on board with Jay's almost exclusively cryptocurrency background. I think she's done an acceptable job as CEO, but I have also felt that leadership at Bluesky was never good enough to see legitimate success.
Today, Bluesky remains largely undermoderated and they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan. Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter.
The only technical saving grace is the broad control you can take over the algorithm to avoid the content you don't want to see, but Bluesky is generally covered with more calls for violence than their nascent content team could ever actually deal with.
And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub.
But I digress, the new CEO pretty much hammers that final nail in the coffin for me. I have zero belief in Bluesky to be anything but another awful corporate corner of the web that I should avoid.
> Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter.
These things are very valuable, and if Bluesky can't succeed doing them, I hope someone else can.
Why is that bad?
thats not a good sign