alt Hacker NewsI know that some folks dislike it, but Bluesky and atproto in particular have provided the perfect tools to achieve this. There are some people, largely those who migrated from Twitter, who mostly treat Bluesky like a all-liberal version of Twitter, which results in a predictably toxic experience, like bizarro-world Twitter. But the future of a less toxic social media is in there, if we want it. I've created my own feeds that allow topics I'm interested in and blacklist those I'm not -- I'm in complete control. For what it's worth, I've also had similarly pleasant experiences using Mastodon, although I don't have the same tools that I do on Bluesky.
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So far my experience is that unless you subscribe to the general narrative of the platform, the discover algorithm punishes you with directing the mob your way.
I had two of my Bluesky posts on AI being attacked by all kinds of random people which in turn has also lead to some of those folks sending me emails and dragging some of my lobster and hackernews comments into online discourse. A not particularly enjoyable experience.
I’m sure one can have that same experience elsewhere, but really it’s Bluesky where I experienced this on a new level personally.
I tried Bluesky and wanted to like it. My account got flagged as spam, still no idea why. Ironically it could be another way of loosing ones voice to an LLM :)
I enjoy Mastodon a lot. Ad-free, algo-free. I choose what goes in my feed, I do get exposed to external viewpoints by people boosts (aka re-tweets) and i follow hashtags (to get content from people I do not know). But it's extremely peaceful, spam and bots are rare and get flagged quickly. There's a good ecosystem of mobile apps. I can follow a few Bluesky people through a bridge between platforms and they can follow me too.
That's truly all I need.
Doesn’t Bluesky have a set of moderation rules that guarantee that it will turn into bizarro-world Twitter?
I personally dont feel like an ultra filtered social media which only shows me things I agree with is a good thing. Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and grow as people. To me, only seeing things you know you are already interested in is no better than another company curating it for me.