I have spent the last day or two playing with Bluesky and I believe that it has potential, At it’s base it’s like Mastodon, but with less anarchic user base, and fewer trolls. This could be because I haven’t spent weeks using it yet.
Threads has a good community and good community tools but it’s part of the Facebook empire and within a few weeks adverts will appear and that will drastically feel the look and feel of the social network.
With the arrival of ads, we will have more noise and it will require more scrolling to get anything engaging. I don’t want to be on a social network that exists for ads. I want a social network that is self-sustaning, based on rational decisions.
I expected Flickr to implode a decade ago but it’s still around. I believe that the key to its success is that it’s a small social network by and for photographers, where people can share their photos, without noise, cult of personality and more. It has reasonable follower numbers so it’s cheaper, and lighter to run than social media giants.
As I write this I see that Bsky already has series A funding in progress, which to me is a warning sign not to depend on the site too deeply. “We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, co-creator of Kubernetes Joe Beda, and others.”. That’s 15 million with 13 million users at the time, and now 20+ million users.
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I agree with the idealism of Bluesky. I don’t trust that it will be able to keep to its ideals due to who its investors are and what they stand for, I believe Bluesky will compromise on its ideals.
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