Ask Lemmy

OP If you want the best of both worlds try WAFRN. It's both ATProto (bluesky) and activitypub (mastodon, etc) so you can engage with both communities. It also has some pretty robust blocking features for removing content you don't want to see.

We need to learn from past mistakes.

When Jeff Bezos buys bluesky in 2035 what?

It's fine but discovery still sucks and genrally it's very low effort. I'd recommend spending the first few hours finding the right profiles to follow as the general post quality is very low but there are gems worth finding.

If you're signing up for ATproto, I'd avoid Bsky and go for Blacksky instead. Although on Blacksky, the two public PDSes you can pick are cryptoanarchy.network and myatproto.social.

Also, Bsky has been trying to push ID lately while Blacksky isn't yet, but there's the chance that Bsky corporate could start to get hostile against Blacksky and other third parties and start to block them at some point.

If you want microblogging social media just use mastodon (or one of it's forks). Even if Bluesky is decent now, it's owned by venture capital, so it's only a matter of time before it enshittifies.

There's a few problems with Bluesky if you're looking for a platform that won't eventually turn to shit.

1. The platform is not meaningfully decentralized. With Bluesky directing its future, they have the power to do whatever they want with it, including attempting to monetize and clamp down on access.
2. Because of point 1 above, Bluesky is able to easily censor users.
3. To fix points 1 & 2 above you have to run the full stack: a PDS (~$5/month), relay (~$30/month), and AppView (~$300/month), which is prohibitively expensive for most people.

Hosting your own mastodon instance, which cannot be easily blanket-censored costs ~$5 bucks a month.

If a system is the outcome it produces, Mastodon is a platform for the people, Bluesky a platform for large orgs.

It’s not quite as unhinged as Twitter, but it’s still corporate social media run by some very questionable people. It also had a huge bot problem; when I deleted my account it had ~300 bot followers (and like 10 real ones). That was a bit over a year ago, so it might’ve improved by now, but I don’t have high hopes

The only way anyone saw any post was for me to hijack another person's feed. Otherwise, no engagement on anything

Bluesky has a lot of libs, which is certainly better then twitter these days, tho annoying in its own way sometimes (most recently: platner glazing up til he finally dropped.) more robust blocking then twitter, and lets you subscribe to lists of shitters to block. I have had issues with bots but they've been fairly easy to spot, and largely resolved when I subscribed to a list that simply blocks everyone who follows 10k+ people.

If you want to interact with normal people, it’s the least-bad game in town. You might even find some established journalists, musicians, authors and such.

I use it regularly and enjoy it, especially in the food, comedy, gaming, and programming communities. If you give it a go I highly recommend trying the “For You” feed. You pin it to your list of feeds, and it produces such shockingly relevant content. It definitely has a mixture of folks on it though, despite that people claim it’s one group on one platform and another group on Bsky.

I actually find the mixture of takes to not be all that different from Lemmy, just less pro-Chinese posts, and maybe even more anti-AI stances than I’ve seen around here.

If you want to hide from politics though, “For You” can definitely be a bit of a bubble. Being a left or right swipe away from escaping your bubble is a nice compromise imo.

I'd say if you're looking for a microblogging site, the best experience is following Bluesky accounts via bridgy from mastodon or piefed or misskey or something. Most accounts don't bridge, so you mostly avoid getting dragged into things, but the big accounts do so you can mostly follow what's going on.

Why would you use another privately owned platform that's likely to enshittify?

I like BlueSky, and it's nowhere near as unhinged as Twitter.

As with how Twitter used to be, it's just a question of curatung your feed. If someone is an asshole you block them and move on.

The key difference is that you can choose to have a feed of only those you follow, and that's what you actually get, not algorithm-driven nonsense.

I left Twitter shortly after Elon bought it so I can't offer a comparison.

About the only thing I looked at on Bluesky was a feed from my home town. BS is great for local news and events. The only thing better is my collection of rss feeds. I closed my account before they started with the identity verification bs. Bluesky is largely vibe-coded if that is an issue for you.

Don’t know got ban from there saying that their algorithm push AI art as art and that AI art is not protected by author’s rights so you could copy-paste everything on some account.