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Comment by muglug | Hacker News Reader

Less active than Mastodon, I'd assume more active than Nostr.

But the interesting thing for me isn't activity — it's the people on there.

Of the cohort who had >100k followers on Twitter, I think more of them post regularly on Bluesky than post on Mastodon. Bluesky definitely has a more cohesive feel, especially because there's currently just one instance & mod team.

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I'm a donating supporter of the Mathstodon.xyz instance, but (sadly?) most of "math Twitter", at least the education-focused university faculty, ended up on BlueSky. I think there's a strong appeal for "a straight forward Twitter clone without Musk" for a lot of people.

Mastodon, and the Fediverse in general, make user interaction decisions on purpose to limit many of the issues common to social media. Think about: mob culture, addiction, and the like.

I wonder if BlueSky intends to follow on those. For example, hiding user actions counts (repeats, favourites, etc...) until the user acts on one.

Things like these may be strange for those accustumed to Twitter, but personally, is what makes me stick with smaller instances on the Fediverse.

My bet is regardless of any initial good intentions, since BlueSky is a company, market pressures will inevitably force them into dark patterns like we see on every other commercial social network (going back to the early days of the companies, Facebook, Twitter, and even Google looked really good early on until all were corrupted by profit motive). My belief is that the profit motive is necessarily at odds with free communication.

To me, the ActivityPub network (Mastodon and friends) is relatively unique in the social media space in having no direct commercial pressures (the protocol is developed by W3C) and therefore being inoculated against the causes for these dark patterns.

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