Bluesky Has Problems

The developers of Bluesky believe that they are developing a protocol. The users want it to be a Twitter substitute, with Twitter’s ease of use but no Nazis or other harassers. This is a problem.

The developers repeat that they are developing a protocol. But few of the users know what that means, so they continue to believe that Bluesky will be their Twitter replacement.

The protocol, apparently, is a way of setting up Bluesky to be part of a federated system, like Mastodon. But the developers believe it will be without Mastodon’s problems. And the users are not ready to take on the responsbilities that federation is likely to require.

At this point we come to a couple of other problems. Problem #2 is that the Bluesky team is bad at communicating and get irritated when people keep asking questions that they think they’ve answered with “We’re developing a protocol.” Problem #3 is that if the team has a plan beyond

• Develop protocol
• Federate
• Success!

they have not communicated it. Nor have they communicated what federation will mean beyond a very rosy vision that everyone will have a server that moderates content exactly the way they want it and a custom feed that will give them all the posts they want, and only the posts they want.

The team recently rolled out a number of custom feeds and a way for others to make more. I’ve said before that everyone has their own personal Twitter, and mine is following interesting people and their tweets as they tweet them. That’s it. That’s my custom feed. On Bluesky, it translates directly to the “Following” feed, as it does on Twitter. Bluesky also has a “What’s Hot” feed that I look at occasionally.

When they introduced custom feeds, they gave me an additional “Popular with Friends” feed, which is – I don’t know – the things my follows have been liking and reposting? But those are in the “Following” feed. Anyhow, there are around 50 choices of feed, most of which are liked by tens of users and which include several each of cute animals, posts from and about furries, and feeds in various languages.

When I joined Bluesky on April 17, the developers were talking about federation happening in the next few days. It hasn’t happened yet. It seems to have been delayed by the demands of users to keep Nazis off the platform and other moderation issues. What happens after federation? Nobody knows, but Morgan Sung suggests in this article that federation won’t solve moderation.

It’s a long article, mostly about harassment that Black users are running into, to which the Bluesky team have responded minimally. This is one way Problem #1, the mismatch between team and user expectations, raises its head.

The team issued guidance last week on that and some other issues. The blog, one of the team told me earlier, explains their plans. Not by my standards of explaining, but opinions differ. The latest guidance was mainly that they have set up places to complain so please stop appealing to the team via the timeline. People who ask for invite codes, in particular, will be muted by the team. Which brings us to Problem #4.

People are brought into Bluesky via the waiting list (something like 2 million people) and invite codes. Distribution of invite codes is arbitrary. Supposedly users get one invite code every two weeks. Many people have gotten zero invite codes. Others have gotten many invite codes and occasionally post asking for recommendations for people to be invited. A few people got a lot of codes early and seem to be spokespeople for the team.

This produces a hierarchy of users – those blessed with invite codes and the outsiders. It’s like high school.

The distribution of invite codes seems to have largely been to software people, which has produced a user population heavily weighted toward that demographic. The user base is slowly becoming more diverse, but one of the best features of Twitter, IMO, has been the variety of expert discussions. I can participate where I have appropriate knowledge, or I can watch and learn. Intelligent discussion of current events needs a wide variety of expertise – legal, scientific, military, national security, history, geography, trade, and many others.

Expertise has existed on Twitter in loose clusters, with specialists in the center and others with relevant knowledge out to completely different expertise clusters. That talk and cross-talk has been my primary interest on Twitter. Problem #5: It has been slow to develop on Bluesky. I think there are at least two reasons for this.

First, obviously, is that there are not enough people on Bluesky, and not the right people. The national security community, the one I am most familiar with, is still represented very thinly. Further, the overall population of Bluesky is around 100,000, whereas Twitter has over 300 million users. So a few thousand followers on Bluesky is a lot. The more users, the more are likely to be online and interested in a post.

Second is what is being called “discovery.” You might see a post, or you might see a response to that post, as your follows repost or comment. Twitter hit a sweet spot in discovery. Bluesky requires (I am told) 12 likes for a post to appear on “What’s Hot,” which means that unless you have followers who do a lot of liking or a lot of followers, most posts will fall flat. I have seen a number of experts asking why their posts get no response. It is also why what I see on “What’s Hot” is mostly things that my follows have already posted or reposted, or are cat photos or soft porn.

People show up on Bluesky with great excitement and then post a lot less. A lot of us are trying to use multiple platforms, with one more coming, so engagement is important. Positive feedback is the best way to keep people doing what you want them to do, and it’s been less for me on Bluesky than it is on Mastodon. Add that to the sense that I’m part of the uncool kids who don’t get invite codes, and yes, motivation goes down.

Things may get better as more people join the platform. Some of those blessed with invite codes have been kind enough to share them with me. But right now, it’s boring.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner