Comment by boringg
3 days ago
X has a lock on live information that no one else has figured out yet not from a technical perspective but from an adoption perspective.
3 days ago
X has a lock on live information that no one else has figured out yet not from a technical perspective but from an adoption perspective.
Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads. Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances located there.
Who is using Bluesky in the US?
Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
I am.... For what it's worth.
There are a few old FinTwit people who have migrated over. Mark Dow, IvanTheK. It works for me.
And Mastodon works too, once I had customised my feed. There are a lot of makers on it, and Cory Doctorow. I did have to filter out the "activists", but twitter has the same activist problem.
Believe me, you can live without Twitter.
I've never received a x.com link from a friend. Maybe we run in different circles with different people.
Most embeds I see on Discord are Bluesky. Bluesky seems to have taken over for social media links on sports subreddits. It saw a huge spike during the last game of the World Series.
https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/
Those might not matter to you, but neither did the early cohorts that drove growth on early Twitter matter to most people. Enough large mainstream cohorts set up a base there after the election spike that it's still growing toward the peak after dropping to a little less than half.
> Who is using Bluesky in the US?
A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness).
> Is it just my friends?
If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.
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Other platforms are over-policed and Twitter is under-policed.
There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.
I consider myself left-wing, but bluesky is pretty casually toxic in a way that turns me off.
1 reply →
> Who is using Bluesky in the US?
Everyone I know. I routinely see only bluesky links. Yes, if X/Grok is promoting Nazi content, then yeah, I'll hear about it. But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky.
> Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
I think it's safe to say that if people are sending links to a certain site, they are using that site. But assuming that everyone is using that same site is silly. It doesn't take any amount of effort to realize that other people are using other sites.
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bluesky is mostly populated by fringe elements and that's putting it nicely
My government has been posting a lot of information (weather alerts, road works, etc.) on their own, dedicated Mastodon instance. They don't really advertise it, but it's good they have a platform to publish live information to in case the Americans continue to get weirder.
Do you have any examples of this? I'd love to point this out to my local government.
https://social.overheid.nl/directory has a list of government services, municipalities, and other stuff.
https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo is for traffic conditions
https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi is the royal national weather service
Some services have shut down their Mastodon presence because their social media team found too little interaction and they don't want to use simple forward bots that nobody responds to, unfortunately.
But X doesn't have a lock on live information.
What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda
If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you
Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back)
X will tell you to invest in <Scam>
X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire.
People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate.
X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron.
It certainly doesn't.
About 1/3 of the people in the USA use Twitter. Which means 2/3rds of us do not. Reddit's audience is larger, at about 1/2 of Americans. Mainstream media's is 2/3rds. And the true information flow happens when people talk IRL after consuming some or all of the above.
So while yes, Twitter has a significant audience, they are not holding a monopoly on live information in any form.
(And this isn't even getting into whether or not people trust each of these information platforms. People often consume media but don't trust what they hear. Which is probably a good thing.)
It's network effect, same as Facebook