← Back to context

Comment by ndr

3 days ago

Who is using Bluesky in the US?

Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?

28 comments

ndr

Reply
chairmansteve  3 days ago

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.

madeofpalk  3 days ago

I've never received a x.com link from a friend. Maybe we run in different circles with different people.

Kye  3 days ago

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.

toyg  3 days ago

> 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.

  • csallen  3 days ago

    The fact that the left defined Joe Rogan as right-wing for not adhering to very specific far-left tenets (e.g. de-platforming personas non grata and cooperating with cancel culture) only served to push him and his listeners rightward, and thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    • djeastm  3 days ago

      >only served to push him and his listeners rightward

      Kind of takes the agency away from full-grown adults, doesn't it?

      How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?

      8 replies →

    • afavour  3 days ago

      “My views are everyone else’s fault” is such a prevalent and baffling claim these last few years. If you have a belief, own it.

  • itsoktocry  3 days ago

    I tried out Bluesky during the great migration about a year ago.

    It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine.

    • delecti  3 days ago

      I suspect our politics are just too different for my attempts to defend the culture itself to be relevant, but it is super easy to cultivate what you see on Bluesky.

      You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls").

      If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.

      2 replies →

  • Levitz  3 days ago

    >If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.

    I reckon there's more of a correlation between this type of statement and being a Bluesky user than being right-wing and using X.

    I mean X userbase is enormous compared to that of Bluesky, you can't be serious.

    • toyg  2 days ago

      It's also dropping like a stone, which is why they are resorting to these tricks to inflate one of the few metrics that can be observed from outside (how much traffic they send to other sites).

      Where I live, X has completely exited polite conversation.

digianarchist  3 days ago

Other platforms are over-policed and Twitter is under-policed.

There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.

jasonlotito  3 days ago

> 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.