Comment by nobleach
2 days ago
I really can't deal with BlueSky. I wanted to because I had a lot of good "starter packs" for NeoVim and OCaml development. Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites. The problem is, I start following people and it almost always turns into politics. I may even AGREE with the person's politics but I hate reading and talking about it. God forbid I ever disagree.
Funny thing though. I've heard the claims of "CSAM on Twitter" and now "CSAM on BlueSky". I've never had any of that ransomly show up. I do still have 2 or so random follows from clip-art female avatars with no tweets - per week. I've never quite figured out how that scam is supposed to work. I used to block 'em, now I ignore 'em.
I want to like Bluesky but have run into the same issue with politics as you.
Worse yet, people get so blinded that they lose the plot entirely... I asked someone about the accounting of a Palestinian fund raiser they were promoting.
They got very defensive so I looked into it, and it was a scam. I pointed this out to the poster to let them know, and they wrote a snide response which got their followers to brigade me.
What actually show up consistently wherever "CSAM on ___" claims are used against, from Twitter to actual porn sites, or WWW in general, is large amount of contents related to anime and/or East Asians(often above 25) on a rapid constant growth and/or already dominating the place. Only rarely it's about actual CSAM.
The anime thing can still be illegal if its depicting a minor, or what looks like a minor in a sexual way, in various jurisdictions. Honestly sounds like a nightmare to moderate.
My point is that "CSAM in platform" claims often refers to those contents(despite the fact that this tactic in practice results in special carve outs and tried-and-tested legitimacy and free additional popularity for those contents, with hilarity), not necessarily that those ought to be legal(though that kind of is my stance).
I don't know whether it's a founder effect of the users that fled there from X, or the mass-blocking features, but no site is as good at enforcing political orthodoxy as Bluesky. A near perfect echo chamber.
Oh I think Mastodon at least comes close.
I find Mastodon fairly chill and a fairly wide range of opinions, I think part of it is that Bluesky attracts most of the more extreme political people who might otherwise go to Mastodon. On Mastodon people are more likely to just block people who they really don't like and move on so there aren't really pile-ons and all that and different opinions co-exist.
You obviously get more of the people with more 'popular' political opinions in the Trending feed but that's not the default and you don't have to follow that if you can find enough good people or hashtags to follow.
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> Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites.
Fedi is a lot better if you want nerd stuff specifically, running instances attracts a lot of hackers who're geared toward it. The big instances are pretty much the same shlock you get on Twitter/Bluesky but there's a lot of cool people in the margins (tip: look for instances that aren't running Mastodon).
You just made me realize how much I miss IRC. Pre-911, one could go for months and months without hearing a single thing about politics. And this is with lots of folks from Berkley in the chats!! (again, not saying Berkley politics are a "problem" - just that I prefer to talk about tech)
Never had issues with bluesky, but i'm a lurker and I have a llm filtering (here on HN, X, bluesky, reddit etc) which removes political stuff and boosts stuff I likely will like.
From what I heard, bluesky (unsurprisingly) has the exact same toxicity problems as twitter.
There was I think this piece of writing in 2024 (just googled it, don't quote me on that) https://www.thefp.com/p/jesse-singal-bluesky-has-a-death-thr...
iirc there were newer instances too, but why bother reading on that, when you can just look at how the system is built.
Twitter and Twitter-ish systems are just fundamentally anti-human. The same can be said about most of social media, actually, but Twitter is high up on the worst offender list, and Bluesky just cloned it. Again.
I found this[0] to be an interesting perspective:
"Bluesky Isn't a Bubble. It's a Containment Dome.
Pray that Bluesky doesn't die entirely — we need it so the worst liberal posts are kept in a place where the broader public won't ever see them."
[0] https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...
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Yep, if there's a recommendation algorithm and a "this is my megaphone" style posting, it just inevitably becomes an echo chamber of narcissism.
Even Mastodon which has no algorithm trends towards the obnoxious when you start going into various corners.
As much as I hate Facebook now, the OG Facebook which was strictly a feed of "this is what my friends and family are posting" and nothing else... was ideal. Not public. Just private in an inner group.
the much maligned Google+ honestly had a good model too.
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FWIW, I've found it to be far less toxic as a lurker. Most people act sane and fairly nice.
Bluesky at least has really robust blocking features. Using them really reduces the toxicity that bubbles into your feed.
I think guys like Singal don't really like Bluesky because their engagement model just doesn't work as well there as it does on twitter. That faintly snarky, passive-aggressive, often concern-trollish, kind of rage-baiting for attention, both negative and positive, kind of tone.
I'm not sure why it doesn't seem to work as well, exactly. Maybe it's the block features. Maybe it's the feeds. Maybe its the user demographics that resulted from the self-selected twitter exodus.
I think it's a combination of all those factors - but keep in mind, one reason you see some of these people write polemics against Bluesky is because they just don't know how to get attention there.
Most users would probably rather block than respond to the bait - that practice got baked into the early bluesky culture. So the only ones left to take the bait are the unhinged, death-threatening, types.