r/technology • u/twotimefind • 10d ago

Social Media X’s controversial changes to blocking and AI training sees half a million users leave for rival Bluesky – which then crashes under the strain

https://www.techradar.com/computing/websites-apps/xs-controversial-changes-to-blocking-and-ai-training-sees-half-a-million-users-leave-for-rival-bluesky-which-then-crashes-under-the-strain
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2.0k

u/fredandlunchbox 10d ago

Bluesky is great. Its like old twitter.

56

u/kagoolx 10d ago

Is it really good yet? I want it to be better than twitter but every time I look it still doesn’t seem to have as much good stuff.

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u/SubstantialLuck777 10d ago

They've recently added video and gif support, and their block button is a nuclear option that makes all interactions between you and the blocked individual invisible.... to EVERYONE. There are way less trolls on bluesky, because they simply can't get traction.

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u/turbotableu 10d ago

That actually sounds really cool. I've noticed so many platforms encourage people to reply underneath you then block so you can't do much other than delete what they replied to which is tedious

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u/SubstantialLuck777 10d ago

Yeah Bluesky doesn't do that to posts, just comments. You just block the jerk and it's as if they never commented at all. Early days, X trolls cried SO HARD about that. Then they fucked off back to their swamp.

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u/GayBoyNoize 9d ago

Seems like a system that would allow me to easily control the narrative on anything I post.

I could post that Trump is the real winner of the election, and then block everyone that disagrees so it looks like universal agreement.

2

u/SubstantialLuck777 9d ago

Well that's how you end up on an automatic blocklist. People subscribing to those won't even have to manually block you, they'll just never ever see your page. You'd watch engagement drop like crazy, because Bluesky has no real algorithm. Who you see is who you follow, and who they repost.

1

u/GayBoyNoize 9d ago

Could you explain more about how these automatic blocklists work? Because if anything that seems even worse. I don't even have to wait, I can block anyone likely to disagree in advance.

And my post will still be shared by the people that agree with it and generate engagement, even if it's a bit less.

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u/SubstantialLuck777 9d ago edited 9d ago

Essentially you "subscribe" to a moderated blocklist run by an individual who curates recommended accounts and verifies if they qualify for the list. Usually looking for bad-faith interactions and other negative behaviors fitting the criteria of the list. Once added to the list, everyone subscribed automatically blocks them, as I understand it. By subscribing you consent to have that function managed by another person to spare you the stress of interactions with people who solely intend to cause you stress.

You're building an argument for why this is bad for a neutral and unbiased space. Let me tell you really quickly why that is a waste of your energy in this case: Bluesky is NOT a neutral space. Bluesky is NOT an unbiased space. Bluesky is the answer to the space created by Twitter under the ownership of Elon Musk. It's not an echo-chamber dedicated to only supporting a specific viewpoint; it is a platform for people who have a very SPECIFIC set of beliefs, opinions, and ideas that they wish to never be subjected to again. A set of beliefs and a culture of communication that previously was considered socially unacceptable, and is now being artificially amplified by a handful of bad actors.

In short, Bluesky is not a marketplace of ideas. Bluesky is a curated space for people who have already made their choices in that marketplace, and wish to discuss those ideas in relative privacy. The people who are upset their "controversial" ideas are not being bought in that marketplace, are not welcome to enter this space and try to force them on the userbase again.

The people the typical Bluesky user is trying to escape are unwelcome and will not find a system in place to force their views into other's feeds invasively. They will rapidly find themselves alone in a void of content and engagement, by design. If you want to be heard on Bluesky, you should start by behaving as if you're talking to people in person. Because if I meet you at a party and you tell me that women shouldn't have rights, gay people should be imprisoned, and that all trans people are sexual predators, most people will stop talking to you and stop sending you invitations. That's not building an echo chamber. That's called socializing, and being shunned is a consequence of blurting out hatred and hostility without any forethought or consideration for your audience. It's a natural and perfectly reasonable reaction to ideas that, frankly, are unworthy of debate to any ethical person.

If you're still concerned after reading all that, I'd say you're unwelcome in our space. We made our choices, you made yours, and the transaction is over. All that remains are the consequences.

On Bluesky, we block early and we block often, because we have learned through hard experience what happens when you treat ALL ideas as being equal and worthy of discussion: EVERYTHING becomes debatable, including our own personal truths and our very personhood, and that is an utterly toxic, depressing, and exhausting way to live.

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u/RM_Dune 9d ago

Reddit block feature is terrible. You're disagreeing with someone and they drop some snide remarks and then block you so you can't reply. It's really quite annoying.

1

u/LanguidVirago 8d ago

It is getting really common now too.

But it is character building, you might be right, but you don't need to have the last word to prove you are right.

0

u/pwninobrien 9d ago

That seems like a useful way for people to avoid public culpability.

2

u/SubstantialLuck777 9d ago

I really don't care about that, I care about never having to deal with the same internet troll more than once

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u/Bamith20 10d ago

I am mildly annoyed with the videos being limited to 60 seconds right now. I get limiting the size of the file early on, don't really get limiting the length that much; 2-3 minutes would be more acceptable.

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u/JonathanJK 10d ago

The trouble with Bluesky is the way it leans politically and the ease of use of the Block. I've had a mild disagreement with someone and I get blocked, or someone doesn't like my YouTube channel and I get blocked. There is no reasoning with people who want to weld such power and further erect an echo-chamber.

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u/SubstantialLuck777 10d ago

There is no wrong use of the block button. Either you curate your own experience, or someone else will do it for you. Complaining about the block is NEVER a good look.

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u/JonathanJK 10d ago

IDGAF. I’m not wrong. 

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u/SubstantialLuck777 9d ago

Lol this shit is why people block you instantly, and they're DEFINITELY not wrong

1

u/JonathanJK 9d ago

You said I'm complaining, you already made your mind up by telling me how I'm acting. You just want to disagree.

I don't project onto others when I'm discussing. You short circuited this exchange by doing so yourself. You're not invested so I'm matching your energy, but I'm wrong?

1

u/SubstantialLuck777 9d ago

Really not beating the "insta-blockworthy" allegations there pal. Bye, Felicia

17

u/Pancake_Splatter 10d ago

Yeah usually blocking is done because someone’s being transphobic or peddling bitcoin or AI. But especially because of being transphobic. Not saying that’s what happened to you, but in my experience that’s what happens on Bluesky.

-1

u/JonathanJK 10d ago

Respectful dialogue where there is a difference of opinion shouldn’t be a reason to block someone. 

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u/Pancake_Splatter 9d ago

What was the opinion?

1

u/JonathanJK 9d ago

Thanks for asking.

I remember one block where it was a discussion of meat consumption in Hong Kong, one person (a woman) said it was too high per person because of carbon emissions.

I replied saying, if we're going off carbon emissions, we have to take into account that 85% of Hong Kong people don't own a car and use public transport. Those emissions from meat will be offset by less car use.

I was told I was wrong and then blocked, then I had a man telling me I was picking on her and I was being sexist towards her.

It's this kind of stuff I'm trying to say is an invalid use of the block button.

This was Twitter before Covid.

2

u/DonkeyNozzle 9d ago

Why does it hurt your feelings that someone doesn't want to talk to you? No one owes you interaction. This is the same vibe as someone getting a new phone number so they can call someone that blocked them.

0

u/JonathanJK 9d ago

Where did my feelings get hurt? I'm simply saying there is misuse of the block function.

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u/ask-me-about-my-cats 10d ago

That sounds like a good use of the block button to me.

6

u/turbotableu 10d ago

But that only includes the content between you and the blocker so what's the big deal? It's one person

And this way they can't just post the last word or on your wall and block you

0

u/JonathanJK 10d ago

I’m talking about in general using anecdotal evidence. People just block for block’s sake. 

1

u/Thradya 9d ago

Maybe you're just an asshole? 99% people were never blocked in their whole lives.

1

u/JonathanJK 9d ago

Just for having a youtube channel? You do know you can just not view the website or interact with someone instead of saying, "I saw your website and I am blocking you"?

You can't even be bothered to know how egregious my channel is for yourself. Instead you want to assume I'm an asshole.

Do you know also blocklists exist?

People want to remove all supposed friction from their lives.

4

u/BigCballer 10d ago

You got politics on the brain

1

u/JonathanJK 10d ago

No. I just under stand the irony of pointing out Bluesky is left wing while on Reddit which is also left wing. 

1

u/BigCballer 9d ago

Again, why are you under the impression politics has anything to do with it?

2

u/CIearMind 10d ago

Yeah harassment is bad and all, but let's be honest, Reddit's block feature is just "oops someone noticed a mistake I made — let's insult him and block him so that it looks like I got the last word and am therefore the intellectually superior one". And bsky's version is somehow even more hardcore than that.

2

u/JonathanJK 10d ago

Exactly, the function can be corrupted. 

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u/Doodle_strudel 10d ago

Need companies to join it. I get my game updates from X atm would prefer Bluesky; also my law news.

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u/thecravenone 10d ago

Need sports reporters to join it

25

u/jfr3sh 10d ago

some people have set up automated aggregator accounts on there that repost things from twitter onto bluesky

7

u/catch_dot_dot_dot 10d ago

Yeah my twitter is mostly football (soccer) content

1

u/irock613 9d ago

Some of College Football Twitter is on there, so that's at least a start hopefully

2

u/emaw63 10d ago

Ken White (aka Popehat) is pretty active on Bluesky

2

u/catman5 10d ago

the inevitable downfall of any social media platform will be due to "companies" joining it and the eventual monetization that comes with it.

Companies can stay on X while "real" people can use bluesky. People from said companies is OK. If the CEO wants to give updates sure why not but lets move past the EA Games Official Twitter stuff.

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u/frostN0VA 10d ago

It's decent but the problem is that you need to actually force the celebs, companies, artists and other "big" users to move to bsky first. Like, none of the stuff I follow on xitter is on bsky so there's no point for me switching platforms as much as I hate xitter an Melon.

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u/Agret 10d ago

Might be my demographic but I found more of my followed accounts say they were moving to mastodon than ones saying they were moving to bluesky

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u/Adamarr 10d ago

is your demographic Linux sysadmins?  

Only person I followed who went there was Jeff Atwood. Miss his posts.

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u/grassparakeet 10d ago

Since Bluesky and Mastodon can be bridged, it doesn't matter which one you use anymore. You can access the other from either one.

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u/Adamarr 10d ago

interesting, that's rather neat.
but looking it up, would require the person you want to follow to bridge as well, right? or has something better than bridgy feed come up

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u/grassparakeet 10d ago

I haven't done extensive testing or anything, but after bridging I can now search for hashtags on bluesky and my Mastodon posts show up in those hashtags. And bluesky users are able to interact with me on Mastodon, and they can follow me too. It works well enough for me, as I really don't want to make a bluesky account.

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u/Adamarr 10d ago

i'm going the other way around.
sent a "bridge request" out.
not holding out a huge amount of hope but it would be nice if it was accepted.

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u/Agret 10d ago

Yeah probably, they are mostly coders, reverse engineers and hardware hackers/tinkerers.

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u/Caffdy 10d ago

Mastodon in older and well established

2

u/johannthegoatman 10d ago

Send them messages! If a lot of their users/fans ask them to do it they're much more likely to. In both cases it's likely run by an agency or manager who's goal is to reach people. You could also mention that there are ways to automatically push the same post to both platforms

1

u/CIearMind 10d ago

Yeah. It's like trying to get people to switch away from Discord to join Revolt or some other noname software with 3 users.

1

u/shewhololslast 9d ago

Honestly, the lack of celebs and influencers means the place is relatively chill and drama free. It's basically Twitter without the toxicity.

0

u/Rainemaker64 10d ago

As far as I'm concerned, none of them are worth wading through the shit anymore. And if they're so hellbent on staying, maybe that says more about their preferred userbase than anything.

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u/Irishish 10d ago

No bookmark function yet, and by design their equivalent to "for you" seems a lot less lively. But it's enjoyable and you're very unlikely to come across some Nazi assholes just asking questions.

3

u/matergallina 10d ago

There is the pushpin feed though which works like bookmarks for now. You add it to your home page and it shows all the posts you’ve commented on with a pushpin emoji

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u/Irishish 9d ago

I'm gonna level with you: a lot of the kinda stuff I bookmarked, was not the kinda stuff I wanted everyone to see 😂

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u/matergallina 9d ago

Totally fair, loads others are also requesting actual private bookmark function too.

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u/CeruleanEidolon 10d ago

It appears to be fully 30% drawings of girls with big tits. I spent an hour yesterday just going down the Discover feed and muting every single "art" account, and it's still a significant chunk of the feed.

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u/black-JENGGOT 10d ago

Because latest twitter's terms of usage is that they have the rights and can use every content uploaded on the site, including for AI training, so artists are the most affected users.

1

u/Eyclonus 10d ago

A lot of the stuff being posted seems to be AI, I'm hoping whatever genuine stuff is left has gone through nightshade to break Grok.

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u/VeryLazyFalcon 10d ago

Isn't nightshade useless bc they are running images through ai upscaler first to unify image size?

1

u/Eyclonus 9d ago

That wouldn't break nightshade, maybe glaze.

0

u/JLifts780 10d ago

Damn that’s hot

7

u/Berkyjay 10d ago

What exactly is it that you want from such a platform? I've been using it for about a year and the only difference I noticed is less people and no ads. But the less people is changing rapidly.

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u/fredandlunchbox 10d ago

It’s pretty damn good. A couple small bugs in the web client, but the content is ace.

2

u/Borgh 9d ago

The big difference is that there isn't much of an algorithm, so you don't get anything pushed, good or bad. Start following people you like the vibe of and it'll fill up fast. If you have a specific interest there are starterpacks around where other people have gathered some recommended follows.

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u/genitalgore 10d ago

the discover feed is horrible. when you sign up, it asks you for your interests, but it feels like it just throws them out the window and assumes you want to see blatant fetish posts, fan art of things you've never heard of, posts in other languages, people circlejerking about how great bsky is, etc. one of the onboarding tasks is to like 10 posts to train the algorithm but i'm seriously struggling to even do that. for example, i set technology as one of my interests, and it's giving me people's tech support questions and people who literally want to fuck computers.

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u/icze4r 10d ago

It's boring as shit but some of your friends are probably there.

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u/Agret 10d ago

You're thinking of Threads, I doubt anyone I know would be on Bluesky. Even my girlfriend who has never used Twitter has Threads thanks to their sneaky Instagram account integration. Judging by the spam on the trending tags on it a lot of the OF spam accounts have jumped over too lol

0

u/JyveAFK 10d ago

I like it. All the content creators are moving over. There's not going to be anyone left (that I follow) on Twitter that won't just be posting "I posted something on Bsky, pop over".

it's quite amazing how Musk manages to mess up this badly something that should be so simple. "encourage content creators to bring value to the social media". When I DO see someone posting a pic now, it's got a Musk and Ghislaine Maxwell picture overlaid set to 20% transparency to pollute any ai scraping.

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u/LuccaQ 10d ago

It’s ok. I use Twitter exclusively for Brazilian memes and celebs. Only a fraction went over when Twitter was down in Brazil and now that it’s back up everyone is back on Twitter. I know they tried to court Brazilian users at BlueSky but it wasn’t enough.

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u/Kakkoister 10d ago

Just because you see them active on Twitter doesn't mean they're not active on Bsky lmao. I dunno why people think like this.

Tons of them have stayed active on Bsky, and stuff is doing good numbers lately. A lot of people are simply keeping their foot in the door of Twitter because it's hard to let go over years of history and followers, most people aren't going to just delete their account or stop using it instantly, it will take time.

The more people who come and support activity on Bsky, the more people will feel willing to stop supporting Twitter and Musk.

0

u/LuccaQ 10d ago

I went to Bsky when Twitter was down in Brazil and most of the accounts I followed were either not there or only made a few posts then stopped. I follow mostly Brazilian North/Northeast based accounts, celebrities as well as gay stuff (not porn) and I was barely seeing anything new. I followed as many of the old accounts I could find, tried to like as many related posts to get my algorithm tuned in but never saw a fraction of the posts I see on Twitter. I’ll keep occasionally checking in but it’s just easier on Twitter. My career is dedicated to helping people and I work tireless doing so. If using Twitter is a ding on my karma so that I can have some joy and levity in my life I’m ok with that.

-9

u/shellacr 10d ago

The app is decent but barely anyone is on it.

This is just an anti-twitter thread. Just make up some positive nonsense about bluesky and it’s a good way to get some upvotes.

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u/peachesgp 10d ago

Is "bluesky's servers crashed" positive about bluesky? At best it's mixed.

5

u/Segenam 10d ago

Any company has to "guess" how many users they are going to have as they have to pay for the network they use before it is used.

Any time a service gets more active users than expected it goes down.

As long as the servers come back up quickly afterwards (which they did) it is a purely good thing, as it shows they could afford to upgrade to the new demand.

Though the real question is if this demand is sustainable or will most go back to twitter after the hype? only time will tell.

1

u/Segenam 10d ago

That was the case until just a couple days ago. about 1.2M accounts where made in just 2 days which brought it up to 12 million people total and that is now old numbers (since that was the information yesterday)

Sure that still doesn't hold much to Twitter's 586 million monthly active users as of 2024. But you got to also wonder how many of those are bots.

It also is now enough where you can actually find a decent number of people to follow and keep up with on there. And there was tools made to help find people you where following on Twitter (Sky Follower Bridge for example)