I am fast to follow but also fast to unfollow if a person turns out to be a dud. An example of a dud is a person who is a cybersecurity expert but almost all their posts were about their travel: which hotels treated them well, complaints about flights, etc.
Bluesky also has a notion of lists, which folks seem to use. For example someone curates a list of people active in local politics and it’s a quick way for me to plug into what local activists and politicians are talking about. Again, I found it via one person I found interesting.
There is no point in creating an account there, even the Elon Haters have gone back, they keep the BSky account as a backup.
Sad, but if you want to feel the global pulse (however weak) X/Twitter is still the place.
Also X/Twitter is an insane name.
My Mastodon timeline full of interesting people says otherwise. I think you're overgeneralising some experience.
It’s still an entertaining place to find memes etc, but any use as real signal for public sentiment is long gone.
Having control over your timeline/algorithm, and the absence of engagement bait, makes it worthwhile for me to be on such a platform for the first time.
Telling Bluesky that I'm not interested in "this type of content" didn't help remove the problem. Blocking/Reporting the accounts is futile, as they are so numerous. Moderation lists for LGBT/furry content seem to be nonexistent or unlisted from public modlist sites (maybe they are considered to be "homophobic"?)
Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
My discover feed is pretty much all Scottish politics and tech.
These are non-problems for people who don’t allow them to be
The default method of operation on Bluesky is that you follow people you are interested in, and only the people you follow show up in your feed.
Feigning misunderstanding is a weird look.
I have no idea what the originator of this thread was doing to end up in their situation. I've seen nothing like it on bluesky.
Maybe it's obvious to you and others why it happened, but it's not to all of us, and down voting people for asking this question doesn't make is any clearer.
Other people have pointed out that the "Discover" feed with a fresh account may show material that the OP finds unappealing and that people have failed to report as untagged NSFW content.
I appealed but my appeal has seemingly gone into a black hole somewhere.
Can't really see a future for Bluesky outside of the niche communities that are already established there.
I'm not a Bluesky user. Twitter has exactly the same problem. I've got the NSFW setting turned off. And I've reported a lot of accounts posting unflagged NSFW content, mostly videos. And every time I get this slop reply email from them after a few minutes:
Thanks for reporting <account_name> and for using your voice to make X better for everyone. After review, we want to let you know <account_name> hasn't broken our sensitive media rule.
We allow sensitive content — like consensually produced adult content, graphic imagery and violence — in posts as long as it doesn't break our sensitive media policy.
I suspect they let these accounts slide because they value the user (or bot) engagement these accounts generate over safety/moderation.
But on Bluesky, I'm new, and I want to get a feel for what's out there, so the Discover feature has been interesting for that purpose. But using it will quickly lead to the types of content that I mentioned, and I don't think users should have to tolerate this until they find interesting accounts to follow and move on to more controlled feeds.
With that said, from the limited experience I've had with Twitter/X's algorithmic feeds, they haven't been that explicit. But that's my anecdote.
But of course this is a slow way to grow my network. But I like the slow linearity of the timeline this way.
It's a shame you have to push through people making some sexual fetish the centerpiece of their online identity. That speaks volumes for the lack of maturity for the people behaving this way.
Granted the scientists heading over to BlueSky are predominantly doing so for ideological reasons, not for "effectiveness." Sean Carroll, for example, both an excellent scientist and perhaps the best science communicator out there, has declared for BlueSky, but it's largely because of his political views. Sean is a committed Democrat and his ideological in-group has declared for BlueSky.
Not content to waste an opportunity, that in-group is spinning this sort of thing as "Science (TM)" is moving to BlueSky. But it's really just moving to a comfortable echo chamber.
Would be nice if others would report them too, because there are kids on BlueSky and they don't need to see their uncles/aunts or neighbors sticking their butt into a camera.
I'm not into comics or manga, but surely they're art?
And I mean this quite aside from the annoyance of seeing them when you don't want to. I'm not saying you should have to see them. It just doesn't seem right to imply that you shouldn't have to see them because they're not art.
Colloquially when people say Art they mean what they see in a museum, not what they can buy in the corner store. When I subscribe to a generic Art category I want to see artists showing techniques, cool paintings, breakdowns of how marble was carved, and most certainly not catgirl uwu. I might be interested in a post about how comics are made (high effort, interesting content), but I am not interested in a picture from issue #346 (low effort fandom attraction).
I think the root issue is that a generic category is inherently not opinionated.
If there's a "fine art" category, that would probably be more in line with what you're looking for.
But not many artists these days work in marble or do museum-style paintings because there's not much of a market for it and they have to eat. So working artists are not likely to generate that sort of content in large numbers.
Is twitter SFW? I constantly hear about "mechahitler" and all sorts of terrible bigotry, language, and dog whistles. I may be ignorant because I refuse to even go on there.
If it's not discussed on twitter, there's a good chance that topic is suppressed.
The fact that LLMs become what is projected on them, in this case from outrage over a leftist saying how glad she was that white children died in a flood, was twisted to fit a narrative by the media. It was not suppressed. That woman did get her account nuked, but that was because of her own violations of the ToS.
They said:
> I do not have an account on twitter but I’m sure
I'd rate twitter about as safe-for-work as 4chan.
my feed is made up of rust stuff, databases, system designs, tech meetups, a few founders, OSS stuff, and some companies. even the other day, i came across a post from a dev at planetscale, ben dickens, who said he's going to livestream at a scheduled time to talk about some of the database concepts he recently read in the book DDIA. i watched it, and it was fantastic.
bottom line, i would say what everyone has to say about X, based on their personal experience, are all completely correct, because it becomes (or can become) the environment you want it to be.
Mechahitler thing was a brief controversy that was turned off a while ago and the people I follow aren't getting spammed dumb questions to grok (although I find grok to be very good these days).
The attention seeking right wing accounts are annoyingly prevalent but it's entirely possibly to not see their content. Just like on old twitter which was full of radical politics. Curate your follow list.
Having a sexually provocative furry show up is not protected by the first amendment, since it appeals to prurient interest, someone passing by could argue they feel sexually harassed or find it hostile and have a much better chance at causing problems for your employer.
Maybe I've worked for some weird employers but if I was caught on twitter posting Nazi salutes I would expect raised eye-brows, but for the stated reasons, if I was caught with a furry picture on display where someone else could see it I'd expect to be immediately terminated.
Let me get this straight: you would get fired immediately for a picture that depicts a sub-culture of people that is often sexually deviant (but would include no nudity or anything in said picture), but it would be perfectly acceptable to promote a hate/terrorism group whose main purpose is to exterminate large parts of the Earth's population?
It is much easier to win a lawsuit on something appealing to prurient interest since the supreme court says it is not protected.
Most people don't actually care if the people involved in making their products are murderous psychopaths, as long as you aren't putting Nazi symbols in their product or something. That's why what are essentially CCP owned chinese manufacturers run by a party that tank-rolls over people wanting basic civil rights is seen as no-fucking-problem, no one gives a shit and their sales are not meaningfully impacted.
The only reason American employers care is if they're going to get sued, unless they are selling to rich people in San Francisco or something who can afford to pay more to buy something for moral reasons.
"Lotta straight guys like watching their buddies fuck. I know I do."[0][1]
More seriously, on at least one occasion, a co-worker was showing a group of co-workers photos of their vacation at a swingers retreat. Let's just say nothing was left to the imagination. I'd add that this was an employee at the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 50 company.
[0] https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/repo-man/quote_37738.htm...
[1] https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/50d10668-35f3-40bd-8fd1-c8c1aa6...
Edit: Added detail about NSFW content at work.
Have you considered that it might not be worth it using social media at all?
That said: furries are the internet’s coal mine canary. They’re one of the more visually prominent marginalized internet communities, and one of the first to get deplatformed when capital steps in. If you’re on a platform where furries are thriving, you’re probably in a safe space. Cf. the history of Tumblr, Twitter, Blogger, etc.
What... are you doing with the app exactly??? Do you not curate a list of accounts you follow?
To counter your anecdote: I've literally never seen anything like what you describe. I follow the people I'm interested in who post things I find of interest. I've occasionally (only occasionally) clicked on the "discover" tab, but it also does not show the sorts of things you described.
"Yeah, those academics are all in a bubble together on bsky". Yes, that sounds "professionally useful", to be in a bubble with the people who work in the same field.
The paper failed both to identify the overall number of scientists using X or the cases where multiple platforms are used (most common scenario). Therefore the paper only seems biased on its best scenario or downright propaganda at its worst.
NOSTR and Mastodon should never be left out of any serious research.
But its published by Oxford, so it must be perfect.
/s
I'm a nerd and I've never heard of NOSTR. What I've heard about Mastodon suggests strong "Desktop Linux circa 2000" vibes: Too much fiddling around for too little gain. If I can't be bothered to deal with either of these, the normies certainly cannot.
In this space it's "I use Twitter" and "After sitting down with the protocol documentation I reckon in January 2026 I will launch my own custom Mastodon server". No middle ground at all. No "Maybe I could join this instance of like-minded individuals?" or even "I found a turnkey solution for $10 per month", it's either 100% blood oath loyalty to Elon's service or they have to write all the software by hand themselves.
Don't look at mastodon as a whole, look at specific popular servers and their niche.
Mastodon works as intended and grows reasonably well. NOSTR is quite frankly one of the most relevant innovations on open source forum/communities from the past two decades.
Both serve similar purposes (build online communities) but the while Mastodon uses a traditional server with a federation on top, NOSTR uses the concept of relay.
In essence, your texts never belong to the owner of a server, you send them to any of a thousand volunteer maintained relays and your audience reads them from there. Your identity remains the same, anyone can verify the authenticity of your texts and this is quite a feature on a time that digital censorship increases.
Well, because they are someone else.
don't go on the rival platform and legitimize it further, IMO
High-profile brands are somewhat stuck because departing would cause a negative news cycle. Quite a few have shrunk their organic social media teams and put more resources into paid social media, which has a more directly measurable ROI.
I guess that many high-profile people are too busy with their regular work to be mindful of politics/ethics and thus they can't be bothered to switch. But maybe there are other reasons as well?
Best to just cut down the social media usage. Twitter-style social media isn't a good place to have deep and meaningful discussions of anything.
Shame though, way back before Trump/Brexit and the era of extreme tribalism, Twitter was full of interesting creative and technical stuff :(
The following feed is purely content by people you follow.
There are also other feeds like "for you" which only shows you posts liked by the people who liked the posts you liked. If you mainly interact with niche/technical/creative content and avoid politics, those feeds will trend towards avoiding politics as well.
Good riddance, I say. My Bluesky and Mastodon feeds are much nicer these days without pseudo-celebrities Pontificating About Important Things.
changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant
I think we need to be honest that - while there is some truth there - this is the view from elements of the left who were instrumental in suppressing conservative voices and generally making it an unpleasant environment for people who did not subscribe to modish cultural takes under the previous management.
The alternative view is of course that for good or ill, freedom of speech is a much higher priority now - which you would think is more in tune with scientific and rational enquiry.
None of that is mentioned in the abstract which immediately suggests caution should be taken when evaluating this study.
You misquote me. I said "suppressing" not "harassed". I disagree strongly with both, but it is the former that is incompatible with free speech; the latter exploits it.
At least with Mastodon, you weren’t tied as tightly or centrally, such that the worst one can do is balkanize instance groups as opposed to efficient narrative security ops.
You're entitled to your opinion of course but it's little more than an anecdote and doesn't offer any meaningful counterpoint except, ironically, an admonition for us to 'be honest'.
Anyway, to get you started you can read some of the articles linked in my other response to a Quillette reader:
Bluesky has recapitulated or even surpassed peak sci twitter. The signal:noise is excellent. However, it requires some work because there is no algorithm. Aggressively unfollow people with low signal:noise, use the custom feeds that disable reposts and enable replies, use the Quiet Posters feed, and use sill.social. This has created a science feed that for me surpasses even the peak of Twitter, let alone X today which is unusable for scientific discussion.
Finally, the thing that drives me crazy is that Bluesky is literally a popular open-source, nonprofit, Ad-less, algorithm-less, truly free and partially decentralized social media network. It's what we all dreamed about in the 2010s! It's Mastodon but actually popular! But half the tech community have convinced themselves it's a "liberal bubble" (that anyone can join....) and that the website that apparently isn't a bubble is the, err, website run by a billionaire with an algorithm designed to promote certain political content that agrees with that billionaire. Absolutely bizarre situation.
I created a new account. Since I'm not following anybody, I see a random-ish feed of things.
It's kinda jarring going from a feed of tech science music to misinformation getrichquick scams and reposted viral content. Like woah.
At this point someone being a big Twitter user would be a deal breaker for joining their company.
What "fun" is not allowed? Be explicit.
There are overwhelmingly many negative comments on any post on bsky that does discuss ai.
There's so much "correct think" like that on bsky. No fun allowed. Only "correct" opinions.
Will an account get suspended/banned because of their views on AI? No. Therefore, still allowed.
Whatever "bleeding" is happening* is after some enormous growth. I'm not a booster at all, they ought to be concerned about this recent depletion, but this slow decline is hardly the death knell.
*: edited from "has happened"
Bs went from 2.8m likers/day its peak to 1.1m today.
Yes certain so-called scientific fields that have a 100% viewpoint capture in academia only feel comfortable sharing views in the bluesky bubble, and they’re the exclusively-BA schools like “Integrative Biology” that this paper is published in.
There was a huge bump of new users right after the election, and things have gone down since then, but they are still much higher than they were in September 2024. And if you look at the tail of the graph, it seems to be holding pretty steady, which is about what you would expect for a social network after a huge spike of growth: not all of those users will stick around.
bsky.app email support [1] requested me to contact them via blueskyweb.xyz email instead [2], but mail from aliases appears dropped by blueskyweb.xyz.
Gave up creating an account after being given the runaround. In contrast, Mastodon have worked fine for me.
[1]: https://bsky.social/about/support
[2]: https://bsky.social/about/blog/09-18-2024-trust-safety-updat...
Luckily there are alternative PDS that you can use without issue. Tangled[1] (the atproto github host) is one. They are a smaller PDS host so the usual caveats apply (if you act up they are more likely to notice you, downtime may occur, etc) but otherwise you can use them like you would any other PDS to interact with bluesky and the greater atproto network.
X has almost no moderation. Its the wild wild west. You can read a thoughtful post about nutrition followed by outright antisemitism. X is the free speech platform, almost anything goes. I am a free speech maximalist though, my only limit being personal threats of violence, targeted attacks (revenge porn, pornographic image manipulation, doxxing, etc. ) other than that whatever people want to say or ideas they want to push should be debated in the public space. No censorship. Freedom of speech of course does not mean freedom from consequence. If I am spouting racist diatribe under my real name and lose my job, that's on me.
I prefer X as I like being exposed to all sorts of view points and find the more extreme posts amusing as its not something you see on the daily. I'm a jew and at one point the algorithm seemed to think I was an open neo-nazi. Was pretty funny, did not bother me at all.
Each to their own, the nice thing is that there are options.
X on the other hand, has a far lighter touch, opting to cutting back the ability to silence at scale and speed.
Mastodon is great but most of the arguments for using Mastodon over Bluesky are honestly arguments most people don't care about, and the Mastodon community can be aggressive and hostile to newcomers, which is great for sustaining a community and preserving your culture against Eternal September but not great for onboarding new people.
But if they want scientific or public facing discourse, they will have to leave it.
The scientists I know personally are actually using LinkedIn the most for discussions around their work, and extremely rarely using any platform other than LinkedIn for this
jppope•5mo ago