Eg. searching 'Anthony Albanese Bluesky' for Australia's leader has a link to X, with custom integrated previews, above the Bluesky link of the PM despite the search explicitly stating Bluesky and despite the account posting to Bluesky.
It's hard for anyone to move over since the lack of engagement is rigged like this.
Duckduckgo and Bing put the bluesky link as #1 for the above. Seems straightforward to make the switch to me. If you haven't changed your browsers default search engine in the past 5 years now's a good time to do so. Much better results await.
The kagi assistant is also nice, only responding with AI when you add a question mark to your query, with the option of opening the query in a separate web search RAG w/the LLM of your choice
The Fediverse will only be popular if someone releases a client that makes it as easy to use as X and Bluesky. Not sure if it's technically feasible (I don't know much about the innards of the protocol) but it doesn't seem to have happened at the moment.
When I started on Mastodon I created an account for each instance I wanted to post to, which was slightly annoying but not much more complicated than signing up for different subreddits. Now I have my own hosted account and follow whomever I like from there. Of course you can follow any account from any account (if the admin hasn't blocked it.)
This is an improvement for average user onboarding - although if almost everyone clicks mastodon.social, you kind of lose the value of decentralization, right?
Only if you expect to be there for ever even as they inevitably enshittify. Be under no illusion that although BlueSky is having its "first they are good to their users" phase now, it is temporary.
So make the most of it now while it's good, but be prepared to move on when that changes. Embracing impermanence is a smarter play. This is nothing new, thus passes all social media.
Decentralization is not a priority for most people. If anything, they actively want centralization, because it's easier. To get those people to decentralize, the solution will have to be dead easy and invisible. The AT Protocol being developed by the Bluesky people looks promising.
I don't work for Bluesky, I'm not on Bluesky, and I don't particularly care, but I found your comment unfair after reading about ATProto on HN literally yesterday.
I stopped posting on Twitter around the acquisition but kept my account. When I do randomly check my timeline I’m genuinely disturbed by the disinformation and pseudo-science, especially in machine learning.
Especially when they try to lean on their status as scientists in order to try and have their opinions be more influential.
The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo.
How do they do that?
In general, it makes scientists look really naive and makes them lose credibility when they talk about actual science.
Other than that, I don't think it's right to tell them not to use their status to influence politics and society towards what they perceive as making the world better. On the contrary, they might have some duty to do just that.
Yep, there it is. You’re just upset that they don’t have your opinions.
When did this happen?
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
Reliance on honorific language and HN account age have strong correlation.
Personally, as you are a private citizen none of us have an obligation to, it's better if you stay quiet and do not influence people who owe you nothing.
No joke, either. The average American anyway reads at a middle school level. Why assume you're any better? Have heard enough out of Americans. They can look at the credibility of their country and keep quiet for a minute.
That’s… not what they said? They said it was probably relatively safe to attend a protest because it was happening outdoors and Covid spread mostly through accumulated aerosols. It turned out to be good guidance: practically no one gets Covid that way unless a sick person is actively coughing on them.
No more athletes, musicians, artists, whatever. Everyone must be anonymous. Or is it strictly scientists who are not allowed to post if their profession is known?
Google+ had it right where you can follow just a community, and also you can selectively make your participation in certain communities visible in your public profile. I am not sure if Bluesky or Mastodon have something similar.
"Scientists say..." is becoming just another "studies show...". You can always find a scientist or a study or an "expert" to push whatever agenda the media outlet has.
Nothing about this is remotely scientific.
Literally true, perhaps. But have you ever noticed how reluctant non-scientist professionals are to voice opinions in their chosen fields? Lawyers preface everything with "not your lawyer", "not my area of practice...", "I'd have to look into the details of that case...", etc. Accountants similarly. Doctors similarly. Engineers similarly. Vs. it seems to be accepted practice for a nuclear physicist to speak ex cathedra about epidemiology, climatology, etc.
What is a scientist to do when they discover a vaccine or cure for something; say fuck it who cares if we change behavior? Are you saying a good vaccine advocate is someone who ignores the underlying science and acts dogmatically?
It just feels like you want to demonize this action of activism for… why? Just because there are lots of bad activists? There are a lot of bad scientists as well, to be honest the view of “good scientist” and “bad activist” feels dogmatic.
To answer your second point, science has a process for disseminating new findings. It's not perfect, but it works. Organizations that scientists work for do pay attention to those sources, discoveries do get patented and productionized. I encourage you to conduct some research: See how many people were talking about mRNA vaccines and gain-of-function research on social media before COVID vs after. The lack of social media coverage didn't affect the science or the scientists, who had spent the past decade conducting research on the subject.
I will maintain that Twitter/X/Bluesky are not part of the scientific process, nor should they be. These platforms do not encourage objective thought or reasoned arguments.
And then that’s just to get money in your specific direction, getting money in your general direction requires more broad activism.
Right now I feel like there are a scientists who would hide or discard results if they contradicted their advocacy beliefs,which is a dangerous place to be imo.
It's because the left-wing that largely captures academia believes in the "rule of law" and more importantly, "policy by experts". Essentially when we boil it down, we're talking about an ideology that can justify anything if it's what "the science says". Of course, we are all aware that inconvenient studies can be prevented from running, inconvenient results can be discarded, and results themselves can be manipulated for the 'correct' result.
COVID was an example where unelected expert committees were given power to decide policy, and as a result schools were shut down at the detriment of education, hospitals were shut down at the detriment of the sick, and the economy was shut down at the detriment of the taxpayers. The COVID committees were singular issue task force: 'reduce COVID deaths by any means', and they achieved that task. A politician on the other hand is responsible for balancing several issues against one another.
Singular issue people/groups in general are quite dangerous and should be kept away from politics. We know, for example, that single issue AI is likely going to be a problem in the future, i.e. The Stamp Collecting Device [1] that destroys the world trying to achieve the singular issue of collecting stamps. Whilst the singular issue expert scientist is well meaning, a well-rounded politician should be considering the various trade-offs.
[1] http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/06/11/the-stamp-collecting... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20120617191319/http://www.singin... )
It enacts no rules, laws, or regulations. That's done by policy makers who can listen to or ignore the guidance and data from the CDC at their discretion.
Why? Which of these other jobs would you call "Activism" an essential part of:
- Fire fighter
- Elementary school teacher
- Auto mechanic
- ER nurse
- Professor of Medieval History
- School shootings
- Sure, they can shut up
- COVID
- Is this one serious?
Are you calling it "Activism" when someone shares the opinion of 99.9% of the population, and spends 0 time advocating for that opinion?
Professor of Medieval history: Lots of political discourse makes claims about history or things like "the dark ages" that turn out to be mis-interpretations or false. Note that I have a friend in that field who often writes gentle corrections to false historical claims in online discourse.
How so? It seems obvious that you can do science (that is: attempt to advance the understanding of how the natural world works) without being an activist for any cause.
But I think what the GP means is let's do science, let's not do hot-political-topics-as-science.
If you’re not actually involved in science you only see the scientists making news, which disproportionately selects for politically intersecting areas of research.
When I was working at a major US research university in the early 2000s, it was a big deal if the scientific publications got any mainstream press at all.
Countless papers push the boundaries of science in major journals and conferences every year and you never hear about them because they have no political implications and usually no immediate practical applications.
That's true, but the other professions don't tend to be associated with (or clearly vindicate) the “above-the-crowd/holier-than-thou” attitude – and I say that as an ex-scientist, for the same reason (among others) as the poster above.
“Sure all the research shows X, but you can also believe y or even z because nothing really matters”
that's always been a fun conversation
Scientists should embrace decentralization and use Mastodon in my opinion. Bluesky will meet the same fate as Twitter and X one day
Have you seen the state of scientific "computing".
Science, and facts themselves, are political now.
Asking them to “not be activists” is really a request for them to self police their speech in a way that fits their worldview.
This is not restricted to scientists by the way. Just look at the different response to how the NFL handled Charlie Kirk’s death with official moments of silence vs. Colin Kaepernick kneeing for police brutality. One is supported, one is suppressed.
I’m fine seeing scientists arguing for the importance of science on social media. I don’t want to hear rants about LGBTQ+ people from geologists.
You're not interested in science but kowtowing to perceived authority
Authors can still get reputation, recognition, and compensation for their papers, without people knowing who wrote what paper, via public/private keys and blockchain. Every time an author publishes a paper, they generate a new address and attach the public key to it. Judges send awards (NFTs) and compensation to the key without knowing who holds it, and if the same award type is given to multiple papers, authors can display it without anyone knowing which paper is theirs.
With LLMs even writing style can be erased (and as a side effect, the paper can be written in different formats for different audiences). Judges can use objective criteria so they can't be bribed without others noticing; in cases where the paper is an algorithm and the criteria is a formal proof, the "judge" can be a smart contract (in practice I think that would be a small minority of papers, but it would still be hard for a judge to nominate an undeserving paper while avoiding skeptics, because a deserving paper would match the not-fully-objective criteria according to a wide audience). Any other potential flaws?
2. Labs are specialized. You choose a lab to work at based on what they're working on. How are you going to choose where to spend your Ph.D or postdoc if you don't know what the lab is working on and how productive it is?
3. We are all still humans. We are wired to know the social systems around us. This would be an entire charade.
It doesn't solve all the issues, but it at least allows scientists to be "activists" (really just share their opinions like any other human) without affecting their credibility. Even if they're doxxed, they can eventually regain anonymity, because eventually other scientists with different views will publish papers on the same subject, and people can only distinguish who published what by its content.
Right now, scientists can share their opinions anonymously. This works well enough, except they can't share them in-person except to others they trust; and if they get doxxed, they can't remove their old posts from the name on their papers.
Bluesky is just the ideological opposite of whatever X is today, but with more blocking and censorship than even what Twitter had under Dorsey.
The comments took issue with the conclusion
[1] - https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/doctors-smoking/more...
X seems to know this is a problem. They hired Nikita Bier who is posting claims that the algorithm is being improved to favor people sharing best in class knowledge every day, but the current meta appears to be posting controversial hot takes that are easily argued or debunked. Tricking your followers into fact checking you is a game in itself because it generates engagement and therefore extends reach. This is why some accounts are deliberate exaggerating facts or posting known misinformation now.
That said, I have a hard time believing everyone is migrating to BlueSky instead of simply leaving this type of social media. Bluesky feels relatively dead except for the few accounts playing the BlueSky meta game, which is largely about infighting and creating hyper cliques from what I see.
One account I follow went to BlueSky but then returned to X because he couldn’t stand it. He described BlueSky as the place to go if you wanted to be constantly attacked by people who 98% agree with you. My impression is that it’s a smaller pond where the people who were previously small fish on X see it as their opportunity to fight their way to the top of a smaller food chain. It just feels ugly and mean half the time. I’ve had to unfollow a lot of people on BlueSky who I previously enjoyed on X because they got sucked into the BlueSky toxicity competition and now they’re just taking swipes at other people on BlueSky all day instead of posting info I wanted to see.
It's only made me realize the 'professionals' are mostly political hacks that will abandon commonb sense and the truth, if it makes their political opponents look bad.
If you go against left-wing ideals on Bluesky, you will be censored or banned.
This doesn't bode well for actual science.
It has apparent value propositions past the social network, but none of those use cases are visibly taking off and none of them appear to be monetizable. The social network itself is what will be evaluated when they go out for more funding. And I don't see how you can raise at all for a social network in 2026 with flat numbers, let alone the declining numbers Bluesky actually has.
I've been dual-wielding Twitter and Bluesky for about a year (after a year off Twitter where I was mostly Mastodon), and, anecdatally, we've hit a point where the engagement and volume of stuff I see in Bluesky is lower than what I was getting even on Mastodon. Earlier on, there was some truth to the idea that Twitter had a much larger audience, but you'd get better engagement on Bluesky. I now get better engagement on Twitter. I can see people I had followed into Bluesky moving back to Twitter.
I have no idea what's going to happen, but I'm curious to hear a coherent story about how Bluesky isn't cooked.
I really dislike Mastodon so gave that up a while back. I know there are a few people I'd like to follow who only post there, but such is life.
I wanted to like BlueSky, but it's such a bizarre echo chamber of people who left Twitter for ideological reasons that it basically filters for people that I actively don't want to engage with.
Those types of people are still there on Twitter (mostly on the other side these days), but I don't see them because the algorithm filters them out.
Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected. Most stats seem to be leveling off (which isn't exactly stable growth either so the rest of your points stand).
I understand that as a Bluesky user the peak and dropoff doesn't hurt the experience. But investors are going to put money in with the expectation of a return and what they're going to look at are the derivatives of the adoption curve: how quickly is it gaining users, and is adoption accelerating?
It looks like Bluesky is going to be shedding active for the near future, probably settling around a million users active per day.
Do you have any data to back this up?
Also famously twitter is losing value and advertisers and users still it’s not stopped twitter from existing
Regarding engagement doesn’t twitter have lot more low quality engagement vs Bkuesky
Are you an insider? Where are the numbers?
how_long_can_bluesky_exists = f(usage, headcount, funding)
Three parameters and you supplied zero of them.
It does sound like you just randomly picked a number 2026 and proceeded to rant on how little engagement you received on Bluesky.
You can generally take a headcount number and assign a fully loaded cost to it (say, $200k, conservatively) and just math it out. And of course that analysis assumes their infra expenditures round to zero.
So no, I'm not just making stuff up. I could be wrong! I feel like I was open about that.
Nate Silver has basically zero juice on Bluesky, people go there to get away from that sort of "expert" that's got a huge profile already but is hard to escape if you are uninterested in his takes.
I mean he'll, take his own word on it, it's not the social network for him!
If you have heard of Metcalfe's Law, you'll understand why this is not good for Twitter long term.
Scientist tend to form their own closed communities anyway.
The rest of us are just writing papers, presenting at conferences, collaborating with other research groups without any interest in putting it all out there on social media.
This whole X versus Bluesky thing is basically irrelevant. Neither of these platforms are good venues for dissemination of scientific research.
Related:
Bluesky now platform of choice for science community
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45039397
Scientists No Longer Find X Professionally Useful, and Have Switched to Bluesky
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815
Science research gets more engagement on Bluesky than X, study finds
ck2•1h ago
only thing that seems to be missing from bluesky migration is athletes and that's probably because it cannot be monetized (well not easily)
Q6T46nT668w6i3m•1h ago