That would be a surprise since (active user) growth has been negative over recent months.
i think this might be a problem with many of the "replacement" services. That initial growth and boom was driven by the novelty and curiosity of the service. Now that twitter is seen as kind of played out it feels unnecessary to be on a clone of it. The draw is gone and most of the utility(alerts) have moved elsewhere.
i tried using bluesky and it just felt...lame? It wasn't really bluesky, just the fact I was on yet another social media service. A significant amount of folks on there are only on there because it isn't twitter. then they realize they don't need twitter which means they dont need bluesky.
bluesky feels like a bunch of high school kids who didnt get invites to the real prom so they made a different prom, but the different prom kinda sucks. "Yay, prom!" "Um..this isn't prom, this is different prom."
I.e. you mostly care about technology foo but occasion delve into epic poetry, and it's nice to interact with both footech.social and epicpoems.read. Also, being able to consume personal publishing (blogs!) from within the same app is quite nice.
Different instances can also have different rules, different moderation and different federation.
Edit: and exist in different legal jurisdictions, and also be harder to ban or regulate.
There are a couple nooks and crannies that are worthwhile, but at scale it's not a good place. The vibe is "something went wrong" and "poor decisions have led me here" and not "warm, welcoming, vibrant, innovative community of wonderful people."
Maybe in your niche, but it's absolutely filled with lots of great people, and the posts are on topic and fun to read. Perhaps the issue isn't Bluesky, but you. There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore.
There's something beautiful about a defense of a community that is also a perfect exemplar of that community. Bit fractal, init?
- Sports
- Law
- Authors
- Comedy
- Video Games
- Programming news
- Other general news
Really feels like you are projecting a bit.
In the past, whenever I get some politics stuff or celebrity news in the main feed, I just press "not interested" and relatively quickly those types of posts stop showing up.
On the other hand, I'm not sure who actually uses bluesky. Can't say I've ever felt the desire to go on there.
> The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws.
> Eurosky is building a European alternative to Big Tech social media and web services that is focused on innovation, user choice and open standards. Eurosky develops foundational software and services that enable entrepreneurs and startups to launch their products faster, cheaper and ready to scale.
> We’re launching @eurosky.social, a European identity that works across the entire open social web. Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more. Hosted in Europe, governed in Europe. [Launching January 2026]
I applaud the effort, but participating in the Fediverse I take issue with the fact that they seem to equal AT with "the entire open web". That's just BS if true.
In recent months, however, I've been surprised to see that it has stabilized somewhat. There might just be this core group of people who are there for good. That would normally indicate staying power for me, except for the fact that they took VC and spent money on the thing, and they want growth. Normal people are repulsed by Bluesky. They're also repulsed by Twitter, but at least interesting stuff happens there.
YouTuber (32%)
TikTok creator (21%)
Doctor/nurse (20%)
Mobile app/video game developer (19%)
Entrepreneur (17%)
Artist (16%)
Sports athlete (15%)
Professional online streamer (15%)
Musician (14%)
Teacher (14%) 1. Movie Star / Actor
2. TV Star / entertainer
How have youth career aspirations toward entertainment/fame-oriented careers changed over time (1960s-present), and does the rise of "influencer" represent a genuine shift or category substitution?
\"Specific sub-questions\":
1. What longitudinal or repeated cross-sectional surveys have asked children/teens about career aspirations with consistent methodology?
2. What were the historical rates for "actor/entertainer/movie star" type responses in surveys from 1970-2000?
3. How do current "influencer/YouTuber" rates compare when aggregated with traditional entertainment categories?
4. Are there international comparison studies showing different rates by country?
5. Is there evidence for changing perceived accessibility of fame careers (kids thinking it's actually achievable vs. fantasy)?
\"Priority sources\": Academic journals (Journal of Career Development, Journal of Vocational Behavior), Gallup historical archives, Pew Research, YouGov archives, OECD education reports, Harris polls historical data.
\"Methodological notes\": Flag when studies use different age ranges, different question framings (open-ended vs. multiple choice), and whether "entertainment" categories were offered or emerged organically.
I ran this for you and got some really interesting results[0] (TLDR: Young people have traded the stability of the "Company Man" for the autonomy of the "Personal Brand" in response to a labor market that no longer guarantees security.
https://fortune.com/article/gen-alpha-dream-careers-youtuber...
EDIT: now that I'm looking more into it, I think this YouGov poll was the original source https://today.yougov.com/technology/articles/39997-influence...
I do vaguely recall a more serious study showing a vast majority of kids thinking "influencer" was a viable career path and a very large portion beleiving it was the only viable career path for them. It also found that these percentages were higher in boys than in girls. That's the study I was trying to find but failed and found this instead
Young kids usually have career aspirations that mirror what’s popular in their media world. It means little.
https://x.com/MaskedMelonUsk/status/1987338574606356901?s=20
I loved her compilations.
[0] https://x.com/TomPelissero/status/2003827902388093289
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/tompelissero.bsky.social/post/3maqh...
I really hope nostr will have sufficient time to develop its own culture before people inevitably notice that freedom of speech is actually important. I guess people will have to burn a couple more accounts on X/B/M/T/FB before seeing the light.
Isn't Blacksky already there? I haven't kept up, but I thought the last big banning blowup led to prioritizing finishing the AppView.
[1] https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/12/20/my-open-social-we... (at the very bottom)
And the overwhelming majority of Xitter content that breaks out of platform are just screenshots as well and not direct links/embeds.
IMO if you were used to the smaller communities of the pre-social media internet, fediverse stuff feels familiar. You aren't going to get 256k upvotes like you will on Reddit, but you can have some interesting conversations.
If you don’t want to give it away openly, publish it as a book or an essay in a paid publication.
That's clearly plagiarism, but it's also interesting to me as there's really no way the user who's querying their fav. ai chatbot if the answer has truthiness.
I can see a few ways this could be abused.
Lack of novelty doesn't remove it as a problem.
I'm having trouble even parsing that question; "Publically" means that you put yourself out there, no? It sounds to me like that Barbra Streisand thing of building an ostentatious mansion and expecting no one to post photos of it.
I suppose you could try to publish things behind some sort of EULA, but that's expressly not public.
Publishing in a paid publication is not a solution because tech companies are scraping those too. It’s absolutely criminal. As an individual, I would be in clear violation of the law if I took text someone else wrote (even if that text was in the public domain) and presented it as my own without attribution.
From an academic perspective, LLM summaries also undermine the purpose of having clear and direct attribution for ideas. Citing sources not only makes clear who said what; it also allows the reader to know who is responsible for faulty knowledge. I’ve already seen this in my line of work, where LLMs have significantly boosted incorrect data. The average reader doesn’t know this data is incorrect and in fact can’t verify any of the data because there is no attribution. This could have serious consequences in areas like medicine.
At this point, I'm writing for myself and not for any particular audience, b/c even if I'm discovered, I'd be discovered by AI.
Which is definitely strange, and we should ask: why?
The same thing happens with every HN predictions thread.
- asymmetric social activity - standing in a crowd social activity - discovery - curated/accidental/mediated - directed presentation - advertising
I’m not too sure what Bluesky’s approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as “everyone is on Twitter”
Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change it’s nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on.
You just don’t know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life.
I’m not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the “invite people you know” problem, and that’s good enough for most of the world. The problem of “somewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen in” is solved with scientific publications, “can I join in” is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared
Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time
That is likely to be a bigger trend than any shift in normie open social web stuff.
I dropped X and adopted BlueSky & Mastodon, but must admit I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them, if I star the repo my stars end up spread across multiple services.
I guess the ideal end goal would be if GitHub federated too and then some of that stuff would work.
The appeal of ditching X was obvious but I can't see the same for GitHub at the moment.
When the relevant audience is bored enough to be open to something new, it only takes a few influential people to tip the scales.
People don't want to be truly revolutionary; that takes actual risk. They want the appearance of being revolutionary with minimal downside and social reassurance.
(w/r/t GitHub there's already enough buzz in the right circles and it will likely happen this year.)
With its support for self-hosted CI runners it could also be a good alternative for people looking to move now that GitHub has decided to charge for those.
Having one account/sovereign Personal Data Store that can hold many different kinds of data. Then having many different clients and services that are decoupled from the data, offering all kinds of experiences is just night and day better than everything else. For everyone.
You account works everywhere & that's awesome. You also have credible edit & can take your account to a different server without disruption, baked in: amazing win for sovereign computing & digital rights far better than (basically) anything.
People can make cool connected online services, without having to figure out how to host all the data! That's so powerful, so cool (and ActivityPub maybe can decouple someday, but we don't see it yet. The data store and the app go hand in hand, & you end up with an account for each service). It makes it wildly easy to build incredible connected services with fantastically little effort and costs.
That said, I did try to get some of my git repos on https://Tangled.org just today, and alas found that the actual git data needs a "knit" server to do that. And afaik there are are no knot servers I can just use. I'd never seen that complexity for a atproto app before! Usually with something like the book reading social app https://bookhive.buzz or the annotation service https://seams.so , just having your regular account is all the data & service you need. Tangled was a surprising contrast, but I hope to be online there sometime soon-ish!
It certainly took a while for me to grasp how all the different components in the atproto stack function and work together, but the decoupling actually makes so much sense and I've also become a huge fan of it for all of the reasons you mention. It really feels like a natural extension of Web 2.0 to me.
Re: Tangled
Tangled does actually host a default knot server at https://knot1.tangled.sh. You should be able to select it when you create a repo?
But yes Tangled's component infrastructure is kind of unique. Only the social data (issues, PRs, comments, stars, follows, etc.) is stored in your data repository on your PDS. The git server requires a separate "knot" server.
It's described a bit more in-depth here[1]. As far as I understand it's basically just the git repo hosting part of Tangled's AppView, split off into its own thing to make it possible to self-host it. This means you stay in control of your repo data but also get the benefits of having an actual server with a remote git repo as the authoritative source for the purpose of collaboration, which is what people are generally used to when collaborating using git.
You're probably correct in that the "normal" way would be to have the Tangled AppView act as the git server, but have it store the remote git repo on your PDS. But as records in your PDS data repository are either JSON documents or unstructured blobs I guess it's kind of hard to use that for a git repo, which is largely filesystem dependent. I imagine it would require some kind of translation layer. Or something like git-bundle[2] maybe?
The same is true in the other direction ("Ugh, this project is hosted on GitHub and I now need to set up an account"), with one major difference: compared to other sites which tend to just accept username + email + password for setup and username + password to log in, it's a huge PITA to set up a GitHub account in 2025 and to log in to an infrequently used account from a logged out state. GitHub won't let you get away with using it in such a simple way.
Just bookmark the repo.
GitHub has one massive advantage which is even people in HR know programmers use it, and they can just glance at a candidate from GitHub. For as long as this remains in place, GitHub will survive.
I would rather use GitLab, honestly. Forgejo, Codeberg, etc, have a CI/CD modelled after GitHub actions which I really don't like, but I digress.
You would think that people would be in a rush to build with a technology that appears to be simple to implement and holds communities directly responsible for their conduct and content.
Maybe I’m seeing things the wrong way.
I think this is working pretty great on nostr. You have the WoT to fight cheap spam, spammers/scammers/impersonators get quickly reported and when they show up for you, you'll see who of your followers reported them for which reason. I can still see if I want to check myself. I'm in control, but I don't get bombarded with unfiltered spam. So far nostr has handled spam waves remarkably well. Problematic material (CP, etc) is scrubbed off of most relays/blossoms quickly.
Whenever I stumble upon opinions I heavily disagree with, I'm glad that nostr exists. I wasted way too much time in the self censorship safe space hellhole that is Mastodon where too many instance operators think themselves god of their own little pocket universe. If that's you're looking for, more power to you. It just wasn't for me.
The legacy social media providers face a quandary - prevent all embedding and hide from search, or be front-ended.
I think you've misspelled "will actively encourage"
How do ads work when ever fewer real people are looking at them? Targetting specifically people who don't use AI is one option — I hear there's big bucks in literal fraud ads, and the big players (or at least Musk) do seem somewhat opposed to basic regulatory requirements such as "tell us who paid for these ads".
nunobrito•1mo ago
1) Blossom grows even more and defacto replaces IPFS for decentralized file distribution
2) Open Social goes beyond text and decentralized video, docs, meetings, calendars become easily available with several implementations sharing a common NOSTR protocol underneath for accounts and communication, see https://iris.to/ as first example
3) True P2P social web is achieved. Forget about servers or clouds, each cellphone becomes its own data center and cellphones talk with other using P2P techniques
evbogue•1mo ago
nunobrito•1mo ago
I'm involved at NOSTR project where beyond internet the connections can be made with bluetooth, LoRa, LAN (including Wi-Fi) and radio using walkie-talkies.
iamnothere•1mo ago
nunobrito•1mo ago
Reticulum is poorly implemented on the library side and assumes everything to be encrypted, which is heavy on network links with poor bandwidth. Plus, on radio waves the encryption is not even permitted.
NOSTR can be simplified to be less verbose and function on less bandwidth links like bluetooth, LoRa and be unencrypted (just signed messages) to legally use radio waves. Reticulum has some kind of drama against using bluetooth for transmission of data. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to change in the near times.
cxplay•1mo ago
cxplay•1mo ago
nunobrito•1mo ago