Why Bluesky feels right
Bskyjuice Bskyjuice Bskyjuice.
I might get back into the game and post more regular in this newsletter, but meanwhile here’s some words about the latest social media hype and why it feels just about right.
So, you’ve heard about that Bluesky hype going on and that users fled Musks TwiX after the Trump election. Bluesky has now overtaken Threads in daily active use, all while Musk rebuilt the former birdsite into a Trump-gov propaganda rightwing hive, Threads wants to be a stale, non-vibrant place for mainstream-compatible influencers and Mastodon insists of being the PGP of social networking. Threads has ten times the users of Bluesky but the bulk of that users are simply converted Instagram accounts which are not very active on the platform, while Bluesky has “the juice”.
I’m very much on board of the hype train — I’m here, say hello! — and the last 7 days on the site were pretty exciting, not least due to some pretty nifty technological innovations in the microblogging space, and one of them in particular.
See, you can build so called Starter Packs on Bluesky, basically lists of users you can follow with one click. I consider those Starter Packs a killer feature exploiting network effects in the best way possible: Those lists are human curated "parasocial" connection-bundles based on expertise and "belonging to a field of interest" and I found so, so many interesting accounts in those, they are invaluable. Imagine Twitter-lists with a follow button, curated by people whose expertise you can (often) trust.
It’s also kind of sad and revealing that the hottest socmed features in the year 2024 are human curation, outward linking and collaborative filtering. You get a sense of how much damage has been done to technological innovation and human centered design not just in the past 10 years for the sake of the exploitation of a media environment that selects for emotionality and outrage, not expertise and interest. Bluesky feels like a breath of “fresh air” in that context, albeit that air being actually more than 20 years old by now — or, as Brian Merchant put it: “Bluesky's success is a rejection of big tech's operating system”. Yes.
And let’s not to forget that Bluesky does not punish external links like many other sites. Someone smarter than me once said that the best sites on the web are those that send you away, pointing at stuff that is interesting. That’s what the web is: A collection of documents interwoven with pointers and links. Many of the social web behemoths from the past decade layered themselves on top of that fabric like parasites, and destroyed much of human conversation in the process. It’s good that the relevance of huge platforms is fading and that there seems to be a race for a “new open web”, which Bluesky doesn’t have to “win” to be successful — they just have to integrate.
It’s not all sunshine in a blue sky though. Dave Troy has a pretty enlightening thread about the funding of the platform and some of it seems shady blockchain stuff with connections to people like Steve Bannon, Troy going as far as saying that “this all points to another rug pull in progress, and a lot of credulous people hurt”.
We’ll see how all of this goes, but for now i’m willing to ignore some of the criticism and ride along, and if only to enjoy the feels of a human centered socmed platform again for a while.
Anyways, here’s a list of packs, tools and docs i found useful)
Here’s a directory of all circa 70000 Starter Packs available on the platform
I followed a lot of people from
Here’s a Bluesky quick start guide featuring a big list of Starter Packs
Collection of tools to convert packs into lists and vice versa, to merge packs and more.
I don’t use blocklists, but german users might find these useful.
Sill.social collects the most posted Links from your connections. Like Nuzzel for Twitter back then.
Bluesky Network Analyzer finds “people followed by lots of the people you follow (but not you)”.
Andy Baio curating some fun Bluesky toys in a thread
GOOD INTERNET ELSEWHERE // Bluesky / Mastodon / Threads / FB / Insta
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Thanks for reading.
Buesky feels like returning to the goof old interwebz days - when will blogging return? And will it happen without the Retrovertigo of today's pop culture?