Bluesky has launched RSS feeds

https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds

by kieto • 3 years ago

324 164 3 years ago

gumby3• 3 years ago

Wish posts that require a login would at least appear in the feed. That would be like RSS feeds from a site with a paywall. If I logged into BS from my RSS reader I'd be able to see them.

jazzyjackson• 3 years ago

Now that you mention it Bluesky might actually find some adoption if they allowed monetizing private feeds (Is twitter doing this? I know you can monetize via subscriptions but AFAIK it's not a paywall, more of a tip). They'd compete for marketshare with patreon, substack and onlyfans combined.

brundolf• 3 years ago

The Bluesky protocol doesn't really allow non-public posts (which is why blocking doesn't work the way some people would like it to, and why there can't be features like Circles)

I believe Twitter does support paid private posts that you can subscribe to, but I've never seen anyone I follow use it

ivanmontillam2• 3 years ago

There are Telegram bots that do paywall private channels, a few examples I can mention:

- InviteMember (accepts most payment methods, including Stripe)

- CanalFans (accepts only USDT, and it's only available in Spanish, South American focused)

The way they work is that you add them to your private channel and the bot executes the sale, invites the member and kicks them out if they don't renew their subscription.

Of course they take a commission on the sales.

gumby3• 3 years ago

Substack has this working.

I have some paid substack blogs in my RSS feed. Some give you part of the post in the feed and then you have to click on the post to see the rest (in you’re a subscriber, else not). Others just say “click here to read” and again, if you are a subscriber (I am) you see the post.

consumer4514• 3 years ago

Yeah, that's kind of janky. Because in Bsky, there is a user setting to ~"ask clients to respect login required."

However, there are things like firesky.tv which access AT Protocol directly and I believe don't respect that setting. You can make a user RSS feed from firesky by using Filter and setting a user handle.

At least I think I am responding to your issue...

kevincox• 3 years ago

The fact that links are broken is a pretty serious flaw. But hopefully that will be fixed soon.

EMCymatics• 3 years ago

Yikes. Who knows when I'll remember to look them up again.

stevebmark• 3 years ago

This doesn't really matter. The Bluesky app has very few features, it's still invite only which limits the number of users, and engagement and active users are low. It's on a trajectory to death right now. The core of Bluesky, relay/BGS, still isn't proven. Over a year after launch there hasn't been significant progress in these areas.

olah_16• 3 years ago

I said 8 months ago that the invite system would be the death of BlueSky[1]. I think that’s true. Just like clubhouse, but the time they actually open it up, hype is gone.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35754628

add-sub-mul-div• 3 years ago

Letting in the eternal September from Twitter would be its death. Threads can be about hype.

cogman10• 3 years ago

Why do they still have it? They are super late to the "twitter replacement" game. The only thing carrying them is jack Dorsey's name and that's slowly slipping into irrelevance.

TillE• 3 years ago

Bluesky invites have been abundantly available for months now, and they're processing the waitlist directly if you don't feel like asking someone.

I've found engagement is surprisingly high, much much higher than Mastodon, but of course it depends on the niche.

dorfsmay• 3 years ago

Bluesky invites have been abundantly available for months now

Only in a bubble where everybody already has an account I suspect.

JeffSnazz• 3 years ago

The Bluesky app has very few features,

This doesn't really matter. It's replicated all of the features that matter, twitter has very few user-facing features that matter anyway. The only thing preventing Blu Sky from succeeding is user interest.

loceng3• 3 years ago

Are all users paying - or users are the product?

johannes1234321• 3 years ago

Blue sky invites are plenty. But they make it quite likely that when you join, you directly find your peer group there since that's where you got your invite from. You directly know a person to follow and via their posts, repsots, followers, ... directly find a network.

If you open without connection to any of your peers you first have to find anybody who is active.

a_bonobo• 3 years ago

BlueSky has for some reason far more biologists than Mastodon: Searching for 'PAG31', a currently ongoing large plant and animal genomics conference, reveals about 20 different posters on BlueSky with about 60 posts and only two posters on Mastodon with four posts (one's a company). Twitter/X still has more posts than BlueSky, though. Scientists are creatures of habit.

quinncom• 3 years ago

That’s probably because many people have not enabled search indexing on their Mastodon accounts. If instead you search for the #PAG31 hashtag you’ll find nine different posters (still too few, but more than two).

mattl3• 3 years ago

I have so many Bluesky invites, I think most people do. If anyone I know needs one, I have one for them. They sign up and they will immediately have people they know to follow.

I stopped giving them away to random people.

EGreg2• 3 years ago

Send one to me. greg at the email qbix.com

numpad02• 3 years ago

I think the invite system worked. They managed to keep high-bandwidth low-effort users out until nicest of online people recreated early-Twitter-like culture, unlike how Mastodon Fediverse had gone with flood of empty calories trying to make a big exodus happen. There are probably lessons on how to build a successful social medium, more so than about architecting a technically scalable system.

JeremyNT• 3 years ago

Personally I would agree. Of all these services Bluesky is the only one I have an account on and actually use directly (I "use" Twitter indicrectly via Nitter). I was actually excited to get an invite.

It just feels... cleaner somehow. The slow trickle has, I think, kept it from being overrun by low effort posters and bots.

wraptile• 3 years ago

They managed to keep high-bandwidth low-effort users out until nicest of online people recreated early-Twitter-like culture

You say that as if it's a good thing. Bluesky turned into one of the most toxic networks out there. Just browsing the discover feed should dispell any illusions of a healthy community - most posts are whining about american politics or whining about some other unimportant memes like AI art instead of fostering growth about common interests like Mastodon does.

Bluesky had their chance with invite only and curated feeds (with some really dedicated community admins) but they've fumbled it all by focusing on american culture wars instead of the nice thing they had.

threeseed3• 3 years ago

It was always going to be a struggle to compete with Threads.

But if you don't bring your A-game when you're competing against the world's best social media company then what is the point. Meta is already feeding behavioural data into Instagram's ads which means they have no need to monetise it anytime soon. And the free advertising they are running on Instagram/Facebook is bringing in new users at a rapid pace. What advantages does BlueSky have ?

And the fact that there are no AT protocol servers means that you have the ActivityPub ecosystem with such a huge head-start and likely set to dominate in 2024.

pfraze3• 3 years ago

If we had ditched invites we never would've been able to ship the open network / relay system. As it stands we're on track for open hosting in Q1¹.

Same story with features. We didn't deprioritize the protocol because that's core mission, so we had to put resources there instead of into features. Features will accelerate as core stabilizes.

Shipping a novel technology, building a product, and growing a userbase all at once isn't easy. I wouldn't declare us dead unless we've missed the boat so badly with market timing that nobody bothers, but we have good runway and (IMO) a pretty solid community of users.

¹ Probably. Maybe. Pretty sure.

jsbisviewtiful• 3 years ago

I signed up for a login directly from the site and got one quickly. It was pretty easy to get access overall.

Now that I’m on the site though, I feel the same about it as I do Twitter: a) Most posts are uninteresting, exist to virtue signal or are by people who _think_ it’s important to try desperately to be funny (which they often are just cringy and not funny) b) It’s extremely confusing to know any context on a reply post when it’s reply 22 of a 39 reply long thread c) It’s not fun or engaging. It doesn’t really add anything to my life d) I don’t want to post myself because inherently I, like many social media users, have nothing worthwhile to say to the digital world - so I choose not to post while others force it anyway.

It’s not my cup of tea and I’ve considered deleting the login a few times. I think I’ve just outgrown traditional social media.

Intralexical• 3 years ago

They're apparently getting registrations at a steady linear rate though:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bluesky_Registered_U...

blitzar• 3 years ago

Signed up day one for the waitlist. Still no invite (and it doesn't sound like I am missing out on anything anyway).

Out of principle, I am refusing to beg on the internet and take invites from the cool kids that have been let in, and at this point I can only assume they deleted all the mere mortals who dared request to join early on.

gtirloni• 3 years ago

Like every Mastodon user apparently: https://www.rssboard.org/news/211/every-mastodon-user-has-rs...

panzi2• 3 years ago

Yeah, would be even better if it where atom feeds with pagination, IMO.

panzi2• 3 years ago

I for one don't understand why one would switch to yet another corporate controlled social network. Have people learned nothing?

agoodusername63• 3 years ago

Because "user first" orgs like cohost have learned the hard way that the money math doesn't work out when your service gets even a few users. Lots of hidden costs to running social media.

Then you have the other end, mastodon and federation. At the very least, solves the user culture problem somewhat but does not solve the hidden costs of hosting and moderation at all. Especially if you get a sudden influx of users.

IMO VC money, corporate money, whatever you want to call it, is more or less required to run social media at scale.

greyface-3• 3 years ago

I noticed this shortly after the loginwall came down, and am subscribed to a few feeds. The post mentions the lack of links, but what I find more frustrating is the lack of embedded media (or indication thereof) on posts where it's present. This is also a problem with Mastodon feeds.

steveklabnik11• 3 years ago

Check it out: https://bsky.app/settings/external-embeds

greyface-3• 3 years ago

Thanks! I didn't know about this, have toggled some of them on, and will see how it changes things. I think this is limited to the web client, though - I don't see how it could impact RSS feed generation, since those are being fetched logged-out by my RSS reader. Mostly I'm frustrated by the lack of <img>s in RSS <description>s on posts that contain photos.

anotherevan• 3 years ago

I'm using https://bluestream.deno.dev/ which does include embedded media.

I've one test user I'm following where I have an RSS feed from Bluestream and one directly with Bluesky. When they reach parity I'll swap over.

bad_user• 3 years ago

Mastodon feeds do have embedded media, not sure what you mean.

greyface-3• 3 years ago

Interesting. I just checked, and Mastodon feeds do seem to be emitting xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" <media:content> tags with image URLs. NetNewsWire doesn't attempt to render them at all. Other feeds using vanilla RSS with <img> tags in the <description> do render. Maybe it's just a client issue.

Edit: Yep, https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/issues/2538. My bad; not a Mastodon issue.

rambambram• 3 years ago

Or do you mean an image or other media in the <enclosure> tag?

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

It beats Facebook's plans to integrate w/ ActivityPub because they actually did it but I will point out some advantages of ActivityPub over RSS because polling with RSS is terribly inefficient as you have to keep polling a file over and over again asking for changes whereas ActivityPub lets you ask for what you haven't read already.

threeseed3• 3 years ago

Threads has already started testing bi-directional follows with ActivityPub.

And the plan is to rollout a "mixed Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them" by late 2024.

http://plasticbag.org/archives/2024/01/how-threads-will-inte...

loceng3• 3 years ago

What's Bluesky's revenue stream? Ads?

abhibeckert• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure it's "we will figure that out later".

methodical• 3 years ago

A bit presumptive but the answer to that is likely ads. Unless they try the whole premium subscription model like Twitter (X) and realize nobody cares that much to pay $5/mo for social media.

hackernewds• 3 years ago

it's a Jack Dorsey initiative so I'm sure it is "cross-subsidization through Square's investors and balance sheet"

steveklabnik11• 3 years ago

Jack doesn't own the company, the employees do. He is on the board though.

steveklabnik11• 3 years ago

https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan

p-e-w2• 3 years ago

Bluesky’s business model must be fundamentally different — we are a public social network and our code is all open source, so we have no “moat” when it comes to data.

That's such a bullshit claim. The entity that runs the servers where the data is stored always has a moat. They can aggressively rate limit scraping and simply refuse to provide dumps, and suddenly, they are the gatekeepers to everything that actually matters. Open source has nothing to do with this.

codemusings• 3 years ago

Not sure how they still could hope to gain enough traction to become profitable. Meta is already running circles around Bluesky both in terms of active users and features.

heavyset_go• 3 years ago

I love RSS, but I predict that these will be removed at some point.

With RSS, you can't gauge impressions and engagement with content, and you can't force all sorts of ads into people's feeds.

petercooper• 3 years ago

I suspect that's why they're not including links in the feed content. You're forced to go to their site to click through.

evbogue3• 3 years ago

Bluesky launching RSS feeds is a direct result of Bluesky not being a distributed protocol. Yes, I know, it's aiming to be federated. But there are fundamental issues with the protocol they decided to go with that is keeping them from creating a social network that actually has self-authenticating posts.

And all of this starts with their DIDs being a substring of the hash of your first post? It just doesn't make sense. In these kinds of systems you hash the data and sign the hash, then you can send a message that can be authenticated anywhere.

And thus, RSS is one answer I guess.

No one ever asked for an RSS feed of a Scuttlebot log back before that network was scuttled. Why? because you could authenticate the sender and the posts on your own computer.

whyrusleeping• 3 years ago

While individual posts are not self-authenticating (largely because it makes deletion much more complicated) all of a users posts are in a merkle-tree that it itself self-authenticating. A Post and the merkle-proof to the root its a complete verifiable entity.

evbogue3• 3 years ago

Our community can have the best of both worlds here. We can have the users sign their posts with a keypair on their own computer, and allow faux delete, and authenticate a merkle-tree back to the root.

Delete can't be real because someone will always have their phone out there ready to screenshot your post.

Imagine the @ protocol was

```<ed25519 Public Key><Signature>```

and that opened to

``` <timestamp><ed25519 Public Key><Previous Post Hash><Data Hash> ```

And the previous post hash could point to a post before a delete if we consider deletes to be real.

The hashes are used to lookup the post content, which we could also send with the message for the sake of convenience.

For key rotation we just need to sign a message pointing to our new keypair, no federated servers required! "My new key is EVxe89AeRwmTT0hfrT7sHe0wAuzvH9Yvg9TFUgqPh4M="

konart• 3 years ago

Logged into BS after getting an invite and immediately realised what X (twitter) users from the US where talking about when they mention political "dispute" being a big driver of the social network.

Goodbye BS! Even looking at the endless stream of xxx-coint posts on nostr is not that exuasting.

ulrischa• 3 years ago

The title displayed is not good At the moment: https://bsky.app/profile/ulrischa.bsky.social/post/3khanuwle... But all in all a nice feature

renegat0x0• 3 years ago

This is a little bit off topic, but Openrss page information about how to obtain RSS link is poor.

"To find the RSS Feed for a website, just navigate to the website and the RSS feed for it is usually located at the domain of the website followed by /rss.xml, /rss or /atom.xml".

Recently on HN there were infos that pages provide meta links to atom. This is cleaner solution than guessing.

There was also Firefox extension 'want my rss', etc etc.

This should be better explained on RSS site.

jraph• 3 years ago

Indeed. WordPress runs a big part of the web and is probably more likely for blogs, which is what you are likely to want to follow with RSS, and it's located at /feed.

At this point, I just use CTRL+U and search "rss" and "atom", hoping to find a the corresponding <meta /> tag. It's a shame Firefox does not automatically display a feed icon anymore, it would be much better if I want to tell non technical people about RSS. Installing an extension is workable but it's also an additional step.

vintagedave• 3 years ago

Yes. It's common practice for them to be called rss.xml and atom.xml but they can be anything you want. I use a `link` tag on my site -- I am not an expert here, but it seems applicable[1], RSS etc readers find it, and `meta` is documented only for use for cases that elements like `link` cannot represent.[2] So I'm confident enough this is correct-ish enough to write in a comment on HN :)

    <link href="https://example.com/rss.xml" rel="alternate" title="RSS feed for example.com" type="application/rss+xml"/>

    <link href="https://example.com/atom.xml" rel="alternate" title="Atom feed for example.com" type="application/atom+xml"/>

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/li...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/me...

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

Back in the day, browsers would have native RSS support. Somewhere around the URL bar of the favourites bar you'd have a little RSS button that would take you to the RSS feed of your choice, as configured by the <link> tags in the HTML.

Most browsers have removed RSS, so now you need to either read the HTML (which sucks even if you're familiar with it) or just guess. If you want to instruct the general audience on how to get RSS feeds these days, and you don't want to link to browser extensions (because only a few mobile browsers support them), then "just add /atom.xml" seems like the most foolproof solution to me.

coldpie3• 3 years ago

The RSS reader I use (Feedly) will do this for you automatically. Just paste in the normal web URL and it'll go search for the relevant <link> tag, just like your browser used to do.

aendruk• 3 years ago

I appreciate that someone created this page which is handy when introducing people to web feeds:

https://aboutfeeds.com/

It too could use a mention of autodiscovery though.

_teyd• 3 years ago

I finally tried it and as a new member literally every recommended post was US culture wars stuff. Is that the normal experience, or am I getting some kind of bias based on who I received an invite from?

jddj• 3 years ago

It was billed as a twitter alternative

GaggiX• 3 years ago

Finally a real Twitter competitor.

MoSattler• 3 years ago

I am so tired of it. I wish there was an AI filter for social media that let me block out this stuff.

finnjohnsen22• 3 years ago

When USA reelect Trump my willingness to pay for such a service is infinite

finnjohnsen22• 3 years ago

Thanks for the warning

unpopularopp2• 3 years ago

And unfortunately I see the same shit on Mastodon as well 24/7…

scopeh• 3 years ago

I don't think there is any algorithm magic in mastodon. your feed is who you follow and who they boost. maybe its time for you to have a clean up.

jug• 3 years ago

It had nothing of the sort when the network was younger but it seems like everything steers towards that sort of political profile eventually, regardless of name.

And 2024 is probably going to be particularly nasty for obvious reasons.

sph2• 3 years ago

Twitter-style social media has become its own subculture, made of:

- people who like to argue online

- people who can easily turn any complex topic into a 100-odd character slogans

- people who like to put the world into hashtag-sized boxes

- masochists who enjoy getting into the ragebait du jour

- a vanishing minority who didn't get the memo and somehow the Algorithm has kept them in a bubble of sanity

- bots

Coincidentally most of these groups, including bots, really love the entire US culture war bullshit. They're the one that are keeping it alive, with the help of journalists, the last category of people that live on that type of social media and then report on some newspaper @oneidiotontwitter's troll post as if it were public opinion, in a perpetual cycle of mental and cultural noise.

---

Look outside. People are going about their lives. The sun is somewhere in the sky. Probably not much is going on around you. That's the real world.

madeofpalk• 3 years ago

Yes, kind of.

But each platform's mechanics encourage certain behaviours over others. The Twitter website (not the culture of it's users), as an advertising-funded platform, is highly geared to optimise for 'engagement', which encourages all of these behaviours.

consumer4514• 3 years ago

What kind of stuff are you into? I follow EU gov stuff, a bunch of scientists, Neil Gaiman, Molly White, bunch of journalists.

Also, did you scroll all the way through https://bsky.app/feeds for various interests?

Oh, and one really useful thing that I found for discovery is the little + icon to the left of the Follow button on people's profile pages. It shows suggestions of who they are following, so I built up a bunch of good follows that way.

dijit2• 3 years ago

I'm not accusing you of this, but I do find it sort of odd how the victim blaming in social media goes.

"My default experience is openly hostile and promotes division"

"My experience is that if you tailor it then it's very valuable".

"OK, but the default experience was hostile and I don't have the means to coerce the good vibes experience"

"Skill issue".

It happens on every conversation about Twitter, less so regarding TikTok and co. But it's an interesting pattern I see all too often.

whywhywhywhy3• 3 years ago

Is that the normal experience

Yes, this is the tricky thing about internet communities. Bluesky is mostly made up of older school Twitter addicts angry at Twitter's takeover and yeah all they tend to talk about is that and culture war adjacent stuff.

Shows a bit of the naivety of the Bluesky devs they didn't clock this as a problem and try and help people who don't want to talk about that find their community on there.

itsoktocry4• 3 years ago

Bluesky is mostly made up of older school Twitter addicts angry at Twitter's takeover

Exactly. Bluesky was born in the shadow of Elon taking over Twitter. But Twitter still exists, so who went to Bluesky? A lot of people who disagree with Elon's (recent) politics. The politics of Bluesky will reflect that.

lbeltrame• 3 years ago

One of the reasons I entered an apparently very focused Mastodon instance and left after two months. I was absolutely not interested in discussing politics, let alone culture wars that are absolutely incomprehensible to me.

It doesn't surprise me that BlueSky goes in the same direction, to be honest.

emayljames• 3 years ago

If you mean "culture wars" as in the right leaning people who are obsessed with attacking minority groups, that is fine.

If you mean said minority groups just trying to exist in a space without harrasment then that is not fine at all.

edm0nd• 3 years ago

both can be fine and part of culture wars.

j4yav• 3 years ago

I wasn’t referring to minorities existing without harassment. Not even sure where that came from, but jumping to that sort of conclusion is exactly what I’m talking about.

yashasolutions• 3 years ago

I think it is normal. I have tried to find other creators or content source, but the topics I care about (mostly engineering and education) are under-represented on Bluesky.

It is probably due to how Bluesky was populated - a specific demographic of twitter were the first movers to bluesky, and it has attracted more of the same. I guess there is a market for this.

As a side note on Thread and Mastodon: the experience there was different. Thread has a larger tech community so there is actually interesting content (for me at least) and Mastodon, it really depends on the instance, but even on the first instance (mastodon.social) you can find good content if you search by hashtag, and you can find some real nice people to follow (and since it's the multiverse, you can follow from any instance anyway) so it's all about building the social graph you want)

fidotron2• 3 years ago

It amazes me the extent to which the existence of BlueSky has improved my Twitter experience. It went from unusable to all the nonsense moving somewhere else and safely avoidable.

Let people argue in their own bubbles and leave the rest of us in peace.

itsoktocry4• 3 years ago

It went from unusable to all the nonsense moving somewhere else and safely avoidable.

You mean you moved from a place that showed content you disagree with, to your own bubble. You can admit that without claiming everything outside your point of view is silly.

Moldoteck2• 3 years ago

After registering, almost every post was related to nazi substack drama... I don't get it. I've also used Threads and it's a much more chilled app...

0xEF• 3 years ago

My wife and I get IG ads for threads that are full of racist, bigoted posts by its users. We have no idea why, since we never click on those sorts of post, and our IG accounts are 100% hobby centric between our own posts and follows. As such, I have not touched Threads and keep telling IG the ads are not relevant to my interests.

Presumably that is not your experience with it. It's wild how easily an algorithm can skew our perception.

Moldoteck2• 3 years ago

I suppose IG ads are not recommended based on your interests, rather on what's more popular in some circles. I get some ads too and these are totally unrelated to my classic Threads feed. In the feed I mostly get travel-photo posts, some posts related to renewables, some related to uk brexit(lol why, I'm not in uk) and some from my country, but most of them are photography/travel related

consumer4514• 3 years ago

nazi substack drama.

That's because there are a decent amount of indie journalists there and a lot of them are moving away.

renegade-otter• 3 years ago

After being addicted to Twitter to a point where I could not focus on anything (as someone who was born in Ukraine, all I did was doom scrolling), I've decided that the only winning move is not to play. No Threads or BlueSky for me. I am OUT.

leokennis• 3 years ago

There was a happy time around 2018 or so, where I followed a limited group of about 50 Twitter accounts. Using Tweetbot, I could keep up with the timeline in about ~20 minutes per day. I would see interesting conversations and links, some humor and almost no anger.

It all went downhill since then.

askonomm• 3 years ago

I have come to the same conclusion. I still feel a bit out of place every now and then without any social media, but if I need to chat - I just open up whatsapp and talk to my actual friends instead.

croisillon• 3 years ago

i have been addicted too, trying to quit several times, and went cold turkey when musk took over

kome• 3 years ago

I suggest a strategy to reduce Twitter addiction: limit yourself to following no more than 100 accounts and avoid using the "For You" tab.

darthrupert• 3 years ago

For me, the perfect thing would be something that aggregates links from all these sources, because there is useful stuff there sometimes.

The discussion tends to be worse than useless.

I'll implement this "some day"

tkellogg• 3 years ago

I made fossil for this purpose. Sometimes the good stuff is regular social posts, sometimes it’s links. The only way to separate the wheat from the chaff is AI (imo)

https://timkellogg.me/blog/2024/01/03/birb

ascagnel_• 3 years ago

For social media that offers RSS (YouTube, Mastodon, and now BlueSky), I use an RSS reader.

If something important happens on Xitter/Facebook, it’ll get repeated elsewhere.

qwertox• 3 years ago

If you are ruthless at blocking and curating who you follow, Twitter can be a very good experience.

My Twitter feed is nothing but posts about what is going on in AI.

While I do follow Elon Musks account, because it may contain something important to know at some point (which rarely happens), I block everyone he retweets in regards to political views so that I'm not affected by it.

I use an ad blocker to remove the Trending panel, because at least here in Germany it is an entry point to the gates of hell, where you are guaranteed to be confronted with the most extremist, anti-government people this country has to offer. Politics are the worst on Twitter, and Twitter feeds that rage in order to have more engagement.

twsted• 3 years ago

I also have always had a curated list of "following" but certainly my experience has been degrading in the last months, for various reasons.

It should be said that for specific contexts, Twitter is the right place to follow, and AI is one of these.

Snow_Falls3• 3 years ago

The issue with creation is that you have to devote mental energy to removing the crazies. I felt much better simply cutting it all out of my life. I only read individual blogs now and its way better. If only we could convince the people worth following to start WordPress blogs or something.

harryvederci• 3 years ago

My Twitter feed is nothing but posts about what is going on in AI.

Sounds awful! :-)

coldpie3• 3 years ago

I had the same experience here in the Twin Cities during the fallout after George Floyd's murder. It was awful, possibly the worst experience in my life, all driven by Twitter. I finally deleted my Twitter account when Musk took it over, and my life has improved massively. I did register a Bsky account, but it immediately triggered the same awful feelings that having a Twitter account did, so I haven't looked back.

These things are absolute brain poison and I don't miss them at all.

itsoktocry4• 3 years ago

No Threads or BlueSky for me. I am OUT.

I still use Twitter some, but I had a similar experience with Facebook. One day I found myself lurking on acquaintance's profiles and thought: "what am I even doing?". I quit and never looked back.

Problem is, I find Twitter really useful. But you have to keep your stream focused (in my case tech and data). It's really easy to doom scroll. In fact that's kind of the design intention.

rchaud2• 3 years ago

Whatever Twitter had in usefulness has been gamed and reverse-engineered by the big accounts and the paid blue ticks to the point where the signal to noise ratio is no longer good enough.

Snow_Falls3• 3 years ago

Never used twitter, but I was a reddit addict. My life is much better now that I've stopped. It really is the only winning move.

DiggyJohnson• 3 years ago

Same here. Reddit and Youtube for a shocking amount of time per day. I had to quit Reddit like I quit nicotine, it was genuinely difficult.

The good news is that it reduced my Youtube time as well because I didn't have anything to pair it with. I realized I would watch Youtube and if I was bored or uninterested I may pull out my phone and hop on Reddit. Get bored of Reddit? Find a video to throw on. It was good to put a wrench in this self-reinforcing feedback loop.

huhtenberg• 3 years ago

Signed up a couple of months ago and it was barren.

Went back yesterday and it's still that way.

There's literally nothing to read and nobody interesting to follow there.

hocuspocus• 3 years ago

Yeah I don't really get the invite-only strategy during the height of Twitter's self-inflicted woes. Very dumb move.

Threads is already much better overall despite the delayed launch in Europe.

Bluesky has launched RSS feeds

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