Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media

> The use of algorithms to filter information has become the norm because chronologically presenting information from followers creates a confusing morass for the average user to process.

Can't disagree more. Call me old-fashioned but I hate any algorithms at all meddling with what I see. If I follow someone, I want to see their posts, all of them, without exceptions. If I don't follow someone, I only want to see their posts if they were knowingly reposted by someone who I do follow. If I want some posts filtered from my feed, I'll set up word filters myself, thank you very much.

It's a recurring theme in the modern IT industry that "the average user" can't be trusted to take their own responsibility. It's sometimes taken as an indisputable truth, even. Why does this keep happening? What can I do to put an end to this?

I used a starter pack that focused on NLP/LLM academics and researchers in industry that tend to publish and talk about their work on Twitter, but have moved to BlueSky. It really does feel like a breath of fresh air. It's the content I want to casually browse when I'm on the subway or the ferry with a lot less rage baiting and without bots and spam.

Plus, it has that nice chronological feature in the default algorithm that really focuses on recent news, which was always my issue with Threads.

I hope this will become true; it's the reason I made an account as soon as possible (not the one that matches my name), have followed hashtag-based feeds with mixed success, and donated to my favourite client (tokimeki.blue). I want to follow topics, in the fashion of Usenet or Reddit, not people. If I'm interested in dandelions, I want to read Jay Expert's posts about dandelions, not their posts about their breakfast (unless it's dandelions) or favourite TV show (unless it's about dandelions).

I fear the recent US election is going to kill it, though.

Bluesky is a refreshing addition to social media. Many users say it reminds them of “old twitter”. I didn’t use twitter so Im not sure what that means. But compared with other social medias? No ads. Auth using your domain. Choose your own timeline algo. Its amazing!

I am worried about the commercial aspects though. I am willing to pay them a subscription if they just ignore ads altogether. The fact that all of it is oss (the protocol, and the implementation!) does give me hope that they won’t turn into an ad infected slop.

Decades later, those people who spent hours on their USENET killfiles (despite the name, killfiles weren't just blocklists - fancier clients supported quite sophisticated scoring - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file) are finally getting their day in the sun.

(I don't necessarily disagree that this is the future, but it is quite funny that the "bring your own algorithm" approach was basically forgotten about for about 25 years, and then revived...)

I preferred lists as the only usable way to use Twitter, even before the takeover. I like how Bluesky has improved the functionality of your own feeds & being able to share them. If I recall, Elon was promising something similar when he bought Twitter but I don't believe that ever happened.

It will be interesting to see how Bluesky is able to continue operating when it needs to generate a profit though. I'm curious what their plans are. The need for profit on social media platforms often results in loss of quality & user experience.

I've been using Bluesky casually for the past week and, as someone who was never a regular Twitter user, I don't see the point of using these kinds of social media websites. Sure, Bluesky is definitely less toxic than Twitter, but I still haven't found a way for it to add value to my life.

I really dont understand why we cannot just go back to chronological as a default. This is how I use X/Twitter, and anything else that lets me just go chronological.

Custom feeds are really cool. I made a custom feed that shows every time someone said "sneak peak" instead of "sneak peek" on a livestream: https://bsky.app/profile/stealthmountain.xeiaso.net/feed/sne...

It's currently running either under my desk or in the living room on my homelab Kubernetes cluster. It's a fun little thing to look into every so often to get a vertical slice of humanity.

Bluesky is a nice experience, exactly the way other social media sites were five or ten or fifteen years ago, when they were still focusing on user acquisition and were still paying employee salaries with VC money.

If we get a few good years of Bluesky before it turns that's not bad, I'll take that, but I feel like the turn is inevitable, right?

There is one constant pattern for media.

Old Media centralizes. New media decentralizes. New media becomes old media.

I’m tempted to say that the only rule is that information networks with humans on it tend to centralize.

I have no idea why, or how to explain the behavior, and I’m pretty sure this has happened since print came into existence.

If you have the term or field that research would come under, do share. (economics ? media economics? Information x?)

Advertising incentivizes engagement driven content amplification which is usually best manifested in outrage unfortunately. On Twitter (X), Instagram, TikTok, it seems any minute signal (view, like, scroll, linger) algorithmically retunes your posts to maximize engagement, which is the root of all the problems.

If one of the options is "only show me content by people that I have explicitely followed/subscribed to", then I might be interested.

I completely understand why social media companies need to have some kind of an algorithm. Without one, when you first join, your feed would be completely empty and I'm sure that user retention after the first visit would be near zero. I do not understand _at all_ why it isn't at least an option to, at some point, decide I only want to see content from people I have actively selected.

Being able to choose your algorithm, possibly even to customize it, seems so obvious to me that it surprises me it's taken so long.

I'm working on my own (Fediverse) site that I hope will some day give you the power to tweak your feed exactly the way you want, but so far nothing about it works, so don't hold your breath on that one. I don't really care about Bluesky doing it because I don't really care about proprietary social media anymore. I want a Fediverse site that does this.

Why do I keep seeing news stories about Bluesky here? It really feels like there some kind of campaign to shill Bluesky on this site.

Does anybody else get this vibe or am I going crazy?

I'm having a crack at making feeds that filter by topic and location using LLM. The current test feed is here: https://bsky.app/profile/super-james.bsky.social/feed/uk-pol...

But I'm in the middle of a big re-work so it'll get a lot better when I finish that.

I never understood why something like YouTube doesn't allow you to at least control the level of discovery.

Is it another, like Mastodon, rise and fall of so called social platform? Why social anyway when there is no socialising? If anything, those platforms makes humans less socialising and communicating in real life.

I might be old fashioned but RSS is future of subscribing content for me.

I use lists but generally I stick to for you and use my head to filter posts that are likely propaganda and stuff I know what they are trying to do. Once you use twitter enough you develop a filter that by pass a lot of bs and makes the whole thing enjoyable

What people whom carefully tweak their feed don't understand is that they are the exception.

Most normies embrace the out of the box algorithms because it is the least amount of effort. Lazy always wins.

can folks share some tech starter packs here that are preferably not all LLMs? python / web stuff / databases / systems design / hardware etc?

I have been seeing it from the first invites came out. It has gone from “nothing to do see there” to “maybe something rarely” to suddenly, in the last few post-Trump weeks, “a lot of something — and most of them is pure spam (of course for me; I am sure it’s beloved content for others). But of course there is no way to filter that out without losing on other things or being to square one “almost nothing to look at”.

Besides, as we have seen with Signal and Mastodon — people will just go back to what they are used to and where most of the crowd and noise is.

I'm old enough to remember when the media tried to astroturf Threads like this.

I want to own my data, algo, and instance.

FAD.. will end up like threads and clubhouse.

From what I have seen using Bluesky this isn't true at all. It's brutally censored, even more than Twitter was in 2021. Or are there other relays and appviews I can use that aren't? Is there a comprehensive list of Bluesky infrastructure that isn't run by Bluesky themselves (excluding a PDS)? Or is it totally centralized for now?