The Engagement Is Better on Bluesky

One thing to note:

Engagement will always be better on new platforms, because they a) have no bots and b) haven't been growth hacked to death, since the strategies that work haven't been figured out yet.

These start at 0, then increase. When both of those trends grow strong enough, people start to leave in droves.

I know I did. On X, I used it a lot, then left when the bad algo content era began. On Insta, the engagement bait was bad enough when I joined that it deterred me from ever seriously using it.

I would expect these to become more of a problem over time, though I'm optimistic Bluesky can do better at beating them than other platforms have.

This one surprised me personally, because we really don't do anything special. We treat posts with links the same as any other kind of post. I would guess there's a kind of high "density" of focus from people right now; the general buzz of the moment. Also I figure our focus on the reverse-chron following feed helps with this.

We're pro open-web, pro people using Bluesky to find other interesting things. We're working on subscriptions right now (not ads) so we've got no incentive to keep people in our app. We'd rather be the lobby to an interesting world.

Also, tbh, every user has a domain name. The web -- and websites -- seems like a really valuable part of the atproto ecosystem. We're going to keep developing in that direction. See this blog comments integration[1] for instance.

1 https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lbq7swe7d22b

Mark Cuban posted about another way that Bluesky engagement is better, in terms of on-platform replies

https://bsky.app/profile/mcuban.bsky.social/post/3lbx7p3vdgs...

There is a general vibe of mute/block, don't engage with trolls, in the hopes we don't end up with the same toxicity found on other platforms, or as Kelsey Hightower put it

"What pushed me off X was just watching good people behave badly" [1]

[1] https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/kelsey-hightower-...

Every single social media platform of note charges accounts for “reach”. Your post gets seen by 1-15% of your followers unless you “promote” it with a marketing spend.

Bluesky has no mechanism for artificially limiting the reach of legitimate messaging, and no business impulse to build one. It really is something new under the sun.

Gergely Orosz polled about editors people use and got more responses on Bluesky vs. X even with one tenth of the follower count

https://bsky.app/profile/gergely.pragmaticengineer.com/post/...

It's fresh and there's quite a ideological push against Musk to somehow take Twitter/X down a notch.

Considering how Threads is doing (from Meta, with their billions of cash to prop it up and 2 biggest social media sites) we'll need to wait a bit and see, usually in social media it looks like the pioneer takes the cake.

Of course engagement is better when posts have less competition for attention.

This tracks with my personal experience. On twitter I had about 20k followers and was getting 20-30 new followers per day and tens to hundreds of likes per post. This dropped to pretty much zero once Musk started fucking with the algo and pushing blue checks.

I’ve been on Bluesky for about 18 months without much engagement, but in the last few weeks it’s exploded almost to the levels where Twitter was before it got enmuskified.

I'm all for the Twitter schadenfreude. Frankly, it couldn't happen to a more deserving person. But we should bear two things in mind:

1. A low-volume competitor will always seem better because the bad actors haven't moved in yet. Growth engineering will kick in and do the same awful thing you see on any newcomer that approaches or surpasses whatever it aims to replace. Put another way: the quality will only ever go down; and

2. We're going to stay in this cycle as long as we back venture-backed companies that will be incentivized to do all the growth engineering mentioned above.

The most successful and enduring and longest-lasting structure for user-generated content is Wikipedia ie the Wikimedia Foundation. The platform needs to be owned to the community or we are doomed to repeat the rise-and-fall cycles we have now.

Its true that the current honeymoon period will not be forever. But what comes afterwards will be even better.

People have been conditioned to think that the social media experience cannot but be enshittifed. (Its even the word of the year 2024 in Australia). But this is no law of nature, this the result of very specific business models.

While everything in the bluesky/atproto niche is now rather centralized and offers little more than a twitter UX, the possibilities are endless if people build an actual ecosystem around it. One can have alternative "views", different user functionalities that completely transform what users experience. Once you start thinking of users as people and not product, an untapped universe of possibilities is opening up.

The concept of diverse interoperating platforms swimming in a pool of message passing is more advanced in the activitypub space. From wordpress plugins, to goodreads and reddit alternatives and an entire zoo of specialized platforms. The severe underfunding keeps all those things away from prime time but they are proving something important:

The old social media order is dead. Mastodon and the fediverse proved that first but it was too niche for most people to notice. Now bluesky does it more forcefully and in the mainstream. The news can no longer be suppressed.

I signed up today and chose Tech and Software Development as interests and this was the first thing that showed up in my feed:

https://bsky.app/profile/austmitchtavlander.bsky.social/post...

No kidding. the vast majority of those 50 million of twitter followers are going to be bots. This is true of all those big old famous accounts such as Obama, Taylor Swift and so on. What about actual traffic? How much clickthroughs does a Twitter link produce vs. Blue Sky? It says 3x Threads, but obviously threads is much smaller than X.

I tried it but I got tired of political fights like twitter is for nazis here we can save the world. I just want to read about tech, nature and science not politics im tired of that shit. In the end i just uninstalled and went to play super mario world

Suprise suprise, normal people use a platform more when they're not exposed to toxic content that they wernt specifically seeking out.

I started posting but my algorithm sucks, any clue on how to improve it? I want to read about developer story!

On Firefox, all the examples they give show up as "Post not found, it may have been deleted"

The fact that you can pay to have your replies higher (plus the suppression of posts with links) on X are part of this. The other reality is that for me and my community / friends who used to be active on Twitter.. they're just not participating anymore.

It's become like Facebook became a decade or so ago. Total ghost-town with only some eccentric folks still posting. In the case of X, everything I see seems to be connected with some kind of ecosystem around Elon, Trump and right-wing influencers. Time to move on.

The engagement quality is better too since replies are ranked based on merit, like how Twitter used to be, rather than whether or not the poster gave Elon Musk $5.

edit: correction, replies on X are now ranked by how much money they give Elon Musk, with $16/month subs getting ranked above $8/month subs, which are ranked above $3/month subs, which are ranked above the plebs.

The simple fact of the matter, IMO, is simply that my feed is mine. It's 100% only posts from OSS developers right now, with no garbage mixed in.

I'm not American. I do not care about American elections. I blocked every lunatic right-wing post that showed up on my Twitter feed from people I don't follow, and yet still almost every post in my feed is about American politics or a half-page Trump ad on election day.

So, almost every post that ends up on my bsky timeline is something I am _explicitly_ interested in, without having to ignore the feed and search for specific users or projects. Of course my engagement is going to be higher! It's basically an RSS feed with an article length limit.

I saw a recent CNN report which claimed that political orientation on X is roughly even now, compared to pre Musk version (which was about 70 left, 30 right). That might appear right wing twitter for people used to the left wing bias (unknowingly).

Not sure what the ratio is on BS, but it appears worse than old twitter. That would distort comparisons with X.

I am seriously surprised at the naivety of people who can't see that Bluesky is also destined for enshittification.

For now. It's just started growing. Let's wait a while for the enshittification to really kick in.

Yeah, but it's funnier seeing people get bodied by community notes on X

Imagine spending time in a community that was created to hate Elon Musk

Traffic to left-leaning news sites better from a social media app that lefty people are embracing, compared to from the social media app now a favorite of right-wingers...

News at 11. Fake news at 11:30, on the other channel!

I haven't noticed a quality response from the bsky, rather the opposite