Blue skies smiling at me Nothing but blue skies do I see

Last week, Bluesky seemed to really take off. What's Bluesky? The simplest answer is that it's another possible Twitter, or do I have to say X, alternative.

Like many others, I left Twitter shortly after Musk took over. Actually, I just stopped using it. I didn't actually deactivate my account until relatively recently but other than logging on to do that, I hadn't been on Twitter since late 2022 or so.

While Twitter has certainly gone to pot, prior to Musk's takeover, it filled a particular niche in social media. Facebook was for people you knew. Instagram for photos. Linkedin for jobs so not much general social discourse going on there and then there were other things like Tumblr, Whatsapp, Pinterest, Snapchat and more. I'm not listing Reddit since I view that more as a modern day Usenet replacement and things like Discord and Slack are also separate beasts.

Twitter was more discoverable and open than Faceook - you didn't have to be "friends" to read or partake in a conversation and as a result, there was a different type of discourse. It also was more suitable for live conversations, similar to Slack or Discord based on hashtags.

Twitter was also good for aggregating news, or at least types of news (before things got bad).

Finally, Twitter became in many instances, at least for me, the last line of customer support. When you couldn't resolve a customer issue with a company in spite of hours on hold and speaking with people in call centers from around the world, a well placed tweet would often get results.

Post the Musk acquisition, Twitter went south fast and up until now, nothing has really filled the void.

Facebook continued to have its Facebook problems - closed silo, not very discoverable, and of course, you're subject to the whims of a different billionaire owner.

Linedkin? As I said, that's for jobs although I did notice an uptick in traffic on my feeds post the first Twitter exodus right after the takeover.

A few contenders have popped up. An early one was Mastadon. I really wanted to like Mastadon and I do. From a user point of view, it looks and acts similar to Twitter but it's open source and can be self hosted. Both big pluses for me. It also uses an open protocol - federated which, in theory lets it play nicely with other federated platforms.

The trouble was and is that because it's distributed you have an account on a particular server. Sure, you can follow people on other servers but finding them and dealing with the whole distributed thing is just a little to much for the non techie user. So, in the end, it seems to be ending up as small closed twitter like groups of technical people. I'm on Mastadon as @zamansky@csed.social and will probably stay on the platform but I haven't seen much life there.

Another one that had promise or at least backing has been Threads which is Meta's answer to Twitter. Again, the look is similar to Twitter but it has the huge advantage of preseeding your account with your contacts and everyone on Facebook could get on with a click. It was trivial to hit the ground running with Threads whereas on Mastadon you had to build your network one account at a time.

On the downside, it really just feels like a more general Facebook feed. Lots of posting, little conversation (at least from what I can see) and again, another platform controlled by a different Billionaire.

Bluesky has been another contender and the one showing the most promise. It grew out of twitter but has spun off and is it's own public benefit corporation - no affiliation with Twitter or Musk. Like Mastodon, it's distributed, uses an open protocol and has open sourced it's apps. Unlike Mastodon, it uses a single entry point so you don't have to figure out who's on which server.

I got an invite back in June 2023 - shortly after Blusky's launch but things were pretty quiet. I checked back periodically but never noticed much growth.

That all changed about a week ago. Suddenly Bluesky became very hot and tons of old Twitter contacts started appearing. Bluesky also seems to be kickstarting the onboarding and finding people problem through the use of what they call [[https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all ][Starter Packs]]. I'm also starting to see news outlets and companies on the platform.

Will Bluesky ultimately be the Twitter replacement people have been looking for? I don't know but it's the most promising one so far.

So, if you haven't yet, check it out. I'm there as @zamansky.bsky.social and if you know some great people to follow or any great lists in the CS Ed space or NY Tech scene, let me know.