More from The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms
Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.
A Friday blog post details the Bluesky team’s moderation proposals for “a shared public commons,” using things like lists, hashtags, and even “per-thread” tools that would give moderation power to each poster.
The latter treats threads like a mini-forum: if you don’t like a reply, you can yeet that skeet (or just hide it). The post acknowledges why this might be problematic:
If a thread contains misinformation, then giving reply controls to the author means they might use it to suppress corrections from other users. Our hypothesis... is that giving users more tools to protect themselves from harassment is worth some downsides like not always having the record corrected in the replies.
Along with algorithms, hands-off moderation fits right into Jack Dorsey’s original concept for decentralized social media.
A write-up in The Washington Post says the Zuck’s latest attempt at image rehabilitation (remember the “only eating meat from animals he’d personally killed” phase?) is, in part, a bid to win over Musk stans.
Zuckerberg has appeared on podcasts hosted by provocateur Joe Rogan and AI researcher Lex Fridman, both popular among fans of Twitter owner Musk. He has posted sweaty action shots on Instagram displaying his jujitsu skills. And this week, he accepted Musk’s challenge to a cage fight after news reports on Meta creating a Twitter competitor.
But Zuckerberg has really ramped it up over the past year, one of the people said, courting the same “tech bros” who have been captivated by Musk — who is suddenly Zuckerberg’s competition in more ways than one.
The cage match between him and Musk may just be the most recent part of his new pitch, even before Instagram’s “sane” Twitter alternative arrives.
If you have a Bluesky account, you can now follow Flipboard’s custom feed that curates posts about technology. According to the company’s blog post about the feed:
For our Tech feed, our AI topic extraction algorithms don’t just look at the raw text being posted to Bluesky. Instead, they dig into shared articles, categorize the content inside them, and confirm that the article meets Flipboard’s quality standards. This delivers streams of stories that are both topical and high quality.
You can also see Bluesky feeds within Flipboard, if you want.
Second place? Instagram. The Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, decided to track social engagement on a post about her recent Scientific American essay (via Hacker News).
The numbers are all relative — of six platforms, Mastodon won according to the percentage of engagement per follower, calculated as (likes + shares + comments)/followers. But for absolute numbers, Hayhoe’s experiment has Twitter on top.
The still invite-only social network just crossed the 100K mark. I’ve had a lot of fun on the platform so far, and I think the new custom feeds could be a big differentiator. But I’m curious to see how the vibes change once the social network is available to everyone — and we still don’t know when that might happen.
Whether you’ve snagged an invite code or not, the User FAQ for Bluesky is here to explain what you need to know about the Twitter-like service, the AT protocol, and even how to find your friends from other networks once you’re in.
But we will have to fact-check a section that is incorrect:
What is a post on Bluesky called?
The official term is “post.”
Liz Lopatto already told you, they’re skeets now. They even have a song.
[blueskyweb.xyz]
Please imagine this playing when I compose my little skeets.
It’s available on GitHub here. The sometimes weird Twitter alternative asks that you don’t submit a pull request to change “posts” to “skeets.” (Unfortunate, because that’s what they’re called.)
Those and other big questions — questions like, “why is Microsoft so weird about Edge?” and “why are there blue checks in Gmail now?” — on this Friday’s Vergecast. Like and subscribe!
I refuse to believe that they’re actually skeets now, but the Bluesky momentum seems to be real. And also insane. Plus, if the godfather of AI is worried about AI, should we be too? All that, and a bunch of laser bongs, on the show today.
Bluesky has had a banner day, and it’s doing an emergency upgrade to handle the influx of new users. I’m already worried how I’m going to handle the five minutes of downtime — I haven’t been able to stop refreshing the app all day.
Update April 27th, 5:56PM ET: Bluesky made it through the downtime and is now back.
