🦋 Bluesky Social

the title says it mostly. back when i was on twitter, i could make my account posts visible only to followers. people could follow me if only i approved them. its useful if you want to interact only with family or irl acquaintances on the platform.

Jack Dorsey weighed in on people leaving one platform he founded (X, formerly Twitter) to join another he helped create (BlueSky).

"I think people are running away from X, rather than running to something on Bluesky," the Twitter cofounder said in a recent episode of the "In Good Company" podcast when asked why Bluesky is growing so fast.

"That's not a great way to build a product, unfortunately. We want people that are running to us for a particular thing that they couldn't do before," he added.

...

"Bluesky has built something that I wanted it to build and I'm excited about, which is this algorithm store, being able to choose your own algorithms," Dorsey said.

"That is a reason why people will run to it eventually, and I think why people run to these services eventually because they get more agency and more control — but it's not something that people care about right now," he added. "What they care about right now is not being in X for whatever personal reason."

The place seems quieter than in December, are other people feeling the same?

I've seen a few independent newspaper saying that Bluesky doesn't bring them that much interaction compared to Twitter, and unfortunately they only have so much time dedicated to social media, so their priority is on Twitter now.

Bluesky users on Android now have access to a new app that works more like Instagram than X. On Tuesday, an app called Pinksky launched an Android version of its photo-centric social networking experience built on top of Bluesky.

The app is now one of many attempting to court former Instagram users by offering a similar user interface to Meta’s app, but one that’s built on open technology. Many of the newcomers in this space, like Pinksky, are building on top of the existing social network Bluesky, allowing them to tap into users’ social connections and feeds.

However, this also limits the apps to Bluesky’s own constraints of up to four photos per post and videos of up to one minute in length.

...

For now, the app is just an experiment, but Souza says that could change if there’s further interest. For instance, he’d consider integration with other technologies, like Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Nostr, or running his own instance. But as he’s currently covering the costs of Pinksky, expansions would likely need to involve some sort of business model — like paying for premium features.

Pinksky competes with other apps being built in this space, including Flashes, Pixelfed, Reelo, and others.

Bluesky is setting itself up to be a social media jack of all trades. There's the main experience, of course, which replaces something like X or Threads. But it's not all about the text posts: Soon, you'll be able to use an app like Flashes to transform Bluesky into a kind of Instagram. Before that drops, however, you can use a different app to turn Bluesky into TikTok. It's not quite there yet, but it's a fascinating look into a unique kind of social media client—an app that turns one platform into something else entirely.

Bluescreen is a Bluesky client with one singular purpose: It identifies the videos from your Bluesky feed and delivers them to you in a TikTok-style endless scrolling interface. You don't interact with text-based posts, nor do you see still images. It's as if Bluesky offered a "video only" feed. But, since they don't, Bluescreen exists.