Journalists are finding more readers and less hate on Bluesky than on the platform they used to know as Twitter.

Summary

Journalists are increasingly abandoning X (formerly Twitter) for Bluesky, citing higher engagement and less toxicity. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of X, changes like deprioritizing external links and rising hate speech have alienated many, especially marginalized groups.

Bluesky, founded by Jack Dorsey, offers a more welcoming environment, especially for journalists and activists, with 20x the engagement in some cases.

Reporters note better traffic, reduced harassment, and a focus on diverse stories.

Organizations like The Guardian and fundraising groups also report greater success on Bluesky compared to X.

  • Snot FlickermanEnglish
    23•4 days ago

    No the site just owes a bunch of money to the crypto bros at Blockchain Capital.

    Doesn’t matter if Dorsey isn’t there and if it’s a PBC, if the investors want a return on their investment (and they do) enshittification is coming.

      • Snot FlickermanEnglish
        3•4 days ago

        Nice, thanks for the link. I knew almost all of this stuff but never had a place where it was all tied together and organized neatly. Now I do. Cheers.

    • Natanael
      2•4 days ago

      It’s open source and designed to literally not be reliant on the company running it. Start a community appview and plc and you can bring your entire account history with you

      • Snot FlickermanEnglish
        6•4 days ago

        It’s not actually decentralized or federated, but keep telling yourself that.

        • Natanael
          1•4 days ago

          Tell that to the people running their own PDS servers and the people running whitewind and all the other services built on the protocol

      • @[email protected]
        4•4 days ago

        These are aspirational goals and not at all actively true now. They are technically possible, but not actually viable as a social media network.

        Its design was based on a drop in for twitter, and will always require a megacorp sized entity for it to operate, due to a “god’s eye view of all data” model requiring huge, faste data lifts to exist at all.

        Best case is some opensource org like internet archive/wikipedia willing to spend 6-7 figures/month(raw costs +engineering talent) on running the service, but so far none have.

        • Natanael
          1•4 days ago

          There’s already others running other relays. The appview is the most difficult, but in theory indexes on top of the data could be shared too which would reduce the need for each appview to have everything saved in advance

          • @[email protected]
            1•4 days ago

            The relays are test level only. They are at the stage where people are dipping their toys in the water to see if it’s actually a resilient protocol.

            There are no viable alternatives right now, and there may never be.