Observations from poking Bluesky app
Observations from poking Bluesky app
I dunno how many here have given it a try yet, or simply don't ever intend to but are nevertheless a little curious, so I'm putting down some notes here.
Very basics:
- It's very much a Twitter clone on the surface.
- It may depend on your setup, but in my experience I did not have to provide a phone number to sign up.
Some miscellaneous quirks
Something not mentioned as much is that the custom feeds are, at least at the moment, not really user friendly to try to make yourself. These very much have a vibe of something more tech-oriented people may make for others to use, even with the Skyfeed app to ease their creation. If anything the fact something like Skyfeed exists is some evidence of this.
The trick is, the custom feeds are genuinely more flexible than lists of accounts or followed hashtags/terms on Misskey or Mastodon, but at the moment Bluesky's custom feeds seem kind of underutilized. Many of the custom feeds could simply be lists as found elsewhere.
Not sure how much of that is because the only existing platform using the AuthTransfer Protocol is Bluesky, technical challenge, or something else, but that's the state of many of them for now.
Oh, and presently there's no DMs, just as a stray detail to mention. Skimming convos I got the sense it may be to avoid giving people the sense of any private communications on there.
Also despite all these feeds and a more centralized model (dependent presently only on Bluesky's relay), there's still a sentiment from some there of the place being empty and lacking engagement. In the time I was poking about it, one of the "viral" posts in my discover feed was someone there, amusingly much like here and elsewhere on the fediverse, reminding people they have to engage/talk to others to get any engagement.
Some things really don't change where you go online.
My overall takeaway thus far is that it's pretty much par for the course with microblogging platforms, and not necessarily the best first showing of what the AuthTransfer protocol might really enable. Especially not with its lacking reach/privacy controls, not that any federated social media makes sense to promote as highly private, but still, some controls are better than none.