Community And Choice Are Not Bubbles | Techdirt

Mike Masnick notes, as the "Bluesky is dying" discourse moves into it's 3rd? week, that it's "a bit odd: when something is supposedly dying or irrelevant, journalists can’t stop writing about it". But the premise of these critiques is wrong as they "fundamentally misunderstand what people want from social media and who gets to decide what constitutes healthy discourse":

• one critique is that Bluesky is an echo chamber: but echo chambers are not a thing in social media, while they are a thing in real life. Quoting Michael Bang Petersen: "social media essentially breaks down the echo chambers.... the felt hostility of social media comes from... exposing us to a lot of things that we’re not exposed in our everyday lives"
• in any case, this is "about who controls the microphone", and on X, "Elon Musk controls the algorithm and actively throttles content he dislikes". Arguing that liberals should not have left X, as the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle did, is "arguing that people should willingly subject themselves to algorithmic suppression by someone who has explicitly welcomed extremist content".
• community: moreover, the pundits writing about Bluesky are not necessarily Bluesk's (or social media's) raison détre, something they may have difficulty understanding. "Pundits and politicians may want to broadcast to the largest possible audience, but most people are looking for community, not maximum reach... When you join a book club, do you complain that everyone seems interested in books?" Community is not possible on X, where "attempts to discuss your hobbies get drowned out by fascist propaganda algorithmically pushed into your timeline. That’s not “diverse discourse”—it’s just a bad user experience."

This echoes some of what I've been saying about how Bluesky's unique features - those that X lacks - allow for some forms of community-building impossible on X. We need more of this to better distinguish the two, but peoples' paradigms were formed on X and it'll probably require inspirational demonstrations to show them otherwise.

Masnick also touches upon the Bluesky purity spiral without mentioning it by name, but downplays it as just the suite's "social norms... Yes, some users can be overly aggressive in enforcing norms ... But this is true of every community".

But it's not true of a site which wants to welcome millions of people onto it. While it's true that "Bluesky users have actual tools to address these issues themselves", the risk is that many people get badly burned by the Purity Spiral before discovering these exist.

He closes by providing some data and other evidence contrary to the "dying bluesky" discourse.