Disappointed by Bluesky, excited about atproto

I’m still hopeful. I’m not sure if it’s because I haven’t found the right feeds yet. Even thought I didn’t find it very exciting, I really hope Bluesky works out.

What made me try it out in the first place was that, I’ve been missing social media for a while. Instagram is built around pictures, and pictures quickly become about grabbing attention rather than saying anything. Twitter doesn’t allow longer discussions, so everything collapses into one-liner rage bait. When the world moved to algorithmic feeds, these trends only got worse.

Text-based social media has been slowly dying out and I’ve been feeling pretty out of place in the current social media landscape. Reddit making things worse didn’t help. My only solace has been places like Hacker News or smaller Telegram groups, but even those have their own limitations.

I had had a go at the alternatives. Scuttlebutt didn’t allow deleting older posts and I found the thought of filling my phone with social media slop horrifying. Nostr was so focused on bitcoin that it pushed out any other discussion. Mastodon required running your own servers, which knowing me would quickly devolve into a full time sysadmin job. I never tried Bluesky before because I’d heard it was VC funded and centralized, felt like another twitter.

Then India banned Telegram in the third week of June. That made me conscious of how precarious my social media was, and it was in the back of my mind that I should find something more reslient to government censure. I wouldn’t want all my posts and comments gone at the drop of a hat.

This article on ATProto too landed in those exact same days. And I found the the protocol exciting. It divides identity, data, the social graph, and recommendations into separate pieces you can mix and match. The idea that I could always wrap up my data and go elsewhere was refreshing.

The parts that appealed to me the most were

• My identity could live under my own domain with just a TXT record or a hosted file.
• My data on Bluesky’s PDS could be moved to my own server when I wanted it, without losing my identity
• I could replace the feed with any algorithm I want. That’s the same reason I love RSS.
• The community seemed interested in the kind of discussions that get me thinking.

But the reality was a bit underwhelming. Despite the atproto protocol, Bluesky doesn’t support domain-based identities, so I’m forced onto a Bluesky hosted one (did:plc) rather than one on my domain (did:web). And as much as different parts of the protocol could be mixed and matched, many are still run by Bluesky with no real alternatives. I couldn’t find an easy-to-run AppView replacement.

The content felt flat. No toxicity like Twitter, but it still felt like I was missing something. I still remember early reddit and the earlier days of the internet where every day I could stumble on something that made me curious. Maybe I’m just saturated now, or maybe it’s the default posts getting pushed to my feed since I’m following nobody. I’m hoping some curation fixes that.

The custom feeds and starter packs were a relief. I could always switch to a different view and I’m not stuck on what I find there initially. Unlike YouTube or Facebook, Bluesky lets me mark what I don’t find interesting, so I’m hoping in a few days the algorithm shows me less American politics. That’s partly my own fault though. I had added politics as an interest, so I guess I deserve the Trump coverage.

For now I’m just scouting the ecosystem and hoping that I’ll find it engaging enough.