The Verge: ‘What’s it like on Bluesky right now, anyways?’
Sarah Jeong, with an incredible story for The Verge on what’s happening over on Bluesky, the newest Twitter-that’s-not-Twitter:
Yet even as the developers heroically sprinted to save Yglesias, the service was straining under something that would become known as “the hellthread” — an unending series of stringed replies fueled by auto-replying bot accounts and users who were incredibly amused by the prospect of jumping headfirst into a JSON error.
Participating in the hellthread would sign you up for an unspeakable number of notifications, and attempts to mute the thread for yourself were mostly futile since something about the AI accounts would unmute them anyway. Users tried to bait each other by tagging them in. (This, of course, meant they themselves were now in hell.) Delighted in part by seeing the CEO herself good-naturedly participate before publicly notifying her devs of what kind of bugs she was seeing, others began to post their nudes right into the hellthread until it was nothing but asses and errors.
So many jaw-dropping moments in this piece, you’ve really just got to go read the whole thing. None of it makes me want to set up shop on Bluesky. I’m very happy with my stable, friendly, calm, and also Fediverse-compatible home on Micro.blog, thank you very much.
When things settle down and Bluesky opens up publicly, I may consider cross-posting there if it does indeed reach a critical mass and it’s where non-nerds end up. But it just doesn’t sound very appealing yet, despite their best efforts with the exclusive invitation system.