Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter?

Bluesky is more compelling because of ATProto. The way they architected it means users have choice about what app they use, where they host their data, what algo feeds the sub to, and what moderation services they use. Each can be chosen independently and composed to form your own personal flavor of the social media fabric.

Beyond the Twitter like Bluesky, anyone can develop any social application on the same protocol and infrastructure. It is easy to define custom record types to build other social applications.

The best part is that you, as a user, have a single sqlite database hosting your data for all the apps on ATProto, making it a simple matter to move data hosts or switch your primary application without losing your following.

Fundamentally, the protocol means we can have real competition in the social media space.

https://atproto.com/

Even if it does, it still doomed to become what Twitter became.

In my opinion, the best years of "social networks" were the early 2000 till early 2010, before Facebook and the likes became globally popular. During these years we had forums and IRC channels. These were off-limit to "common" folks or people looking for engagement, and you could find quality material and interesting discussions over there.

Then the modern social media came, and it ruined everything. Short form content and engagement motivation (like Twitter ad revenue share, where they pay you for "popular" tweets), ruined the place for everyone. You can't have a meaningful discussion with 200, or whatever the limit is, characters. Most people on these platforms try to "game" the algorithm in order to publish a viral tweet. There is zero to no moderation, and in one "scrolling" session you can see a lazy motivational quote, a selfie, an MRR screenshot, a life lesson, and far right/left propaganda, which is kinda insane.

On top of all that, the entire "follow" mechanism is flawed. It creates small echo chambers around big accounts. Take a popular account, find a tweet you disagree with, and look at the comments--it will be filled with "yes men" and people looking for engagement. On forums you could read different opinions in the same discussion, thus widening your world view, rather than narrowing it.

Forums also had moderation, and users had "reputation", even though they were anonymous. I joined bluesky recently, out of curiosity and hype, and it's filled with "Hello this is my first post", pictures of peoples workstations, anime, politics (US based, which I don't care about), etc. It's just too much noise to navigate with little to no value.

The entire modern social media system is broken. We don't need something more popular than Twitter, we need something completely different that will bring value back into online discussions, but I guess it's unachievable. Look at HN, which I consider to be the top 1 "social" platform for myself, yet it's unknown outside the tech/science community. Everything too big is doomed to become average at best.

Nothing will ever be as popular as Twitter, which is why it was valued at $44 billion dollars when it was bought. Bitten once, twice shy.

  Edit for response since I'm rate limited: 

Twitter didn't make a profit - it would have been overpriced at just $10 billion dollars. The value comes from having a captive userbase where the majority is entirely unwilling to use an alternative. Depending on how hard you intend to manipulate those users, the ROI may or may not be worth it.

Yep

I'd be happy as long as the right-of-center folks stay at the nazi bar microblog place.

Plus, the bsky blocking mechanisms are AMAZING