MacKuba

I’ve been still pretty busy with various Bluesky- and social-related projects recently, so here’s a small update on what I’ve been working on since my November post, if you’re interested:

Skythread – quote & hashtag search

I was missing one useful feature that’s still not available on Bluesky: being able to see the number of quote posts a post has received and looking up the list of those quote posts. The Bluesky AppView doesn’t currently collect and expose this info, so it’s not a simple matter of calling the API. But since everything’s open, anyone can build a service that does this, they just need to collect the data themselves.

Since I’m already recording all recent posts in a database for the purposes of feeds and other tools, I figured I could just add an indexed quote_id column and set it to reference the source post on all incoming posts that are quotes, and later look up the quotes using that field.

For the past 10 months, I’ve been a pretty active user of Bluesky. I enjoy it a lot, and I’ve managed to learn a lot about how it works, what works well and what doesn’t, and also what’s likely coming next.

I’ve decided to write down some of the tips & tricks that I often give to friends when I send them an invite code, or the advice and answers that I sometimes give to people that I find in some feed asking about things.

This of course got much longer than I planned 😅 so if only have a moment, here’s a TLDR:

• there are official iOS and Android apps, but you can also use bsky.app in the browser, or try e.g. Graysky, deck.blue, or Skeets
• if your timeline feels empty, go to the “Feeds” tab, look for the “Discover New Feeds” section and look for some feeds on the topics that interest you (on the top list or in the search); follow these feeds, and then if you find some interesting people posting in those feeds, follow them too. You can also search for feeds on goodfeeds.co.
• don’t be afraid to interact with people, repost good posts, like good comments, comment in threads and so on – that’s how you make friends! (but be nice :)
• if you see too much NSFW stuff, look for “Content filtering” settings in the Moderation tab
• everything you post here is very public, so don’t share anything too private 😏
• if you own some cool domain name like “taylorswift.com”, you can set it as your handle
• hashtags and word muting are now available; gifs, videos and post editing are planned, DMs and private profiles may be coming but not in near future
• Jack Dorsey is not the CEO and does not run the company ;)

And now the long version:

I had different plans for this year… then, Elon Musk happened.

Elon took over Twitter in October last year, which set many different processes in motion. A lot of people I liked and followed started leaving the platform. Mastodon and the broader Fediverse, which has been slowly growing for many years but never got anything close to being mainstream, suddenly blew up with activity. A lot of those people I was following ended up there.

Then, Twitter started getting progressively worse under the new management. Elon’s antics, the whole blue checks / verification clusterfuck, killing off third party apps and effectively shutting down the API, locking the site behind a login wall, finally renaming the app and changing the logo – each step made some of the users lose interest in the platform, making it gradually less interesting and harder to use.

Changes, so many changes… and things changing meant that I had to change my workflows, change some plans, build a whole bunch of new tools, change plans a few times again, and so on. My GitHub looks like this right now, which is way above the average of previous years:

Update 01.03.2023: Updated Mastodon address - my previous instance has been unexpectedly shut down and I had to make a new account. I’ve decided to set up my own server to make sure it won’t happen again.

Update 09.11.2023: I made a follow-up post which talks about the social media related projects I’ve been working on this year, and about Bluesky, where I’m spending most of the time now.

This is just a small update about Twitter and Mastodon, since things have been… very unstable and chaotic in the last few weeks, as you’ve surely noticed if you log in to these even occassionally.

Twitter has been my internet home for over 13 years now. I started using it when my colleagues from Lunar Logic showed it to me, and especially in the recent years it’s been my main source of information and news. It’s where I went to keep track of what was happening in the Apple/Swift world, find useful tips about UIKit, SwiftUI or Xcode, follow the news, rumors and dramas on the Crypto Twitter, and find out every day what important thing was happening in the world, including following the Covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine this year.