Social Media

An update to the Threads app lets users switch between their various feeds on the home screen, similar to what Bluesky allows.

Over the last few weeks, Threads has rolled out a string of updates that crib from Bluesky, including adding custom feeds.

The insurgent social platform that’s giving Threads a run for its money says it’s “exploring” additional ways to show that an account is legitimate.

Users currently can verify their accounts to weed out scammy doppelgangers by linking their website with their Bluesky account. But it gets complicated fast.

Today, a Hugging Face employee published data from 1 million Bluesky posts scraped from its API to the AI repository. He’s removed it and apologized, but 404 Media notes the set was “trending” all day.

Bluesky says it’s looking into ways to “specify consent (or not) for AI training.” but acknowledges that “It will be up to outside developers to respect these settings.”

As 404 Media and others note, Elon Musk’s X has inserted itself into The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars, arguing that neither Alex Jones nor the estate handling his bankruptcy owns the associated social media accounts.

Since X simply grants a license for their use, the lawyers say that can’t be transferred without permission.

Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu confirmed in an email to The Verge that the platform is “actively working” with its lawyers to ensure Bluesky’s compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act’s information disclosure rules, as Bloomberg reports.

Yesterday, the European Commission called out that Bluesky has no page listing “how many users they have in the EU and where they are legally established,” as required by the DSA.

Update November 26th: Updated with confirmation from Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu.

Theo Sanderson created a visualizer that sends you through a tunnel of Bluesky posts as they happen. Maybe it’s pointless, like watching users bust cusses in real-time, but it’s also fun that the platform enables this sort of thing to be made.

Saw this news on 9to5Mac. I honestly didn’t know landscape video wasn’t previously possible.

Erin Kissane’s take on “the dark forest” idea of the internet suggests that context collapse is what makes the internet deranging. So how do you build a network where people matter?

So this is NSFW because it’s just gonna holler profanity at you, but if that’s what you’ve wanted — well, Bluesky is the kind of platform that lets you build it.

This seems very useful!

CEO Jay Graber, who was on Decoder earlier this year, marked the occasion with a thread of 20 fun facts, like this one:

Couldn’t get enough of Trust & Safety Tycoon? Cocreator and Bluesky board member Mike Masnick is crowdfunding a card game, inspired by Touring, about growing a social network while running your competition into the ground. It’s called One Billion Users, and if I ever end up playing, I’m totally nabbing the “Hellsite” card.

The platform may not be seeing Bluesky and Threads numbers, but the lines are also going up for Mastodon right now, according to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko.

Pew Research Center released a report on news influencers who people are increasingly getting their information from.

The report couldn’t have come at a better time, following an election where the role of influencers and podcasters was especially notable. Of today’s news influencers:

- 77 percent have no background with news orgs

- 65 percent are men

- More identify as Republican or conservative than Democratic or liberal

- Far more have a presence on X than on any other platform