r/BlueskySocial

The app isn't loading for me, just hanging on the logo screen

Anyone else? It was just fine this morning…

I moved from X to Bluesky because I wanted to see art on my timeline for specific fandoms without having to use X. However no matter how much I try to tell Bluesky which posts I want more of and which ones I don’t want, it doesn’t get the message and the discovery tab is mostly useless, showing me political and other content I don’t really want. I tried to get around this by pinning feeds, but of course I can’t influence those feeds to get it to show me more of what I want, and there’s the limitation of not being able to refresh for new posts. So is there anything else I can try, anything I’m missing?

I actually really like blue sky compared to the alternatives that I've tried, reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, etc. But I think the platform has an Achilles heel that has ruined the entire thing. Labelers are being weaponized against other people, sometimes not in a malicious way but in a manner of pure stupidity and incompetence. For example, a lot of people believe that sky Watch blue is a very reliable labeler because it's a community based one. But unfortunately that's not the truth. This is a very harmful and inaccurate labeler that I have seen at least a dozen times or more mislabel people that I personally know, and 'cause their engagement to basically tank on the platform or get them treated in a way that isn't really fair

If you've never heard of Sky Watch Blue and you're curious how it works: It basically is an automated algorithmic system that both scans the Blue Sky platform looking for what it thinks are offenders to its many rules. I would estimate that it has about a 65% accuracy rate here which is terribly low, for something that is going to be labeling people and a lot of people are following. But other people can also report users to the labeler, which is probably the worst part. There are people report things falsely, either because they don't like someone or they see them as competition, or they're just annoyed at seeing them.

Labelers also tend to be very difficult to undo, a lot of them don't have accounts that are active or don't respond, For example Skywatch Blue, i've never heard of anyone ever being taken off of their label when they are labeled inaccurately.

"it's just a label!! Why do you care?!?" In brief, It's similar to defamation. Imagine that you're trying to start your own niche in the blue Sky community for anything. Maybe you're an artist or you sell pottery or something like that, or you're an athlete... Someone reports you or the labeler picks you up as being a follow farmer/inauthentic behavior Simply because you used starter pack or two. Yeah, that happens. It really does. Now people look at you with this label, inauthentic behavior, and it's not even proven like in a court of appeal or a court of law or anything like that. There's no actual factual basis to that label, it's not technically proven. But people will believe it anyway. I've literally seen people and followed people who are labeled as follow farmers or inauthentic behavior, and they are normal people that don't do that. Game developers, 3D artists, etc.

Labelers aren't really all that helpful though, either. It's kind of BS, really. If you want to see a label for you privately that no one else can see, that makes sense. Sure. Like, who cares if I label the drawers in my house or in my pantry with all kinds of crazy stuff right? But imagine if I go out in public and I start putting these stickers on people. I just smack one on someone's back saying, dumb bitch. How insane is that? That everyone will now see that because that's the way I personally felt about the person? It's really insane, honestly.

People have gotten really immature with these labelers, in closing. It was really meant to solve for serious issues like extremely toxic people, actual follow bots who aren't even real people and follow like 30K people and then they have 5K followers, like that's obvious. But now people are just putting labels on people for anything. I saw one that called a group of people Puritans or something ridiculous, and they were just normal people. Like how immature! "I had a disagreement, so instead of blocking, I'll just make a labeller to piss em off" ugh

In some regions at least. Certainly affecting me here in Australia.

Update: Seems to be coming back online, albeit in a degraded state.

Post from Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3mjmlrpvc7c25

Follow-up post from Bluesky indicating it was a DDoS attack: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3mjnlu7smsk2w

Seriously, the amount of Chicken Little posts I've seen about "BLUESKY IS DEAD!", "Which alternatives site should I move to?!", etc., is so insanely obnoxious. The site's been on and off down, purportedly due to DDoS attacks and y'all are acting like "The devs admitted the platform is vibe coded, that's why it's down, GG, it's over!"

Jesus. Take a breath. It's not the first time a website, or a social media platform has been down for an extended period of time and it won't be the last. It's not the end of the world, or the end of Bluesky.

according to the status page, first it was api.pop1.bsky.app that went down... then api.pop2.bsky.app went down. and then inkcap.us-east.host.bsky.network went down. now the whole status page itself wont even load.

someone fucked up BIG time lmao. cant wait to see the postmortem on this

update: 6 hours later it's still down, but at least the status page is back up i guess

Broke: it's the vibecoding

Woke: it's DDOS attacks

Bespoke: the DDOS attacks are coming from anti-AI folks who can actually code so Bsky can't stop them because they don't know how

Witchsky is a forked copy of the Bluesky Social website/app. You can use it on a browser to still connect to Bluesky, it's a bit slow sometimes (this is always an issue with Witchsky). I'm sure Deer Social will work still as well since both use non-Bluesky APIs for the most part.

I thought I could at least log in over a different app and see other eurosky members messages?

I'm just curious why. I thought with switching to eurosky I'd be completely independent from blueskys infrastructure. But now I think I got it wrong somehow.

Can someone explain it to me?

Well the world hasn't end, and we can all get out of bunkers now and start skeeting again. Bluesky is back up.