I was commenting on Twitter the other night just how bad Twitter's recommendations --- now hard to avoid, since everyone's funneled into the official web app --- have become; it's all random US political figures that don't intersect any of my interests.
I likened it to 2003, when people fled Windows for the MacBook over issues like crapware (which: the X algorithm basically is). And: a lot of early MacBook adopters, most especially the ones that had been there for a long time, were insufferable! But we hit a point where one product was clearly better than the other, and you roll the tape forward and see how good the long-term prospects are for the niche product that just does what all its real users actually want it to.
Hard to imagine why someone would go through so much trouble to acquire Twitter just to Ballmer-ize it. You usually have to have started and built up a product yourself to screw it up this badly.
I found that some aggressive gardening of the 'For You' feed on Twitter made it borderline useful (By gardening I mean clicking the 'not interested in this post' option pretty aggressively). Eventually this seems to revert the recommendation algorithm to pre-Musk behavior.
That said, this might be different on phones than on the web app.
To your larger point, I think BlueSky is hobbled right now by the religious committment to decentralization, which the new arrivals don't care about at all. I would compare the situation to a world where people had to flee Windows for Linux—neither alternative is one that just works the way you'd want it to.
What ever they're doing with decentralization isn't really legible to me. As much as I'll say nice things about Bsky, I'm not really rooting for it. As you saw: I left Twitter after Musk bought it and landed in the Fediverse, which I actually quite liked, not out of any religious interest in architecture so much as for the promise I thought (still sort of think) it held for restoring a blogosphere-type organization to the Internet (a world where most people would just sign up for whatever the Blogger.com of Mastodon was).
Not enough people stayed in the Fediverse, and I found early Bsky culture, hm, difficult to mainline day-in day-out, so I went back to Twitter, and I'd be fine, regardless of ownership, if it would just be a good product that everyone wanted to use.
So to me, Bsky just felt like Twitter with different owners; it still sort of does. Which: if you're looking for a less-shitty Twitter, to me, that's Bsky's offering today.
I completely agree with you—the large exodus from Twitter means that both sites have the Twitter feel, so people can choose. My point about decentralization is that it imposes some weird technical limits on Bluesky for reasons that the normal users it is now attracting have zero interest in. For example, the list of who you block is public, and you can't quietly make someone stop following you by quickly blocking and unblocking them.
I'm sure there are additional limitations, too. All of these stem from highly religious architectural choices that are of no interest to 99% of the current user base, who just want pre-Musk Twitter back. The obvious endpoint is what happened to email—there will be one central provider who can set arbitrary policy, and the decentralization part will just linger on as a series of annoying hoops that developers have to jump through to work with the de facto centralized site.
I likened it to 2003, when people fled Windows for the MacBook over issues like crapware (which: the X algorithm basically is). And: a lot of early MacBook adopters, most especially the ones that had been there for a long time, were insufferable! But we hit a point where one product was clearly better than the other, and you roll the tape forward and see how good the long-term prospects are for the niche product that just does what all its real users actually want it to.
Hard to imagine why someone would go through so much trouble to acquire Twitter just to Ballmer-ize it. You usually have to have started and built up a product yourself to screw it up this badly.