As a Roblox developer, I am joining a lot of fellow devs and Roblox users who are currently working on ditching Twitter and moving to other microblogging sites with less toxicity. It would be great if Roblox supported this move by letting us link to https://bsky.app and https://www.threads.net profiles from our Roblox profiles/groups.
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to reach my players who are also leaving Twitter for Bluesky/Threads. Twitter is currently the only Social Link which allows a developer to easily post things like game updates, and the only one which easily allows UGC artists to advertise and hype up their releases. (Most Roblox users are not on Facebook, & Youtube Communities are only for video creators)
I support this and I hope we will get something like this soon. I myself don’t like using twitter anymore, because it is full of toxicity misinformation and also lacks any kind of moderation. It supports hate speech, and also you could be just posting UGC updates, or Game updates and some sketchy bot accounts will try to engage and interact with you.
I think blusky and threads are better alternatives which we can use!
The only reason why I haven’t totally ditched Twitter for Bluesky is because of the support of it on Roblox. Supporting Bluesky sounds like it’s the realistic next step for social links. Major support for this!
I support this idea! I’ve had to go private on Twitter due to the new block update + other things, and I’ve since made the jump to Bluesky along with many other devs. It would be really nice if I could link that the same way I can link my Twitter.
Yes please! I’d much rather be linking players and customers to my accounts on less polarizing social media sites.
Bluesky has been a really nice breath of fresh air in terms of sharing, and seeing online content - it allows users to curate and customize the type of content they see with feeds.
As a developer it is difficult to reach new players and keep up with other developers organically.
The benefit of a Bluesky link is that users who are interested in my content would be able to follow my account where I post work-in-progress screenshots of my experiences / games. Roblox does not offer a suitable feature for this. The best we have is friend activity (limited to only your friends) or groups (which are limited to specific games). Bluesky offers better tools for finding out what games are being created and to follow their progress.
Additionally a platform like Bluesky can be invaluable for reaching new audiences. Users who click my Bluesky link will likely also be recommended other great Roblox developers to follow. It offers features like custom feeds and starter-packs to let users tune topics they are interested in, as opposed to other media that focus solely on algorithmic engagement. Games will be able to reach new users, many of which may not even have Roblox accounts yet.
Bluesky is also currently rising in popularity and has already amassed millions of users. Just today it has reached record engagement and it shows no signs of slowing down - which in the current day and age of the internet is an incredibly difficult feat to pull off. It is clear that users are interested in using Bluesky.
If you’re referring to the fediverse, yes that is true but there’s still around 1 million monthly active users according to the latest data from https://fedidb.org.
These users are from a variety of communities and it’s still a decent amount of users.
If you’re referring about Bluesky, @Zomebody did just point out this:
Bluesky has been vital for some people to remain connected with others. In Brazil, there was a massive migration to Bluesky temporarily when Twitter was taken down.
I don’t see any reason not to add it. Plus, you can view posts more easily on Bluesky without an account whereas Twitter only showed the most popular posts without an account and had heavy limits (I don’t know if it’s changed now, I browse Twitter through Nitter on https://xcancel.com).
I don’t use either so I have no bias here but the original post is about adding Bluesky (and Threads) as valid links, not about removing Twitter links entirely.
Even if the way they phrased it sounds like they want people to ditch Twitter for Bluesky, that’s not what is being asked for here and frankly I see no issue with adding something like this when nothing else is lost.
What viable argument is there other than potentially “not enough people use it”?
While I see the point of the argument, if enough developers are asking for it; what’s the harm in adding it?
This is not the first time I’ve seen Bluesky links be mentioned in feature requests on here.
If Roblox somehow doesn’t see this as beneficial (I don’t see how they wouldn’t, what exactly are they losing? after all, by the sounds of it, it doesn’t seem like the site is entirely dead as some make it out to be) then that would just show in some form that they don’t really care about the communication developers want.
As mentioned already, Facebook isn’t something I’ve seen anybody use (in a major way) and yet it has its own link. I would argue Bluesky would get way more use out of it than Facebook does, even if Facebook is far from dead and quite the opposite, it shouldn’t be about whether a site has a massive user-base in general, rather whether the site has an active Roblox user-base.
@SkyyOrbs Great feature request, I would love to see more social media options for us developers to link & post on. Anecdotally I haven’t used Threads, but I’ve been enjoying Bluesky recently and so have many of my peers.
I do enjoy browsing Bluesky and seeing what people are up to. It’s a much less hostile and dangerous environment than Twitter’s been in my experience.
I care a lot about the well being of the people who follow my work - and about my own too! - so I think it’d be nice if these options were added.
Bluesky does have a slightly different moderation approach to most other social apps (posts are filtered actively, but the post data is owned and controlled by the owner so can’t be taken down fully).
I think this is reconcilable with Roblox’s model - especially if we’re talking about more mature and autonomous people - but I do think you would need to consider moderation. Back when devs lobbied for Discord social links (see Roblox’s prior reservations on Discord here), I don’t think moderation was properly talked about in the community conversation, and as a result it’s caused no end of trouble for Roblox having to deal with the prospect of people using Discord in shady ways.
The people in charge of Bluesky seem very nice and responsive though; someone could reach out to them to ask about how they intend to handle younger users.
My only counter to this idea is to instead allow any custom links, not just specific social sites. It’s 2024, social sites will be coming and going more often in the future and only allowing specific ones is not very future-proof.
This falls into a similar category as the feature request for social links on the Talent Hub:
