Sorry for the critique on form instead of content but man, this is hard to read. Putting periods where commas belong or where a sentence should be rewritten for clarity is an obstacle to easy comprehension.
It's the confluence of sales and religion. With these rhetorical tools, everything is a sales pitch. And when everything is a pitch, all conversation is commerce. A new world. A world where hype becomes real and reality is your plaything. We call it Xchange. Xchange your reality.
I guess I don't understand what this has in terms of appeal over say a Mastodon. Mastodon of course is famous for being decentralized, and not much else.
Also not sure why they had to invent a new protocol from scratch?
Not sure if this solves it, but as a relatively heavy twitter user and as someone who REALLY would like an e.g. Mastodon to succeed, the lack of something like a universal handle and an easy way to follow them and find people you're into is 100% why Mastodon just ain't it.
Huh? Your universal handle is yourusername@your.domain, you
can follow anyone on any instance (moderation polices of your chosen
instance notwithstanding).
Search I get, decentralized search is hard without centralizing because you can’t even know all the Mastadon instances that exist. Just like email Mastadon is open federation.
Yes. I think you're probably saying better what I meant to say -- though again, even the "one username" thing makes things much easier.
I suppose what Mastodon unfortunately misses is that "microblogging" ain't like email: it's supposed to be done publicly -- so, unlike email where you're likely to have a small group of people who mostly know each other -- immediate identification of "who's talking" is far more important?
For anything to be a universal handle, you need everything to support it. Will every single project start using this protocol? Probably not. So it won't be a universal handle, just another account.
Before blockchain was the only thing anybody wanted to talk about, there were other systems that divided up trust between parties into dimensions, such that establishing whether a chain of events happened or not was an exercise of combining a bunch of independent facts and suppositions to come to a conclusion.
One that sticks out in particular is a time service. I don't know who April is, and I don't know if you're April. All I know is that someone claiming to be April sent a message intended for an alleged Barbara at 11:34:23 PDT this morning. That's all anybody trusts me to do, and that's all I claim to do.
We could divorce identity from these chat services in a similar way, but we keep making the mistake of trying to positively ID people like you would for a court case, and that's not what's needed most of the time. All we need for the happy path is a way to verify that you are the same person who claimed to be this identity a month ago, instead of someone impersonating you.
The problem is that if it's free to create identities, then people can use it to do astroturfing or false flag situations. Vetting is a big place where things fall down because vetting and adoption fight each other in an arena called Instant Gratification. Also we haven't instilled the same sort of Stranger Danger on the internet that GenX and GenY got spoonfed about public spaces since they were old enough to talk.
My first thoughts are that it's very similar to Mastodon, but has a better chance at gaining traction because its supported by Dorsey and his influential friends.
I tried mastodon once for a while, and aside from finding an instance filled with totally garbage people, it was OK. I didn't love the UI, or how federation worked or anything really. For its chosen mechanics, it had good polish.
The people that love it, love it not for its ease of use. But because it's OK for being decentralized and you can (more or less) have one pane of glass for your tech news, social media, and barking mad conspiracy forums filled with crazy people, degenerates and war criminals.
If anyone thinks this sounds like an endorsement, don't talk to me ever.
Mastodon and the dozen or so other fediverse projects are free which means they are not advertised and promoted. I have a personal rule not to buy anything that is advertised. So this is great for me. The masses don't know about it and probably never will. Some of us are fine with that as it keeps our instances manageable with participants generally smarter than average.
Perhaps Dorsey and Elon aren't BFFs (forever buddy friends) after all, this is potential competition.
There is a big opportunity coming for whoever is prepared to catch the foreseeable wave of twitter account mass-exodus which will take place as soon as Musk takes control and begins asserting themself.
Which tw inspired platforms are baked and ready deal with the influx?
Jack and Elon seem to be good friends. Elon clearly knew this was coming and still made a bid for Twitter. Could Elon be planning to bring Twitter to Bluesky? It seems crazy, but you never know.
I mean the issue isn't really getting ride of 75% it's keeping the valuable 25%. I think most people can agree that in general twitter's staff does basically nothing of value. I just don't see how they can convince the others to stay after that degree of firing.
For one, it's not so clear anymore that Elon actually wants to buy Twitter, is it? Then Bluesky would have to succeed, for Twitter to move there. How many web3 projects have succeeded yet?
It doesn't seem to matter if he wants to at this point. Not only is he being told he has to, but also faces court rulings about messing about with the process. Unless something significant changes, it's likely a matter of time before he does. (or pays significant penalties)
I don't think Elon or anyone who knows Jack Dorsey thinks this will catch on. Dorsey is unfocused, a poor leader, and terrible at building B2C products.
That's not entirely true for people at Dorsey's level.
However, it's been almost a year since Dorsey was CEO even though he didn't step down from the board until May. That is pretty close to the limit of what California would really allow in a non-compete.
In terms of personal employment, yes California is very leery of non-competes. In terms of business contracts, absolutely not. If you build a product for a customer, you can agree not to build a similar product for said customer's competitors. This is not unusual.
Practical example: one customer was a cruise line, and the company had to tactfully ask if building a similar product for a hotel didn't violate the contract. As opposed to, say, a school which would not reasonably compete with cruise lines - Semester at Sea notwithstanding. If you don't want to agree to this, you don't need to sign a contract not to work with competitors. But of course, the customer is probably not going to want to pay as much if they know that they can very quickly lose whatever edge they're getting.
That's not entirely true. California allows non-competes for someone selling a business. We don't know if Dorsey actually did sign a non-compete, but Musk is buying Twitter so this might be one of the rare instances where it'd be legal in California if he had.
> [...] any owner of a business entity selling or otherwise disposing of all of his or her ownership interest in the business entity [...] may agree with the buyer to refrain from carrying on a similar business within a specified geographic area in which the business so sold, or that of the business entity, division, or subsidiary has been carried on, so long as the buyer, or any person deriving title to the goodwill or ownership interest from the buyer, carries on a like business therein
I scanned the documentation and I didn't see anything about blockchain (I assumed at first it would be some web3 BS). Are they just using different language? It looks like it's just an open protocol
Edit: I looked at the github, not the medium page, I see I'm wrong. It is some web3 BS
> Edit: I looked at the github, not the medium page, I see I'm wrong. It is some web3 BS
Where exactly does it say that BlueSky is yet another web3 / blockchain project?
The Medium post isn't from the BlueSky team, its from a random crypto blogger and even he doesn't reference where BlueSky is a blockchain or crypto token platform.
My read of the protocol docs from when they came out a few days ago is that they're using Blockchain in the distributed merkel-tree ledger sense and not (explicitly?) in the sense of a cryptocurrency.
It seems like it models your data as a Merkel tree log, signed by an identity key that can be obtained through DNS. Unless they plan to add a namecoinish thing for identities you shouldn't really need Po* to "secure" that.
Fair enough. They have not really made it clear on the BlueSky site. I found this:
> We’re not describing what we’re building as a federated or p2p network, or as a blockchain network, because it doesn’t fall neatly in any of these categories. It could be described as a hybrid federated network with p2p characteristics, but it’s more descriptive to focus on the capabilities – self-authenticating identities and data – than on network topology.
Not that it clarifies anything for me. It feels (I'm speculating) like they are very careful not to mention web3, but maybe that's because it really has nothing to do with tokens and whatnot and is actually just a protocol that lets people run their own social network servers. But it doesn't say it's that either. Some plain language would help make it clear if it's legit or just some new take on blockchain scamming
From what I can see, it's not entirely clear it actually uses a blockchain. Their PR name-drops blockchains and "Web3", but the technical details they offer consistently fail to explain how a blockchain might be involved.
It kind of feels like Dorsey wanted a blockchain, but their engineers found that blockchain-based social media did not work well and just built a federated network, so now they're going for some "inspired by the blockchain" angle.
That's the best part of passing off algorithm and data responsibility to the users. It's entirely the users' problem to deal with the spam and bots now :P /s
And if people bothered to read some of the other BlueSky posts before commenting for the answer to see whether if it is a blockchain / crypto / web3 project in another post:
> Bluesky is not a blockchain, and we believe the adoption of social web protocols should be independent of any blockchain. [0]
> We’re not describing what we’re building as a federated or p2p network, or as a blockchain network, because it doesn’t fall neatly in any of these categories. It could be described as a hybrid federated network with p2p characteristics, but it’s more descriptive to focus on the capabilities – self-authenticating identities and data – than on network topology. [1]
In short, it is NOT a "blockchain social network" and doesn't even use one to begin with.
The title here is a bit misleading. I thought this would be an announcement from Jack Dorsey, instead it just appears to be a blogger summarizing this Twitter thread from @bluesky a few days ago:
In principle yes, but that announcement was discussed elsewhere (see my comment downthread) and there doesn't seem to be any significant information yet, otherwise, so I think it makes sense to downweight the follow-ups until there's significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
Not an Apple user either, but that Bezel looks like an iPhone 12, latest is 14, possible to tell from how wide the bezel (the part with the selfie camera) is - I guess.
"Unveils" is somewhat misleading -- this project has had a web presence for a number of years already.
They have recently distinguished the project proper from the "Bluesky community," which was -- as far as I could tell -- just a chatroom with a Matrix/Discord bridge, vaguely sanctioned by but distinct from Twitter. I couldn't understand most of what was under discussion, but it's a moderately amusing space if people arguing about what buzzwords mean is amusing to you.
Social media platform killer is always quite the murder mystery. No one ever knows who the killer is, and the killer never announces it (tiktok > everyone, insta > almost killer, Facebook > MySpace, Friendster).
TT may be popular but I wouldn't put it in the same category as FB in this case. MySpace was actually killed - it's barely used these days. On the other hand TT coexists with other platforms pretty well and has its own use cases. Nobody why cares about contact with specific people leaves another platform for TT.
The next generation of social networks seems to be focused around decentralization.
The protocol they developed (https://atproto.com/) seems to differ with ActivityPub at least in "Algorithmic Choice", a "market of open algorithms". The other features are already offered by ActivityPub - which is what Mastodon, Pleroma, GNUSocial use.
I wish they had built on top of ActivityPub instead of making their own federated protocol, but they may have some particular reasons as to why.
They’ve got some good ideas in their protocol design but god damn it reads like urbit lite.
Why did you need to invent xrpc/lexicon? (which is not xml-rpc by the way) but a purposely leaky a schemafull RPC abstraction over HTTP with introspection.
Coulda honestly just used an real xmlrpc server at that point. They borrowed every concept except made it JSON. If nothing else it would have given you pre-built libraries for every language ecosystem.
Couldn’t come at a worse time for Musk. The Twitter acquisition has to be the worse tech acquisition ever, judging purely based on the dollar value on day 0.
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Also not sure why they had to invent a new protocol from scratch?
Am I missing something?
A blockchain is a 'not crazy' potential solution?
Search I get, decentralized search is hard without centralizing because you can’t even know all the Mastadon instances that exist. Just like email Mastadon is open federation.
Isolated communities that hear about each other by diffusion is not a bad idea.
I suppose what Mastodon unfortunately misses is that "microblogging" ain't like email: it's supposed to be done publicly -- so, unlike email where you're likely to have a small group of people who mostly know each other -- immediate identification of "who's talking" is far more important?
One that sticks out in particular is a time service. I don't know who April is, and I don't know if you're April. All I know is that someone claiming to be April sent a message intended for an alleged Barbara at 11:34:23 PDT this morning. That's all anybody trusts me to do, and that's all I claim to do.
We could divorce identity from these chat services in a similar way, but we keep making the mistake of trying to positively ID people like you would for a court case, and that's not what's needed most of the time. All we need for the happy path is a way to verify that you are the same person who claimed to be this identity a month ago, instead of someone impersonating you.
The problem is that if it's free to create identities, then people can use it to do astroturfing or false flag situations. Vetting is a big place where things fall down because vetting and adoption fight each other in an arena called Instant Gratification. Also we haven't instilled the same sort of Stranger Danger on the internet that GenX and GenY got spoonfed about public spaces since they were old enough to talk.
The people that love it, love it not for its ease of use. But because it's OK for being decentralized and you can (more or less) have one pane of glass for your tech news, social media, and barking mad conspiracy forums filled with crazy people, degenerates and war criminals.
If anyone thinks this sounds like an endorsement, don't talk to me ever.
There is a big opportunity coming for whoever is prepared to catch the foreseeable wave of twitter account mass-exodus which will take place as soon as Musk takes control and begins asserting themself.
Which tw inspired platforms are baked and ready deal with the influx?
Maybe it's intended to become more like the vision behind Google Wave of old?
Lol, what a joke
Maybe this is the Year of The Web3 project.
Meh
However, it's been almost a year since Dorsey was CEO even though he didn't step down from the board until May. That is pretty close to the limit of what California would really allow in a non-compete.
Practical example: one customer was a cruise line, and the company had to tactfully ask if building a similar product for a hotel didn't violate the contract. As opposed to, say, a school which would not reasonably compete with cruise lines - Semester at Sea notwithstanding. If you don't want to agree to this, you don't need to sign a contract not to work with competitors. But of course, the customer is probably not going to want to pay as much if they know that they can very quickly lose whatever edge they're getting.
Source: California law: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...
> [...] any owner of a business entity selling or otherwise disposing of all of his or her ownership interest in the business entity [...] may agree with the buyer to refrain from carrying on a similar business within a specified geographic area in which the business so sold, or that of the business entity, division, or subsidiary has been carried on, so long as the buyer, or any person deriving title to the goodwill or ownership interest from the buyer, carries on a like business therein
Edit: I looked at the github, not the medium page, I see I'm wrong. It is some web3 BS
Where exactly does it say that BlueSky is yet another web3 / blockchain project?
The Medium post isn't from the BlueSky team, its from a random crypto blogger and even he doesn't reference where BlueSky is a blockchain or crypto token platform.
It seems like it models your data as a Merkel tree log, signed by an identity key that can be obtained through DNS. Unless they plan to add a namecoinish thing for identities you shouldn't really need Po* to "secure" that.
> We’re not describing what we’re building as a federated or p2p network, or as a blockchain network, because it doesn’t fall neatly in any of these categories. It could be described as a hybrid federated network with p2p characteristics, but it’s more descriptive to focus on the capabilities – self-authenticating identities and data – than on network topology.
From: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-s...
Not that it clarifies anything for me. It feels (I'm speculating) like they are very careful not to mention web3, but maybe that's because it really has nothing to do with tokens and whatnot and is actually just a protocol that lets people run their own social network servers. But it doesn't say it's that either. Some plain language would help make it clear if it's legit or just some new take on blockchain scamming
It kind of feels like Dorsey wanted a blockchain, but their engineers found that blockchain-based social media did not work well and just built a federated network, so now they're going for some "inspired by the blockchain" angle.
Not many keywords immediately turn me off from a project, but this is a surefire one
(Which is basically web3 more or less funnily rebranded)
Technical details: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol
Developer documentation: https://atproto.com/guides/overview
> Bluesky is not a blockchain, and we believe the adoption of social web protocols should be independent of any blockchain. [0]
> We’re not describing what we’re building as a federated or p2p network, or as a blockchain network, because it doesn’t fall neatly in any of these categories. It could be described as a hybrid federated network with p2p characteristics, but it’s more descriptive to focus on the capabilities – self-authenticating identities and data – than on network topology. [1]
In short, it is NOT a "blockchain social network" and doesn't even use one to begin with.
[0] https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-7-2022-overview
[1] https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-s...
How does it use blockchains and cryptocurrency? Is this an integral part of the distributed protocol, or is it more like Mastodon?
https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1582437529969917953
@dang, could we get the link changed to point to the original thread?
But I'll settle for anything that isn't a medium.com link, particularly a "member-only" post. Fuck that noise.
The AT Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 - Oct 2022 (99 comments)
Looks like a generic smartphone to me.
Is this some kind of Apple consumer faux pas?
They have recently distinguished the project proper from the "Bluesky community," which was -- as far as I could tell -- just a chatroom with a Matrix/Discord bridge, vaguely sanctioned by but distinct from Twitter. I couldn't understand most of what was under discussion, but it's a moderately amusing space if people arguing about what buzzwords mean is amusing to you.
So this ain’t the killer.
And those who are called killer vanished without a hit.
Remember Vero, the FB and Insta killer?
The protocol they developed (https://atproto.com/) seems to differ with ActivityPub at least in "Algorithmic Choice", a "market of open algorithms". The other features are already offered by ActivityPub - which is what Mastodon, Pleroma, GNUSocial use.
I wish they had built on top of ActivityPub instead of making their own federated protocol, but they may have some particular reasons as to why.
Why did you need to invent xrpc/lexicon? (which is not xml-rpc by the way) but a purposely leaky a schemafull RPC abstraction over HTTP with introspection.
Coulda honestly just used an real xmlrpc server at that point. They borrowed every concept except made it JSON. If nothing else it would have given you pre-built libraries for every language ecosystem.