It’s also hilarious that the users are using the term “skeet”. (Interestingly and semi-related, a TechCrunch article said that Bluesky needs sex workers and Black Twitter in order to thrive.)
Wasn't the thing that killed Google+ that it just didn't have enough engagement for it to be worth for Google to run it? I seem to remember that at the time, Google was saying that 99% of the user sessions were less than a minute, or something like that, and that's the reason they are shutting it down. If I remember that correctly, it seems it wouldn't have mattered if they had a Beta label on it or not.
Basically Bluesky is getting to learn all of the lessons about why running a social network is hard, at an extremely high speed, with lots of public scrutiny. Fun.
Not a comment specific to Bluesky at all, but I think it's human to believe that we are different than the thousands/millions/billions of people to try $THING before us. That somehow our intuition is better (it might be, but rarely), or that it will be faster/easier to just experiment our way to our end goal rather than step back and learn first (it might be, but rarely).
Sometimes I’ll revisit code I’ve written and think “wow, so dumb, I could’ve just done xyz” only to implement my obviously far-superior method and recall that I’ve already learned this lesson and there was a good reason I hadn’t done xyz the first time.
I am humbled every time I look at my old code. I'm always disappointed by it. This is because I've grown since I wrote it, so that's a good thing. I don't want my best work to be behind me.
At the same time, I also have to recognize that the brilliant code I'm writing right now will look disappointing in five years.
I try to leave comments for myself and others when I’ve had to write code that looks less than ideal. It’s nice to know something was hacked in for convenience or because it was the best solution at the time. :)
Yes, when you're knowingly writing less than ideal code.
But we're talking about writing code that you thought was great when you wrote it, but when you come back to it a few years later, you can see how far from great it really was.
Which, for me, accounts for about 80% of everything I've written.
Yeah, which given that Bluesky is a Twitter spin-off with Jack Dorsey as an identified cofounder, board member, and so much the public face that the actual CEO has to remind people that she, not Dorsey, is the CEO, is a bit surprising. You'd think that they’d know all this from day one...
I mean, it blew up in popularity literally overnight. I'm willing to bet a lot of these features are on their backlog, they just haven't had time to do them all yet.
People elsewhere have said it before, and I'm going to echo their words: It is simply irresponsible to launch a new social media platform without a solution for trust and safety already in place.
That they did so puts their judgement in serious question.
Does being a private, invite-only deployment count as launching nowadays? We used to reserve that word for when services publicly launch and are ready for the general public.
When you're spamming about yourself throughout the internet, paying for publicity about how you super secret private exclusive club is so much better than Twitter, yes, it's a launch. In the same way that Clubhouse launched, despite being invite only.
I don't think bluesky has control over other people hyping them. If they were buying Super Bowl ads, that would be one thing. Exuberant press from extremely online take makers is another.
Getting users to use a new social media platform is an extremely difficult ask. What's the point of investing weeks/months building content moderation for "trust and safety" if nobody ends up using the platform?
So far Bluesky has learned the mistakes of Mastodon's awful search and 'choose an instance' confusion and has a default server ready for users to use, instead of being forced to choose. But it risks repeating the same mistakes as Clubhouse if it doesn't open its invite system once another wave happens.
The next wave of users running away from Twitter will happen when the orange man takes back his Twitter account and sends his first tweet in years, with the media screaming about it. Probably later this year, but who knows.
We'll see how Bluesky really performs on adoption when that next wave happens.
I have not yet tried Bluesky, but paradoxically, I think the "success" that currently everybody wants to try Bluesky might be an indicator that it will fail.
If there is so much demand, why does nobody offer a free and open client? This might be a sign that it is hard to write and/or run one.
I tried Nostr and it was extremely easy. Because it is so easy to write and run a client, there are plenty already.
People have released multiple open-source alt clients (mostly in beta states, because it hasn't been very long). I've played with the API myself and it's really quite easy to use, especially with an SDK (there's an official one in typescript and community ones are sprouting up in almost every major language). I'm in a discord for people doing stuff with the API that has almost 1k members
You could definitely build a read-only one; only account creation and the things that go with it are invite-only, the rest is already public and distributed. I don't know of a client like you describe existing yet, but I could use the API endpoints I've already worked with to build one if I wanted to take the time.
There's an underlying protocol (AT protocol), and then there's the Bluesky app that's built on top of it (and has its own public API, etc). Only the Bluesky layer requires authentication (and is therefore gated behind closed signups for now). My understanding is it's mainly gated because they're a tiny team experiencing explosive growth, so they have to make sure it doesn't take down the whole system (they recently had to migrate DBs because users doubled in 24 hours)
There's a layer of data and interaction that exists at the application level right now. I don't know exactly where the line is drawn between the two, but I think eg. likes might be at the bsky level right now (while posts themselves are at the AT Protocol level)
I believe the team plans to move as many things as possible down to the AT level over time
The answer to existing centralized for-profit systems blowing up, or to existing federated systems having various problems (some of them caused by an inadequate federation architecture), is not another centralized for-profit system with vague promises of future federation.
Meanwhile, folks are crowing about how great the vibe is on the platform, and how welcoming it is to victimized communities.
It's, what, 60,000 people?
All invite-only?
With a campaign specifically targeting Twitter power-users?
And very actively curated to push out troublemakers?
Yeah, of course the vibe is good. Now. Let's see what it's like when there's a few million folks on the platform with a small but vocal percentage actively engaging in harassment.
Edit to add:
Now, if they do live up to the hype--if they succeed in building an open, federated, protocol-first social platform that somehow also manages to bolt on opt-in algorithmic curation, moderation, and so forth--then that's great!
But they're a private company, operating a very small platform right now, so it's simply too early to tell if they'll manage to live up to their promises.
Yes. Moderation is a hard problem. "Black Twitter" power-users complained about the racism on the incredibly anodyne Mastodon because Mastodon being volunteer and not-for-profit run, did not hire an army of 3rd-world moderators to handle the problem and still needs volunteer admins to take care of bigots, spammers, and other problem-users.
It basically has broken down that the nerds and idealists have moved to Mastodon, the twitter elite have gone to BlueSky, the Bitcoin bros have gone to Nostr, and the people who have to use Twitter professionally have stayed with the bigots and conspiracy-theorists that are taking over Twitter.
And honestly, if that's the way it shakes out, I'd be fine with that. Tech is obsessed with winner-takes-all solutions thanks to a couple decades of "blitzscaling" bullshit. But there's no reason people can't fan out and find communities on a range of platforms.
Even better, if Bluesky and Nostr live up to their promise of open protocols, then maybe we can look forward to some level of interoperability so people don't have to choose one place, but rather than easily connect with communities on many different platforms.
But, speaking for myself, I'm not putting my social eggs in a private corporation's basket until they've proven they'll truly be as open as they say. I've done that and I'm done with that.
> nerds and idealists have moved to Mastodon, the twitter elite have gone to BlueSky, the Bitcoin bros have gone to Nostr, and the people who have to use Twitter professionally have stayed with the bigots and conspiracy-theorists that are taking over Twitter
…and everyone considers themselves better off without all those other groups shitting up the place.
I agree with the other commenter saying that having everyone in the same room is overhyped.
Literally the only thing I care about isn't being addressed and that is news networks posting about social media drama, and that isn't a platform problem, but a news network problem.
People deserve to have a fun place to play on the internet, but the less the rest of us know about what goes on there, the better.
The "Black Twitter" on Mastodon story needs a nuance. It's not them receiving racist remarks on Mastodon (although surely that might happen too), it's mostly about tone policing.
Mastodon's culture is safetysm, toxic positivity, put a content warning on everything. Some experience that as discouraging or even erasure.
This is the irony inherent in the desire of many to plant a flag on something, anything, and call it Twitter 2.0.
Many of the negative aspects of Twitter that drove people away (incl pre-Musk era) are repeated here. The ownership is centralized; why would a protocol need a CEO? The network will lean towards centralization as well; let's be real, the default instance will be 1000x bigger than any federated offshoot).
It's frankly unfortunate to see so many of the tech bloggerati trying Mastodon, an actually decentralized solution without a for-profit mission, and then bandwagoning on to this new thing under the guise of wanting some lols, because Mastodon is too boring, they are no slapfights over celebrity/social media nonsense.
I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, but why would we celebrate Jack Dorsey rebuilding the same flawed system that went too far towards censorship in the name of "misinformation"?
Because Jack Dorsey may have funded BlueSky, but he's not involved in running it, he's instead focused on Nostr, the web3 answer to the problem. And as for "misinformation" vs "censorship", I think Fox News just demonstrated over $700 million reasons to care about misinformation.
Not to say if it's the best or worst, but considering his experience of running a platform he himself say failed at what he wanted it to do, wouldn't he be a good person to have on your side in order to stay clear of making the same mistakes?
He openly say he fucked up with Twitter, and his involvement as funder of both Bluesky and Nostr is him trying to correct his mistakes with new platforms that cannot be abused in the same manner.
Having a waitlist was a smart approach for Bluesky. Gives them an opportunity to scale and polish the user experience while building hype for people without an invite.
> Although Bluesky is currently hosted on only one server under the control of the Bluesky team, its intention is to eventually become a decentralized protocol for a multiplicity of federated servers with a variety of different moderation practices
At this point they're just kicking the can down the road, postponing the problems that Mastodon already had to face.
If mastodon.social were the entirety of Mastodon, it would seem a lot more user friendly.
Bluesky made some key decisions that are different from Mastodon:
- Profiles and posts are portable across hosted instances. If you have a problem with your admins, etc, you'll be able to hop away without much fuss.
- Moderation is decoupled from hosting. They're still working out the details, but the overall vision is that the global firehose is public, and you'll be able to opt in and out of different moderators which operate on that stream. If you don't like what a moderator is doing, you'll be able to just turn them off for yourself. Moderation doesn't prevent people from posting, it allows people to prevent themselves from seeing.
Which is all good in principle, and it'll be interesting to see how it works out.
The profile portability story is good, save that as far as I can tell, Bluesky server operators don't actually do much save for provide storage and a place for clients to connect to, specifically because the algorithms and curation are being treated as a separate layer. So ironically I see far less reason for identity portability in that ecosystem since (to my knowledge) the server you're using doesn't have much of an impact on your experience.
Additionally, this layered functional architecture creates new kinds of problems.
For example, with Mastodon, if I'm helping fund my instance (which I do) I'm also helping fund the moderation staff, because the instance architecture and the moderation story are tightly coupled.
With BS, moderation is a separate service which has to be funded... how?
Same goes with curation.
So I still have a lot of questions about the Bluesky model.
And this is all assuming they actually pull off what they claim, and it's still waaaay too early to say if this'll all work in practice.
> So ironically I see far less reason for identity portability in that ecosystem since (to my knowledge) the server you're using doesn't have much of an impact on your experience
To an extent, though I still think it's valuable for situations where eg. a host might decide they don't want to host you if you post certain content. In the same way: a website host doesn't normally have much of an impact on your experience, unless they decide to kick you off or otherwise exert control over you
> moderation as a separate service, which has to be funded... how?
It's an interesting question; I think some of it will be answered with algorithmic/AI-based filtering (false-positives are more tolerable if users have the ability to opt out!). People have also talked about a model where you can just share (or subscribe to) communal block-lists. So maybe your circle of friends does its own internal "moderation" just by using the site (blocking people is already a normal part of my day today usage of both bsky and twitter)
With a platform this open and flexible, there are tons of options to be explored!
> And this is all assuming they actually pull off what they claim, and it's still waaaay too early to say if this'll all work in practice.
> So ironically I see far less reason for identity portability in that ecosystem since (to my knowledge) the server you're using doesn't have much of an impact on your experience.
One of the biggest reasons why people change Mastodon instances is because the instance shuts down.
I had to do an emergency switch because my instance admin went AWOL, and it was breaking down technically. In other cases, the admins decide they don't want do run an instance anymore, for whatever reason.
If posts could be migrated on Bluesky, that would be a vast improvement over Mastodon.
You are right, that is definitely one very good reason why many people move (though in the Mastodon world, I would argue it's probably not the biggest reason outside of weird events like the shutdown of mastodon.lol), and in the Bluesky world, probably the primary reason (since there's no concept of local moderation or community policies that you might disagree with, thereby leading to an instance switch).
Eh, tbh though, I don't know why I was arguing that point, it really doesn't matter one way or another.
You absolutely identified a very good reason to want to switch instances, and why account portability has value in the Bluesky world.
I wish ActivityPub had a better solve for this, but unfortunately a true federated model makes that awfully difficult (since the entire ecosystem has to update its view of where posts are located).
Similarly, if I'm in a length email exchange with a friend on Gmail, and then I move to another service, there's no way to update my friend's account to "rewrite" those emails to point to the new service. It's a deep limitation in the model itself. The only question is whether the tradeoff is worth it (and, to me, it is).
Another very cool decision they made for AT Protocol/Bluesky is making user identity domain name-based. So you can just sign up as a subdomain of eg .bsky.social, but you can also bring in a custom domain name. This neatly solves identity-portability and even trust/verification in one swoop
(you can also change which domain your bsky profile is identified by, which, I'm not quite sure how that works at a protocol level but it is possible)
> This neatly solves identity-portability and even trust/verification in one swoop
Until you lose control of the domain for any number of reasons and then whoever buys it happily continue on as you. A simple credit card processing problem can lose your "identity" at some point in the future.
The same is true if you use a custom domain for email, for your company's servers, for any number of other critical things. It's no different (and arguably those other things are more catastrophic than losing control of a social media profile)
Also, to emphasize, regular people who don't do those other things don't have to roll a custom domain on bsky (and are unlikely to). But eg. if NPR wants to make a bsky account under @npr.org, that's really quite good verification that it's "the real NPR account", and then nobody has to deal with any of the politics around verification which have become a dumpster-fire on twitter since Musk took over
Using a domain for verification isn't the worst idea but there's still some things to work out. How will the service handle homoglyphs domains? Are they going to ship a webfont that makes homoglyphs obvious? Will they display punycode? It's all well and good the real NPR can use @npr.org but what will ｎｐｒ.org end up looking like on the service? Will it be distinct enough normal users will be able to distinguish it from the real domain as displayed on the website or app?
Again, it's a strict improvement over what came before (centrally-managed namespace), and it lumps bsky's problem in with the existing place where the web is already wrestling with these questions. It hitches its cart to the world's biggest and most robust decentralized-identity mechanism; I can't think of a better approach to take, perfect or not.
Actually the domain (handle) resolves to your DID which is you primary identifier and which contains your public key and without coresponding private key, nobody would be able to happily continue as you... See: https://atproto.com/guides/identity. It would be better though if the DID didn't contain the link back to the domain, so that you could continue with your identity under different domain...
> If you don't like what a moderator is doing, you'll be able to just turn them off for yourself. Moderation doesn't prevent people from posting, it allows people to prevent themselves from seeing.
This is going to polarize people even further.
Before social media, had you seen people with radical views? Yes there were cults but it was all limited. Social media polarizes people and with this kind of moderation it seems it's only going to exacerbate the problem.
There will be no one left in these polarized groups to correct their course.
Edit: It's going to create more and more groups who don't want to connect and have a discord on common issues.
> There will be no one left in these polarized groups to correct their course.
This presumes polarized groups start neutral and can somehow being corrected away from polarization. People often seek out polarized spaces and then get more polarized but they're starting far from a neutral position.
a) You could say this about any communication channel- the web, email lists, group chats, in-person meetings. Should we require a moderator in every social sphere?
b) Personally I think butting heads and being outraged by what others are saying is the bigger factor in polarization, which this would actually help with (at least, I've noticed I became a lot more politically nuanced and a lot less emotional when I made a concerted effort to pare down my twitter feed using blocks and mutes)
>Profiles and posts are portable across hosted instances. If you have a problem with your admins, etc, you'll be able to hop away without much fuss.
As far as I can tell, this is only with cooperation of the server owner; since their "DID Placeholder" relies on a server to provide a string of identity updates. ActivityPub can do the same thing with HTTP redirects; and Mastodon supports cooperative profile redirection, which is morally equivalent. Polycentric[0] is a tad more decentralized than this, AFAIK it's specifically designed to make cryptographic keys first-class identities (so called "sovereign identity"). No clue if they've managed to solve the obvious pitfalls of cryptoidentity.
[0] Another censorship-resistant social networking tool being funded by FUTO Tech, of whom Louis Rossman is a spokesperson for
That moderator idea seems huge to me. That means Moderation is less like a benevolent dictator that people might disagree with, and more like a view filter.
There can then be many ways to implement the filters: voting, dictators, AI, etc.
It seems unworkable to me. If you filter the trolls, but the people you follow don't, your feed isn't going to make sense. This causes a race to the bottom in terms of moderation, which causes a bad experience for everybody.
One thing that moderation should also do is restrict which accounts can see your posts in their discovery feed. Even if the posts are public and those account would be able to navigate to the posts with a link sometime some of your followers are just there to spam/troll.
> The federation architecture allows anyone to host a BGS, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers.
The blog post seems kind of hand-wavy. One question is, how do they make the few large BGS censorship-resistant?
(I know I'm violating the HN guidelines, but I hate how they've hidden the scrollbar on that blog post.)
Maybe its because of my crypto years, but nothing tunes me out of the conversation more than "decentralized".
There is no such thing. You can try your best but the laws of human behavior pretty much ensure that centralization and cartelization will happen, unless specifically stopped via outside regulators.
Mastodon's user experience issues should be perfectly resolvable - you can follow accounts on other instances, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to create accounts on other instances as well.
Go to an instance, select a bunch of interests, and have it return a set of instances that are accepting new accounts.
It's meant to be a federated service - it should act like one.
The issue is not online communities per se, it is creating yet another social media site that tries to house everyone. HN is a focused audience with active moderation, that's why it works.
Social media? Completely different story. Scale is off the charts so it is difficult to moderate. Lots of noise, people trying to be brands and brands trying to be people. Idiotic clamoring for blue checkmarks as if they actually mean something. Collective belief in the metrics of the platform meaning something overall. Little pushback against unpleasant individuals, and few people questioning the pace or mechanics of platforms that actually create toxic environments.
But yeah, other than that, social media is great. :)
You're drawing some arbitrary line where a "focused audience" isn't "social media" whereas a "media site that tries to house everyone" is.
All of these are social media. Tik Tok, Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Github (yes, Github), Discord, and on and on... they're all social media, in that they provide places for individuals to connect and communicate.
Which is what the OP seemed to be objecting to.
Personally, I 100% agree with you: I don't believe winner-takes-all social media platforms must necessarily be the future, and in fact I think it'd be better if there was far greater diversity, which is why I strongly believe in a protocols-over-platforms future.
it's still in doubt who exactly owns bluesky pbllc, but there has been some discussion and the claim is that it is owned by "the team" (which is vague and doesn't specify who or quantify how much stake is held by a shareholder).
again, who owns the PBLLC?
after clearing that up, I suppose my other question concerning Bluesky is if they intend to submit their protocol to the IETF or something. It's weird they're doing this whole thing parallel to protocols like W3C ActivityPub.
> the service was straining under something that would become known as “the hellthread”
hellthreads have been a thing on the fediverse since forever, it's as if the people behind bluesky didn't even bother to spend any time there before deciding to do their own thing
> hellthreads have been a thing on the fediverse since forever
"hellthreads" have been a thing on the internet since people started interacting with each other on the internet. I don't think people on the fediverse invented the word either, the first time I saw something named "hellthread" I think was on early Twitter.
Also, I don't think anyone is claiming that Bluesky invented the word. The article just says that a particular thread started being called such, and specifically "the hellthread" instead of the general "hellthread".
The people on bluesky are not actually upset about the "hellthreads", they're mostly reveling and laughing about it. It's a fun piece of chaos, feels very early-internet
Mastodon is terrible because it’s hard to join—unlike Bluesky, a social network that is hard to join, which is great.
Journalists are flocking to Bluesky, and not Mastodon because Bluesky allows retweets—which Mastodon doesn’t allow. Oh, and about hashtags, direct messages, and post edits not being available on Bluesky? Journalists don’t need them.
Mastodon does have retweets, and the joining is really easy after you pick a server. I think it's better that people have to pick and can still communicate with others who picked differently, instead of there being one obvious choice.
You can have a nice centralized layer over a robust decentralized back-end, which people only have to use if things go south. And then that will keep the big players more honest, because users can just leave when they don't like what the client is doing (instead of being held hostage, like they are on twitter right now)
Seems like the early mover effect. Regardless, these fediverse wars are fascinating to watch.
Mastodon has the interesting situation where enthusiasts want to grow the network by having high profile characters join yet paradoxically the culture is exactly opposite to that. They frown upon influencer culture, anything remotely capitalistic, famous, etc. They're also against basic features like search, quote tweets, recommendation algorithms, anything proven and essential to make a network grow. Admittedly, those mechanisms do tend to lead to the culture seen on Twitter.
Hilariously, that's what people seem to want. The high profile Twitter users that had every chance to join Mastodon, never did. Yet immediately jump to Bluesky.
In response, Mastodon (the company) seems to finally come around and make some changes (easier to join, quote tweets coming, etc).
Ultimately, the moderation approach is going to be decisive. In my view, Mastodon is "toxically safe". It leads to a culture unfit for the masses.
Bluesky's long term culture is unclear to me, but I imagine it will be Twitter-like on the main server.
Amazing how a “slightly sexist” post not being banned from Twitter is definitive evidence of leadership malpractice and direct threats to murder people on Bluesky is just fun “shitposting”. Mainstream media is truly horrified of Elon Musk.
It's just not. I realize that a large chunk of former Twitter addicts and propagandists have MDS, but Bluesky is dead in the water. People are just gonna have to deal with Twitter's increased freedom of speech if they want to be heard on social media.
118 comments
[ 248 ms ] story [ 2467 ms ] threadIt’s also hilarious that the users are using the term “skeet”. (Interestingly and semi-related, a TechCrunch article said that Bluesky needs sex workers and Black Twitter in order to thrive.)
I am humbled every time I look at my old code. I'm always disappointed by it. This is because I've grown since I wrote it, so that's a good thing. I don't want my best work to be behind me.
At the same time, I also have to recognize that the brilliant code I'm writing right now will look disappointing in five years.
But we're talking about writing code that you thought was great when you wrote it, but when you come back to it a few years later, you can see how far from great it really was.
Which, for me, accounts for about 80% of everything I've written.
That they did so puts their judgement in serious question.
> paying for publicity about how you super secret private exclusive club is so much better than Twitter
I haven't seen either of those things happening from the bluesky team. I've seen them talk about bluesky, which makes sense, but spamming?
Neither have I seen any ads to join bluesky, which would be weird considering you cannot really join bluesky unless you get an invite.
Where did you see the paid advertisement precisely?
The next wave of users running away from Twitter will happen when the orange man takes back his Twitter account and sends his first tweet in years, with the media screaming about it. Probably later this year, but who knows.
We'll see how Bluesky really performs on adoption when that next wave happens.
If there is so much demand, why does nobody offer a free and open client? This might be a sign that it is hard to write and/or run one.
I tried Nostr and it was extremely easy. Because it is so easy to write and run a client, there are plenty already.
Is there a client online that one can simply use by visiting a website?
Edit: here's one https://skypulse.dvy.io/
High-level explanation of the protocol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35822267
I believe the team plans to move as many things as possible down to the AT level over time
It's invitation-only, with a total of ~50K users, many of whom are non-technical celebrities. That's why.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto-ecosystem
https://twitter.com/ryxcommar/status/1651704456088518656
Also gmail can talk with other email users.
Meanwhile, folks are crowing about how great the vibe is on the platform, and how welcoming it is to victimized communities.
It's, what, 60,000 people?
All invite-only?
With a campaign specifically targeting Twitter power-users?
And very actively curated to push out troublemakers?
Yeah, of course the vibe is good. Now. Let's see what it's like when there's a few million folks on the platform with a small but vocal percentage actively engaging in harassment.
Edit to add:
Now, if they do live up to the hype--if they succeed in building an open, federated, protocol-first social platform that somehow also manages to bolt on opt-in algorithmic curation, moderation, and so forth--then that's great!
But they're a private company, operating a very small platform right now, so it's simply too early to tell if they'll manage to live up to their promises.
It basically has broken down that the nerds and idealists have moved to Mastodon, the twitter elite have gone to BlueSky, the Bitcoin bros have gone to Nostr, and the people who have to use Twitter professionally have stayed with the bigots and conspiracy-theorists that are taking over Twitter.
Even better, if Bluesky and Nostr live up to their promise of open protocols, then maybe we can look forward to some level of interoperability so people don't have to choose one place, but rather than easily connect with communities on many different platforms.
But, speaking for myself, I'm not putting my social eggs in a private corporation's basket until they've proven they'll truly be as open as they say. I've done that and I'm done with that.
…and everyone considers themselves better off without all those other groups shitting up the place.
I agree with the other commenter saying that having everyone in the same room is overhyped.
People deserve to have a fun place to play on the internet, but the less the rest of us know about what goes on there, the better.
Mastodon's culture is safetysm, toxic positivity, put a content warning on everything. Some experience that as discouraging or even erasure.
Many of the negative aspects of Twitter that drove people away (incl pre-Musk era) are repeated here. The ownership is centralized; why would a protocol need a CEO? The network will lean towards centralization as well; let's be real, the default instance will be 1000x bigger than any federated offshoot).
It's frankly unfortunate to see so many of the tech bloggerati trying Mastodon, an actually decentralized solution without a for-profit mission, and then bandwagoning on to this new thing under the guise of wanting some lols, because Mastodon is too boring, they are no slapfights over celebrity/social media nonsense.
https://reason.com/2023/03/17/researchers-pressured-twitter-...
Aside from being on Bluesky’s board of directors.
He openly say he fucked up with Twitter, and his involvement as funder of both Bluesky and Nostr is him trying to correct his mistakes with new platforms that cannot be abused in the same manner.
At this point they're just kicking the can down the road, postponing the problems that Mastodon already had to face.
If mastodon.social were the entirety of Mastodon, it would seem a lot more user friendly.
- Profiles and posts are portable across hosted instances. If you have a problem with your admins, etc, you'll be able to hop away without much fuss.
- Moderation is decoupled from hosting. They're still working out the details, but the overall vision is that the global firehose is public, and you'll be able to opt in and out of different moderators which operate on that stream. If you don't like what a moderator is doing, you'll be able to just turn them off for yourself. Moderation doesn't prevent people from posting, it allows people to prevent themselves from seeing.
The profile portability story is good, save that as far as I can tell, Bluesky server operators don't actually do much save for provide storage and a place for clients to connect to, specifically because the algorithms and curation are being treated as a separate layer. So ironically I see far less reason for identity portability in that ecosystem since (to my knowledge) the server you're using doesn't have much of an impact on your experience.
Additionally, this layered functional architecture creates new kinds of problems.
For example, with Mastodon, if I'm helping fund my instance (which I do) I'm also helping fund the moderation staff, because the instance architecture and the moderation story are tightly coupled.
With BS, moderation is a separate service which has to be funded... how?
Same goes with curation.
So I still have a lot of questions about the Bluesky model.
And this is all assuming they actually pull off what they claim, and it's still waaaay too early to say if this'll all work in practice.
To an extent, though I still think it's valuable for situations where eg. a host might decide they don't want to host you if you post certain content. In the same way: a website host doesn't normally have much of an impact on your experience, unless they decide to kick you off or otherwise exert control over you
> moderation as a separate service, which has to be funded... how?
It's an interesting question; I think some of it will be answered with algorithmic/AI-based filtering (false-positives are more tolerable if users have the ability to opt out!). People have also talked about a model where you can just share (or subscribe to) communal block-lists. So maybe your circle of friends does its own internal "moderation" just by using the site (blocking people is already a normal part of my day today usage of both bsky and twitter)
With a platform this open and flexible, there are tons of options to be explored!
> And this is all assuming they actually pull off what they claim, and it's still waaaay too early to say if this'll all work in practice.
It definitely is! But I'm excited and hopeful
One of the biggest reasons why people change Mastodon instances is because the instance shuts down.
I had to do an emergency switch because my instance admin went AWOL, and it was breaking down technically. In other cases, the admins decide they don't want do run an instance anymore, for whatever reason.
If posts could be migrated on Bluesky, that would be a vast improvement over Mastodon.
A number of such events have occurred.
I haven't actually heard of anyone moderated off an instance (aside from spammers), but maybe I hang with the "wrong" crowd for that.
Eh, tbh though, I don't know why I was arguing that point, it really doesn't matter one way or another.
You absolutely identified a very good reason to want to switch instances, and why account portability has value in the Bluesky world.
I wish ActivityPub had a better solve for this, but unfortunately a true federated model makes that awfully difficult (since the entire ecosystem has to update its view of where posts are located).
Similarly, if I'm in a length email exchange with a friend on Gmail, and then I move to another service, there's no way to update my friend's account to "rewrite" those emails to point to the new service. It's a deep limitation in the model itself. The only question is whether the tradeoff is worth it (and, to me, it is).
(you can also change which domain your bsky profile is identified by, which, I'm not quite sure how that works at a protocol level but it is possible)
Until you lose control of the domain for any number of reasons and then whoever buys it happily continue on as you. A simple credit card processing problem can lose your "identity" at some point in the future.
Also, to emphasize, regular people who don't do those other things don't have to roll a custom domain on bsky (and are unlikely to). But eg. if NPR wants to make a bsky account under @npr.org, that's really quite good verification that it's "the real NPR account", and then nobody has to deal with any of the politics around verification which have become a dumpster-fire on twitter since Musk took over
This is going to polarize people even further.
Before social media, had you seen people with radical views? Yes there were cults but it was all limited. Social media polarizes people and with this kind of moderation it seems it's only going to exacerbate the problem.
There will be no one left in these polarized groups to correct their course.
Edit: It's going to create more and more groups who don't want to connect and have a discord on common issues.
This presumes polarized groups start neutral and can somehow being corrected away from polarization. People often seek out polarized spaces and then get more polarized but they're starting far from a neutral position.
b) Personally I think butting heads and being outraged by what others are saying is the bigger factor in polarization, which this would actually help with (at least, I've noticed I became a lot more politically nuanced and a lot less emotional when I made a concerted effort to pare down my twitter feed using blocks and mutes)
As far as I can tell, this is only with cooperation of the server owner; since their "DID Placeholder" relies on a server to provide a string of identity updates. ActivityPub can do the same thing with HTTP redirects; and Mastodon supports cooperative profile redirection, which is morally equivalent. Polycentric[0] is a tad more decentralized than this, AFAIK it's specifically designed to make cryptographic keys first-class identities (so called "sovereign identity"). No clue if they've managed to solve the obvious pitfalls of cryptoidentity.
[0] Another censorship-resistant social networking tool being funded by FUTO Tech, of whom Louis Rossman is a spokesperson for
https://atproto.com/guides/identity
There can then be many ways to implement the filters: voting, dictators, AI, etc.
Seems they're finally publishing more details about it: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture
The blog post seems kind of hand-wavy. One question is, how do they make the few large BGS censorship-resistant?
(I know I'm violating the HN guidelines, but I hate how they've hidden the scrollbar on that blog post.)
There is no such thing. You can try your best but the laws of human behavior pretty much ensure that centralization and cartelization will happen, unless specifically stopped via outside regulators.
Which is much better than other systems; "twitter but like email" is a reasonable goal.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle
Email and IRC today are, as far as I know, highly centralised, but not in the same way that, say, social networks are.
Even the web is somewhat centralised (and I suppose always has been, to some degree) but it's clearly and successfully federated.
Go to an instance, select a bunch of interests, and have it return a set of instances that are accepting new accounts.
It's meant to be a federated service - it should act like one.
Why did you create an account 8 days ago, and proceed to participate in conversation here, if places like this are just a "fake shitnozzle"?
Social media? Completely different story. Scale is off the charts so it is difficult to moderate. Lots of noise, people trying to be brands and brands trying to be people. Idiotic clamoring for blue checkmarks as if they actually mean something. Collective belief in the metrics of the platform meaning something overall. Little pushback against unpleasant individuals, and few people questioning the pace or mechanics of platforms that actually create toxic environments.
But yeah, other than that, social media is great. :)
All of these are social media. Tik Tok, Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Github (yes, Github), Discord, and on and on... they're all social media, in that they provide places for individuals to connect and communicate.
Which is what the OP seemed to be objecting to.
Personally, I 100% agree with you: I don't believe winner-takes-all social media platforms must necessarily be the future, and in fact I think it'd be better if there was far greater diversity, which is why I strongly believe in a protocols-over-platforms future.
again, who owns the PBLLC?
after clearing that up, I suppose my other question concerning Bluesky is if they intend to submit their protocol to the IETF or something. It's weird they're doing this whole thing parallel to protocols like W3C ActivityPub.
hellthreads have been a thing on the fediverse since forever, it's as if the people behind bluesky didn't even bother to spend any time there before deciding to do their own thing
"hellthreads" have been a thing on the internet since people started interacting with each other on the internet. I don't think people on the fediverse invented the word either, the first time I saw something named "hellthread" I think was on early Twitter.
Also, I don't think anyone is claiming that Bluesky invented the word. The article just says that a particular thread started being called such, and specifically "the hellthread" instead of the general "hellthread".
Journalists are flocking to Bluesky, and not Mastodon because Bluesky allows retweets—which Mastodon doesn’t allow. Oh, and about hashtags, direct messages, and post edits not being available on Bluesky? Journalists don’t need them.
The fedi will remain a sub-cultural thing. I said that way back in the start of 2022 waves.
Mastodon has the interesting situation where enthusiasts want to grow the network by having high profile characters join yet paradoxically the culture is exactly opposite to that. They frown upon influencer culture, anything remotely capitalistic, famous, etc. They're also against basic features like search, quote tweets, recommendation algorithms, anything proven and essential to make a network grow. Admittedly, those mechanisms do tend to lead to the culture seen on Twitter.
Hilariously, that's what people seem to want. The high profile Twitter users that had every chance to join Mastodon, never did. Yet immediately jump to Bluesky.
In response, Mastodon (the company) seems to finally come around and make some changes (easier to join, quote tweets coming, etc).
Ultimately, the moderation approach is going to be decisive. In my view, Mastodon is "toxically safe". It leads to a culture unfit for the masses.
Bluesky's long term culture is unclear to me, but I imagine it will be Twitter-like on the main server.