Weird. It shows as fully operational to me. The degraded performance was resolved yesterday a few hours after it started thanks, at least in part, to Paul Frazee (@pfrazee.com).
Thought i could be the fastest grabbing this after they enable singnup again but both are gone by the time. Thank you though for the generosity, instead of selling it like other people out there.
Twitter got a lot of grace when it had growing pains 17 years ago when it was new. Remember the Fail Whale? It got a name it was handled so positively. So yes, Twitter did get positive spin when it did the same things.
When a new ice cream place opens and gets overwhelmed because the McDonalds across the street can’t get its ice cream machine to work more than 2 hours a day, it would pretty funny to see a bunch of people dressed like Ronald McDonald whining that the new place gets treated differently.
I've been itching for months for a Twitter alternate, and I'm not placing much hope in the members only waitlist. Whoever is funding them needs to open the wallets to get them to scale up asap, it's like they can't take advantage of these moments when Twitter falls apart.
I think that failed because it appealed to a comparatively much smaller audience and that audience was likely more engaged with mainstream social media much more through amplifying other “leaders” content than creating their own. In a case like that it’s much more difficult to rapidly acquire the captive audience ready to jump ship to the new platform unless you can get a bunch of the most visible leaders to very quickly do the same before the outrage dies down.
In the case of Twitter these changes are impacting a much more diverse population of passive consumers and active content creators, and doing so in a way that these policy changes, if permanent, will induce chronic friction in using the platform, so it may be a better opportunity that prior movements to ditch existing platforms.
I’m talking about probabilities though, not predicting that as an outcome. And I think the overall probability, while higher, may still not be too high. But I’m just an interested observer with no particular expertise in the social dynamics of network effects, so take this comment in that context as well.
The difference with Voat, to my mind, is that it mostly took the outflow of a sub-set of users who were aggrieved by Reddit at the time. This meant that it grew well, but was a more specific niche instead of having a broad base of users.
What's happening now with both Reddit and Twitter is effecting almost all of the users equally, which potentially opens up more of generic migration option. I'd never been that interested in Bluesky before, but in the last couple days, 5-10 people I was still sometimes checking in on on Twitter moved over, so now I can't see their posts at all on either platform since I don't have an account on either. It's a real bummer, and it feels like it's also preventing people from really committing to Bluesky, since there's no even read-only access to it, people who still want to have some reach can't use it exclusively.
Yes this. It clearly seems to have emerged as a result of Twitter’s direction since, near as I can tell, Dorsey only started down that path when it became clear that Elon might not be the savior he’d hoped for.
In which case I’d hope bluesky planned for the possibility of a rapid decline driving people to <alternative> and made plans for very rapid scaling and it’s just that implementing them is still non trivial.
And/or they didn’t imagine the occurrence (somewhat reasonably) of multiple events on the magnitude of those from the past week driving so much interest this fast. I don’t even use Twitter but the recent news, and awareness of a (hopefully) healthy alternative that I might find worth my time, how driven me and probably other like me to turn to interest. How does one even get into it?
Ah, thanks. I wasn’t sure how they could bootstrap that sort of thing. That’s always a hurdle in a service that fundamentally requires network effects to hit critical mass.
It feels empty, like people created accounts then left after a week since there was never the critical mass to support a constant buzz of information. And (this is just my weird very subjective opinion) Mastodon often feels like the unholy child of 2010 Tumblr and Stackoverflow.
After having experienced several migrations, I would avoid like the plague any platform that includes a CEO, even if it claims to supports open standards. Mastodon is a better choice long-term.
As someone who’s had an account for awhile, I probably contributed to the problem that led to this action.
You see, I’ve been sitting on a handful of invite codes because it’s not like people have been begging me for them. That was true until yesterday anyway. The Twitter fiasco revived discussion about alternatives, so next thing I know I’m handing out invite codes to people in HN comments who are showing interest in the platform, contributing to the (apparently) massive, single-day influx of new users.
That being said, there have been interesting scale and latency issues with Bluesky as it has grown. I suppose it can be chalked up to platform growing pains. At least they haven’t DDoSed themselves yet.
I've been wondering if BlueSky has been growing too slowly, doling out invite codes too cautiously as people move onto other platforms and sort of give up on it.
Looks like I'm wrong. Other platforms don't seem to be scratching that twitter river-of-news itch for me.
How has BlueSky been for you? It's just been such a have & have-nots situation to me (from the outside). I have no real idea if people are enjoying how it works other than just having it.
It’s wild. I’m not a habitual social media user/checker, so my thoughts should be interpreted within that context.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone can fairly say they’re artificially growing the platform. I’ve watched them fight bots that attempt to autofollow everyone on the entire platform and engineer solutions for blatantly NSFW content filtering (but not blocking as that’s not a direct concern of theirs). They’re thinking really critically about giving users tools to give them the ability to see only the content they want to see. The coolest feature I’ve seen so far is custom feeds, which lets any user create a custom feed using whatever criteria they want to filter posts that any other user can then subsequently discover and add to their own list of feeds as an optional way to view content. For example, there’s a feed that (I presume) uses CV to include every post that includes a cat photo (no hashtags needed). It’s pretty cool.
They’re really on top of it, and when I say that I mean crazy passionate, bordering on burnout levels of on top of it. Throughout all of it they’ve been really authentically engaged, and even playful, with users.
As for users themselves, I’d say at the moment there are still really tight demographic bubbles of users on there, and everyone is an early-adopter, so the 80/20 rule doesn’t apply yet. Although it’s slowly changing, at least back in late May/April there were no lurkers. Everyone seemed to be posting and replying to everything. I find it interesting that they’ve managed to pierce beyond our techno-bubble. Not everyone on there has a technical background. I’d say they trend that direction, but they have writers and artists too, for example.
Lastly, I’ve seen some pretty neat experimenal web apps and chrome extensions being built around it. It’s all very exciting. That being said, this is early days, so it’s to be expected. I have a hunch they’re going to win this space because they seem to be making a concerted effort not to alienate users who are used to the idea of a centralized platform by not overwhelming said users with concerns that extend beyond engagement.
My concern also hinges on that, however, because it can very justly be argued that this is federation-lite or d(i)e(t)-centralization. The underlying foundation of the AT-protocol will be expensive to run. It’s the push/pull dilemma. They’re not shy about this, but they’re not exactly shouting it from the rooftops either, if you catch my drift.
I gotta say, I am disappointed so far at both bluesky amd mastodon. They both have interesting ideas to solve problems with technical means but mastodon wants to transfer a lot of problems to whoever runs the server and to the user and bluesky sounds like it might get popular a bit but I have yet to see something about it that makes regular people care about it. Both platforms are nice for people that care about elon musk and his twitter or fediverse stuff but they are just not cool yet.
I mean, clubhouse and tiktok are cool for example. What really cool stuff can I do on them that isn't a rehash of something on some other platform? What is the revolutionary thing here?
If it is just an alternative then good luck being mediocre.
Here is what I think would be cool (just my view): Do something like yik yak, location centric social media but also like next-door except better but not as a substitute but an improvement over twitter. Do livestreaming but in a way that is easily monetized, think cable subscription but for social media personalities, kind of like podcasts except live is paid but select recordings are free. And you know what else would be cool? What if there was a tiktok/vine like feature except! It was like reddit.
I am just spitballing here not to say my ideas are great but this sort of a new and interesting experience is what makes it stand out not being able to take your accounts or have some guy on a vps control your entire social media life.
I feel like they are trying to do the same thing differently instead of doing something new and exciting. Even the UI of these sites is frustrating to me. Honestly, I am sick of the web's UI entirely, this is like the future and shit! Where is the cool futuristic UX? I am still clicking on buttons and typing in the same kinds of text boxes and all that as I wad 10-15 years ago.
I am just saying, let's not be complacent with even basic things like html, js and css. I look forward to new tech not just v1000.0.99 of stuff. But I admit, these last two paragraphs are just me ranting about UX in general.
Not sure what that is. Like a news+activity feed? I think outsourcing recommendation engines to 3rd parties and letting users subscribe to the recommendation engine (which might include ads for incentive) of their choice would be neat. People want stuff recommended to them.
For example, I would want to subscribe to good news sources that are both global and US centric and any infosec related recommendation sources. Others might want content recommended to them if it is shared by people with creds/reputation in other platforms or if they are their friends. I can imagine a "friends and family" recommender that connects to all other social media and recommends events from their in one feed.
Moderation, hosting fees, legal liability, responsibility for accounts (people invest a lot of time in creating content tied to your instance), security,etc... it is federated but all the legal,security, infra,moderation,etc... people across the world that support twitter and the like are no longer there for your mastodon instance but the only thing there that scales down/up with respect to the number of active users is infra support staffing/costs. Everything else is "decentralized" but since it isn't a technical problem, much like most things foss, the responsibility is transfered to whomever runs a mastodon instance assuming they have taken all the neccesary steps to be responsible and reliable in every regard. But in reality, the user is expected to find out through trial and error and word of mouth, which instance is being operated properly. Matrix and other decentralized systems have the same problem.
But you're just saying that the people who run the servers have to run the servers. You don't have to run your own instance - just join one you fancy.
So yes, the difficulty then becomes "is this instance being properly run?" but thats not unique to Mastodon, it also applies to things like Twitter - as we've seen. Just without the option to jump to a better Twitter instance - because there is only one.
I agree with that, except Twitter is one, mastodon is many. For example, my first attempt to use mastodon failed because all the instances wanted an email address and just giving that alone or using temp email was not worth it for me. With twitter, it is one "instance" and I don't have to sample a dozen to figure out which one is right so because it is just one, I setup an email and even a temp burner phone for it in the past. But the risk of having to move to another mastodon is weighty.
Bluesky is and will always be the only atproto using instance, because there's no open source involvement, running an instance is prohibitively hard and expensive. They run under the pretense of open standards, but are pretty much the only ones with the scale needed to run it.
Meta will have a hard time doing Embrace Extend Extinguish on atproto.
ActivityPub however, this easily puts them in a dominant position. Meta can put more developers on ActivityPub today than the combined open source projects,all together. They will control AP, the same way Google controls the WHATWG
Of its exact kind, yes. Generally, no. For example, there’s a clubhouse-style audio application that operates on the protocol, and there are lots of little interesting projects that interface with the protocol in some way at a high level.
The federation aspect of Bluesky/the AT-protocol hasn’t truly been launched yet as far as I can tell. If you’re familiar with BGP in DNS, the AT-protocol has a similar equivalent that will be the most expensive and resource-intensive part of the stack to run. It’s expected that there will be a few players in this space and many higher level players paying for access over time. As it currently stands, I believe that Bluesky is the only one running this part of the show right now though as they continue work on finalizing this part of the protocol and platform. They put it roughly as (paraphrasing), “federation hasn’t been switched on yet, we’re still testing,” and I think they’ve said it’s an alpha/beta state.
I’m just an outside observer with an account who has read some material and followed the on-platform discourse by the team directly. If someone more directly affiliated with Bluesky would like to critique me, I’m more than open to it.
That’s interesting, thank you. Some interesting projects. But for my question (I should have clarified in it) I was thinking about their infrastructure stack as well.
In general I’m just curious about where the scaling bottleneck is right now.
Aside: all these verge articles are getting tedious. Besides that there's already HN post yesterday that got into this I think (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36557378) these Verge articles collecting news from a tweet and spreading it into a 2 page article of "news" that then gets posted here like 12 hours after is lame. We don't need a whole article based on one breaking news thing that's there's not much more story to other than the blip that's occurring at the time. I think Verge's new plan/model of incorporating active news stories from whatever they see on social isn't really a value-add at this point. Just borderline clickbait "filler".
63 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 77.6 ms ] threadbsky-social-xlf73-5hoai bsky-social-jvtfz-ona55
Twitter is a 17 year old service with more than 200M users. This comparison is not useful.
Both are assholes, but in different ways.
You don't expect toddlers to behave themselves, but you do expect 17 year olds to be a little more responsible than toddlers.
Context matters.
I tried to sign up for a couple of months, without any luck, and then gave up - there's only so much time I want to waste chasing invite codes.
In the case of Twitter these changes are impacting a much more diverse population of passive consumers and active content creators, and doing so in a way that these policy changes, if permanent, will induce chronic friction in using the platform, so it may be a better opportunity that prior movements to ditch existing platforms.
I’m talking about probabilities though, not predicting that as an outcome. And I think the overall probability, while higher, may still not be too high. But I’m just an interested observer with no particular expertise in the social dynamics of network effects, so take this comment in that context as well.
What's happening now with both Reddit and Twitter is effecting almost all of the users equally, which potentially opens up more of generic migration option. I'd never been that interested in Bluesky before, but in the last couple days, 5-10 people I was still sometimes checking in on on Twitter moved over, so now I can't see their posts at all on either platform since I don't have an account on either. It's a real bummer, and it feels like it's also preventing people from really committing to Bluesky, since there's no even read-only access to it, people who still want to have some reach can't use it exclusively.
In which case I’d hope bluesky planned for the possibility of a rapid decline driving people to <alternative> and made plans for very rapid scaling and it’s just that implementing them is still non trivial.
And/or they didn’t imagine the occurrence (somewhat reasonably) of multiple events on the magnitude of those from the past week driving so much interest this fast. I don’t even use Twitter but the recent news, and awareness of a (hopefully) healthy alternative that I might find worth my time, how driven me and probably other like me to turn to interest. How does one even get into it?
https://fortune.com/2022/11/28/mastodon-social-ceo-eugen-roc...
You see, I’ve been sitting on a handful of invite codes because it’s not like people have been begging me for them. That was true until yesterday anyway. The Twitter fiasco revived discussion about alternatives, so next thing I know I’m handing out invite codes to people in HN comments who are showing interest in the platform, contributing to the (apparently) massive, single-day influx of new users.
That being said, there have been interesting scale and latency issues with Bluesky as it has grown. I suppose it can be chalked up to platform growing pains. At least they haven’t DDoSed themselves yet.
Looks like I'm wrong. Other platforms don't seem to be scratching that twitter river-of-news itch for me.
How has BlueSky been for you? It's just been such a have & have-nots situation to me (from the outside). I have no real idea if people are enjoying how it works other than just having it.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone can fairly say they’re artificially growing the platform. I’ve watched them fight bots that attempt to autofollow everyone on the entire platform and engineer solutions for blatantly NSFW content filtering (but not blocking as that’s not a direct concern of theirs). They’re thinking really critically about giving users tools to give them the ability to see only the content they want to see. The coolest feature I’ve seen so far is custom feeds, which lets any user create a custom feed using whatever criteria they want to filter posts that any other user can then subsequently discover and add to their own list of feeds as an optional way to view content. For example, there’s a feed that (I presume) uses CV to include every post that includes a cat photo (no hashtags needed). It’s pretty cool.
They’re really on top of it, and when I say that I mean crazy passionate, bordering on burnout levels of on top of it. Throughout all of it they’ve been really authentically engaged, and even playful, with users.
As for users themselves, I’d say at the moment there are still really tight demographic bubbles of users on there, and everyone is an early-adopter, so the 80/20 rule doesn’t apply yet. Although it’s slowly changing, at least back in late May/April there were no lurkers. Everyone seemed to be posting and replying to everything. I find it interesting that they’ve managed to pierce beyond our techno-bubble. Not everyone on there has a technical background. I’d say they trend that direction, but they have writers and artists too, for example.
Lastly, I’ve seen some pretty neat experimenal web apps and chrome extensions being built around it. It’s all very exciting. That being said, this is early days, so it’s to be expected. I have a hunch they’re going to win this space because they seem to be making a concerted effort not to alienate users who are used to the idea of a centralized platform by not overwhelming said users with concerns that extend beyond engagement.
My concern also hinges on that, however, because it can very justly be argued that this is federation-lite or d(i)e(t)-centralization. The underlying foundation of the AT-protocol will be expensive to run. It’s the push/pull dilemma. They’re not shy about this, but they’re not exactly shouting it from the rooftops either, if you catch my drift.
This will go down as the memetic insult to startups for a while to come :-)
I mean, clubhouse and tiktok are cool for example. What really cool stuff can I do on them that isn't a rehash of something on some other platform? What is the revolutionary thing here?
If it is just an alternative then good luck being mediocre.
Here is what I think would be cool (just my view): Do something like yik yak, location centric social media but also like next-door except better but not as a substitute but an improvement over twitter. Do livestreaming but in a way that is easily monetized, think cable subscription but for social media personalities, kind of like podcasts except live is paid but select recordings are free. And you know what else would be cool? What if there was a tiktok/vine like feature except! It was like reddit.
I am just spitballing here not to say my ideas are great but this sort of a new and interesting experience is what makes it stand out not being able to take your accounts or have some guy on a vps control your entire social media life.
I feel like they are trying to do the same thing differently instead of doing something new and exciting. Even the UI of these sites is frustrating to me. Honestly, I am sick of the web's UI entirely, this is like the future and shit! Where is the cool futuristic UX? I am still clicking on buttons and typing in the same kinds of text boxes and all that as I wad 10-15 years ago.
I am just saying, let's not be complacent with even basic things like html, js and css. I look forward to new tech not just v1000.0.99 of stuff. But I admit, these last two paragraphs are just me ranting about UX in general.
For example, I would want to subscribe to good news sources that are both global and US centric and any infosec related recommendation sources. Others might want content recommended to them if it is shared by people with creds/reputation in other platforms or if they are their friends. I can imagine a "friends and family" recommender that connects to all other social media and recommends events from their in one feed.
I'm not quite sure what you are getting at here - could you unpack it a bit?
So yes, the difficulty then becomes "is this instance being properly run?" but thats not unique to Mastodon, it also applies to things like Twitter - as we've seen. Just without the option to jump to a better Twitter instance - because there is only one.
Is it open source so you can run your own instance?
Does Bluesky federate with other AT-Protocol instances?
ActivityPub however, this easily puts them in a dominant position. Meta can put more developers on ActivityPub today than the combined open source projects,all together. They will control AP, the same way Google controls the WHATWG
The federation aspect of Bluesky/the AT-protocol hasn’t truly been launched yet as far as I can tell. If you’re familiar with BGP in DNS, the AT-protocol has a similar equivalent that will be the most expensive and resource-intensive part of the stack to run. It’s expected that there will be a few players in this space and many higher level players paying for access over time. As it currently stands, I believe that Bluesky is the only one running this part of the show right now though as they continue work on finalizing this part of the protocol and platform. They put it roughly as (paraphrasing), “federation hasn’t been switched on yet, we’re still testing,” and I think they’ve said it’s an alpha/beta state.
I’m just an outside observer with an account who has read some material and followed the on-platform discourse by the team directly. If someone more directly affiliated with Bluesky would like to critique me, I’m more than open to it.
In general I’m just curious about where the scaling bottleneck is right now.
"lemmy" seem to work better than "mastodon" and im really not sure "bluesky" is gonna catch on with the masses.