[HN Gopher] Everything happening on Bluesky
___________________________________________________________________
Everything happening on Bluesky
Author : CharlesW
Score : 85 points
Date : 2023-05-05 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| dahwolf wrote:
| 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.
| arrakeen wrote:
| > 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
| capableweb wrote:
| > 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".
| brundolf wrote:
| 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
| lapcat wrote:
| > 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| > At this point they're just kicking the can down the road,
| postponing the problems that Mastodon already had to face.
|
| Seems they're finally publishing more details about it:
| https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture
| lapcat wrote:
| > 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.)
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The best you can get is something like DNS or email, which
| are "decentralized" in theory but quasi-centralized in
| practice.
|
| Which is much better than other systems; "twitter but like
| email" is a reasonable goal.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| You can get more decentralization than those services
| provide, but not without sacrificing usability and/or
| security.
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle
| bombcar wrote:
| One key to a successful decentralized system is not being
| able to spam with it; if someone learned how to spam
| using BGP or DNS we'd all be screwed.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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.
| quaintdev wrote:
| > 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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)
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| How is this any different than servers on the Activity Pub
| network?
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| > 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.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| 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).
| lapcat wrote:
| > I would argue it's probably not the biggest reason
| outside of weird events like the shutdown of mastodon.lol
|
| 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.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| It absolutely happens.
|
| 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).
| brundolf wrote:
| 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)
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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?
| brundolf wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It definitely is! But I'm excited and hopeful
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| Yep! Bluesky's solution to many of Twitters problems and
| controversies is "give people the tools to solve them how
| they want to for themselves"
| afiori wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >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
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Handles are DNS names that point to the DID
|
| https://atproto.com/guides/identity
| brundolf wrote:
| Explanation of how it actually works, please read before making
| assumptions: https://atproto.com/docs
| riffic wrote:
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| 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.
| mg wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| brundolf wrote:
| 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
| mg wrote:
| I tried Nostr on a web client. It was pretty easy. Just going
| to the website was enough. I have not seen such a thing for
| Bluesky yet.
|
| Is there a client online that one can simply use by visiting
| a website?
| brundolf wrote:
| 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.
|
| Edit: here's one https://skypulse.dvy.io/
| mg wrote:
| The invite-only aspect is part of the protocol?
| brundolf wrote:
| 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)
|
| High-level explanation of the protocol:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35822267
| mg wrote:
| But why are there no other public webclients that let you
| create an identity and communicate via the AT protocol?
| tedunangst wrote:
| Because currently nobody communicates via AT. There's
| nobody to talk to.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Yes, staging.bsky.app was the web client all along. They
| finally acknowledged it's really a prod site, so now
| they're moving it to bsky.app
| xxpor wrote:
| The vast majority of people moving to Bluesky do not care about
| decentralization or open clients or any of that. Like, at all.
|
| https://twitter.com/ryxcommar/status/1651704456088518656
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I agree, the vast majority of people moving to Bluesky don't
| understand their history and now appear to be doomed to
| repeat it.
| brundolf wrote:
| Which is why it might succeed: regular people want to use it,
| not just enthusiasts
| jacooper wrote:
| Regular people don't want to deal with invite codes.
| random42_ wrote:
| I remember a time when people _sold_ invites for GMail
| and the list of buyers wasn 't short at all.
| jacooper wrote:
| That's a service, not a social network which aims to beat
| the network effect.
|
| Also gmail can talk with other email users.
| random42_ wrote:
| The argument I was replying to was about people disliking
| invitation codes. If that's practical or not for a social
| network is beyond this comment.
| brundolf wrote:
| My experience begs to differ
| [deleted]
| lapcat wrote:
| > If there is so much demand, why does nobody release a free
| and open client? This might be a sign that it is hard to write
| one.
|
| It's invitation-only, with a total of ~50K users, many of whom
| are non-technical celebrities. That's why.
| brundolf wrote:
| Here's a living list of clients and other projects:
|
| https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto-ecosystem
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| 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.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Title currently showing in the article is "Bluesky showed
| everyone's ass / In many cases, literally."
| bluepod4 wrote:
| So funny.
|
| 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.)
| Hizonner wrote:
| 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.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Amen.
|
| 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.
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| 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.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| 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.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > 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.
| JieJie wrote:
| 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.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Most end users want a simple centralized solution, this is just
| yet another proof of that.
|
| The fedi will remain a sub-cultural thing. I said that way back
| in the start of 2022 waves.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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)
| pelagic_sky wrote:
| I wonder if Bluesky is going to Google+ itself by staying in Beta
| too long.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| They're going to Clubhouse themselves by being stingy with
| invite codes.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| That and the ill-will generated by forcibly cramming it down
| everyone's throats a la the youtube debacle.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Guess my age: I'm mad at Google for 1) Reader 2) Breaking +
| as a search operator
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| [flagged]
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| You're literally participating in an online community right
| now.
|
| 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"?
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| 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. :)
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| 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.
| monkaiju wrote:
| What is the monetisation strategy for Bluesky?
| yuliyp wrote:
| 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.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| 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.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| 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.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| 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?
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| 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.
| tedunangst wrote:
| 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.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| It is very human to continuously fail to listen to the lessons
| of history, only to rediscover them.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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).
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, and particularly for devs. We tend to start to believe
| our own hype and think we're uniquely smart.
| elliekelly wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes!
|
| 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.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| 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. :)
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| If they really can learn at high speed then that would be a
| significant competitive advantage, more important than getting
| things right up front.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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...
| DueDilligence wrote:
| [dead]
| carlivar wrote:
| 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"?
|
| https://reason.com/2023/03/17/researchers-pressured-twitter-...
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Because Jack Dorsey may have funded BlueSky, but he's not
| involved in running it
|
| Aside from being on Bluesky's board of directors.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| dtrailin wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| We'll see. It depends how long the window for launching a
| twitter replacement is.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This article started out interesting but rapidly degenerated into
| society gossip. I would feel embarrassed to have written this.
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