[HN Gopher] I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
___________________________________________________________________
I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
Author : crecker
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-05-06 21:28 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (worthdoingbadly.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worthdoingbadly.com)
| mikece wrote:
| The fact that someone can download all posts on a social network
| tells you how little usage it has attracted.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| You can download all of the (public) posts and comments on
| Reddit. It's a ~2TB torrent.
| skc wrote:
| It's still in closed Beta and invite only
| XorNot wrote:
| Which broadly describes why things are going okay there.
| There isn't anything to moderate, there's no spam, there's no
| fixated person harrassment.
|
| There's nothing hard being solved.
| manojlds wrote:
| Eh, it's in a closed beta.
| waboremo wrote:
| Even on large platforms you can (technically) download all
| posts. Might take some time and you might need to cycle some
| storage, but it's doable. So I don't really think that's a
| great metric to observe usage.
|
| Ignoring that judging usage based on a still invite only
| platform is also a little silly.
| est wrote:
| why would download posts be difficult to begin with?
|
| You know in the past, the Internet were designed to be
| downloadablein the first place, like USENET, FTP, etc.
| capableweb wrote:
| Would be interesting to see if your comment has any basis at
| all by comparing how things looked for Twitter at the same
| timescale, or Facebook, or any other social media.
|
| Just to look at the numbers in isolation is hardly interesting.
| OJFord wrote:
| Last time I saw bsky on HN a maintainer shared a skip-waitlist
| invitation code ('anyone on HN is probably better behaved than
| some of the trolls we've dealt with', or something to that
| effect) - which was unfortunately dead by the time I found it /
| Any chance of an encore? Or I am on the waitlist: something I
| don't recall at username dot com /
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
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| DnqazRGMiLsD58a6fHR66 Eg== =tmx/
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| teddyfrozevelt wrote:
| * * *
| jeron wrote:
| Glad to know all 5 of my posts have been archived
| olah_1 wrote:
| Is there such a thing as private posts? or "friends only" posts
| or something? Or is it all public?
| Hamuko wrote:
| All public. There aren't even DMs. No private accounts either.
| I think some kind of private communication is on the roadmap.
| repeekad wrote:
| Is there even a notion of "friends"? or is it more like
| Twitter where you only follow others who may follow you back
| Hamuko wrote:
| No "friends", only follows and followers like Twitter.
| gfodor wrote:
| Ok. Now someone fine tune llama on this and then you'll be able
| to understand how you'll have a custom social user agent that
| shields you from toxic people and moderates on your behalf.
| demarq wrote:
| Next challenge make incremental updates to the archive
| latchkey wrote:
| I signed into it and there was a meme about posting pictures of
| butts. Apparently porn still drives the internet.
| capableweb wrote:
| At least there is also black and man butts, instead of 100%
| white chicks. Seems we're moving forward tiny steps at least,
| and prudes have yet to find/get into Bluesky.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| What are the advantages of ATProto over ActivityPub? I don't get
| it, if you want to make a decentralized social network why not go
| with the standardized, working, protocol? What does ATProto offer
| over ActivityPub?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Character limits for one thing. "text": {
| "type": "string", "maxLength": 3000,
| "maxGraphemes": 300 }
|
| https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-feed#appbskyfeedpost
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist.
| It might go poorly, but I'm unwilling to write off weird attempts
| at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in
| the wild.
|
| I've seen several posts lately that have made me feel like the HN
| sentiment towards Bluesky is negative. Throwing them under the
| bus for the domain validation mistake. Hatred at
| commercialization of a protocol. Questioning why Bluesky would do
| anything but become a worse Twitter since Jack Dorsey is at the
| helm.
|
| C'mon! At least give it the benefit of doubt while in beta! I,
| for one, frequently lament how fragmented my IM programs have
| become. I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP
| interfaced with _everything_ and we 've slowly walked away from
| that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the
| protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind
| the goal.
|
| Do I have concerns that this is another attempt at building a
| walled garden around something I wish to be open and
| interoperable? Of course! Do I think it's a net negative on
| society for someone to be making their attempt? No! Bring on the
| new tech!
|
| I wish I had a more nuanced argument to make my case because I'm
| sure there will be tons of replies here telling me why my opinion
| is bad and I'll be unable to refute them. And those responses
| will likely make very fair points, but oh well! I needed to at
| least try to throw some optimism about technology into the
| HackerNews foray.
| jug wrote:
| I'm also trying to stay positive.
|
| In that spirit, I really enjoy:
|
| 1. The very good documentation this early in the project! This
| is not common.
|
| 2. The very rapid response developer team that does it live!
| Once the combination of surprisingly rapid membership growth +
| no blocks blew up and it became an urgent moderation feature,
| they had blocks within weeks despite the technically
| challenging task due to the kind of federated protocol and
| distributing blocklists. You can tell they have seasoned
| developers on the team. This is not just any kind of gimmick
| network trying to cash grab on Twitter exodus like I feel Hive
| Social was. It is an actual attempt at something better than
| Mastodon that has a fun, social experience with good onboarding
| and solving account migration headaches in mind.
|
| 3. The rare service disruptions despite the developers having
| their plates full and commonly introducing updates to the
| service. This speaks loudly about software architecture skills
| and being humble to risk management with good software hygiene.
| This again is not something that just happens but takes effort,
| experience and intent.
|
| 4. The exciting model of DNS approval which I still like. It's
| bloody fantastic to self-verify in a way that actually makes
| sense, and it feels very "World Wide Web" in a Tim Berners-Lee
| way. It uses pillars of the modern Internet in a way to
| strengthen a service and promises verification at scale. It can
| do company-wide verifications (domain.tld) as well as
| contributor-specific ones (username.team.company.tld). So, I
| dearly hope any misuse can be countered.
|
| 5. I worry they are overreaching with the AT protocol and
| federation but there is the "Shooting for the stars and aiming
| for the moon" saying here. I can only wish them the best and if
| I refer to the points above, the developer team seems
| surprisingly capable and full of actual intent here.
| boringg wrote:
| I don't want to sound cynical but all the things you describe
| are mostly early stage nimble startups with goos teams. As
| they grow quality erodes.
| jordanreger wrote:
| +1 this. I'm very much hoping they'll stick to the protocol
| because it seems very well thought out and designed as a social
| protocol. I see this as a Deno situation where the runtime is
| free and open and will always be that way, but they build
| products upon it. That way everyone benefits from a good thing.
| [deleted]
| snickerbockers wrote:
| TBH I haven't paid much attention to it, but as somebody who
| was already using Mastodon as their primary social network for
| years before Musk took over, I'm not sure I understand what
| niche BlueSky is even supposed to fill that
| ActivityPub/Fediverse doesn't already fill. It just seems like
| a bunch of guys who got ousted from their jobs trying to invent
| a new commercial social network.
|
| And one of the things that needs to be emphasized that a lot of
| people seem to have forgotten is that twitter was already
| terrible a *long* time before Musk bought it. Jack and his
| cronies aren't actually any better than Musk is, they're just
| smart enough not to make an ass of themselves in front of the
| entire world. I don't trust them.
| gfodor wrote:
| Mastodon is filling a niche, because it has to. Bluesky is
| designed to one day swallow Twitter.
| barnabee wrote:
| This tells me that you don't actually want what Twitter is
| (was?) good at.
|
| Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me. It's a
| different type of community/service, one that doesn't have
| much value for me. (Not to say it's bad! I just don't care
| for it, it doesn't do something I want.)
|
| Equally, Twitter wasn't (and mostly still isn't) terrible for
| everyone. Everyone gets to choose what it is! I am particular
| about who I follow, I unfollow quickly, and I care not for
| celebrities and people's "personal brand".
|
| Twitter is an incredible resource, if you want it to be.
|
| That said, it could clearly be better, and any replacement
| that prevents a single entity controlling everyone's
| algorithmic feed or deciding who can post or what they can
| say is worth exploring.
| naet wrote:
| Maybe some folks like yourself thought Twitter was terrible
| before, but plenty of people were happy enough until certain
| changes by Musk. Mastodon itself had a large growth recently
| as people left Twitter in response.
|
| I had an automated bot running for a long time on Twitter
| that I was happy with, until recently when API access was cut
| off. Now I'm looking for a new platform for my bot to run on
| as a direct result of recent controversial policy change.
| Maybe it will be Mastodon or Bluesky, or maybe something
| else. I think I prefer something more similar to how Twitter
| was than Mastodon currently is for my needs.
| detaro wrote:
| > _I think I prefer something more similar to how Twitter
| was than Mastodon currently is for my needs._
|
| curious what those differences would be for running your
| bot?
| brvsft wrote:
| Bluesky is something created by someone who should never be
| trusted again. Just because Elon Musk, an even bigger egomaniac
| than Jack Dorsey, bought Twitter doesn't mean I need to get
| bombarded with HN posts about Bluesky every other day.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| You can just not click on Bluesky links, no one is forcing
| you to read articles you aren't interested in.
| agentofoblivion wrote:
| [flagged]
| tbalsam wrote:
| I think this is a good take that I don't need to add much to,
| to be honest.
|
| Maybe this doesn't add as much to the discussion as vehement
| agreement or disagreement might to the curious HN reader, but I
| do really personally appreciate it. <3 :)
| sneak wrote:
| People seem to be generally anti-social-media and, furthermore,
| anti-social-media-magnate.
|
| I'm a fan of publishing. I think any-to-any publishing is one
| of the most important applications of the internet.
| barnabee wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| The most important property of any-to-any publishing is not
| to (algorithmically or otherwise) turn any-to-any into some-
| to-many by creating celebrities and boosting the same content
| to everyone.
|
| I think this is something TikTok (for all their issues)
| probably got more right than others.
|
| There's a lot further to go before we perfect this, but
| Nostr, Bluesky, et al. are doing at least something right.
| capableweb wrote:
| > I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP
| interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from
| that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the
| protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind
| the goal.
|
| One thing regarding bluesky that is often overlooked, and is
| related to XMPP (Jabber), is that Jeremie Miller, the inventor
| of XMPP is one of three board members, the others being Jack of
| Twitter fame and Jay Graber who is the CEO.
|
| Hopefully, the combined experience of running a platform the
| founder himself consider a failure with the experience of
| inventing a open protocol still being used today, can create
| something cool.
|
| But it's way too early to tell, as you say. One can only stand
| by and see where they end up. They certainly have interesting
| ideas, but the crux is always in the implementation.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| > I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP
| interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from
| that high water mark.
|
| I remember writing a tutorial on how to connect your _League of
| Legends_ chat of all things to Pidgin, once upon a time. I
| doubt it still works, Riot 's completely remade their client
| since then....but, yeah, those days were certainly nice.
| grimgrin wrote:
| I'm happy it exists too. By far my favorite discussion about it
| was Oxide's last podcast:
|
| https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/blue-skies-...
|
| Emily Kisane was on the ep, following their piece that blew up
| https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon
|
| > In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were
| joined by special guest Erin Kissane and long-time
| acquaintances of the show Tim Bray and Steve Klabnik.
| wnevets wrote:
| > I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to
| exist. It might go poorly, but I'm unwilling to write off weird
| attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance
| to evolve in the wild.
|
| Isn't it just a variation of mastodon?
| detaro wrote:
| no.
| wnevets wrote:
| Then what is the biggest difference between the two besides
| the name of the protocol?
| johnny22 wrote:
| the design of the protocol :)
| areoform wrote:
| Bluesky is absurd in both its small village feel and the breadth
| of people who post there and you can interact with. It's the same
| vibe as very early clubhouse. Broke artists next to
| philanthropists.
| bombcar wrote:
| All invite-only early-access things that get hot are like it;
| once they go to general availability they go to shit, it seems.
| dannyphantom wrote:
| There was a post here about a year ago that summarizes this
| pretty well[1]; I've honestly gone back to read it a few
| times for my own projects as it offers some good perspective
| and framing.
|
| > My take is, if a community is constrained by quality (eg
| moderation, self-selecting invite-only etc) then the only way
| it grows is by lowering the threshold. Inevitably that means
| lower quality content. To some extent, more people can make
| up for it. Eg if I go from 10 excellent artists to 1000 good
| ones, chances are that the top 10% artwork created actually
| gets better.
|
| > But eventually if you grow by lowering quality, then, well,
| quality drops.
|
| > I suppose for very small societies, they may be limited by
| discoverability/cliquiness and not quality, so their growth
| doesn't mesh with quality and so they could also get better
| with size.
|
| > Note, "quality" doesn't have to mean good/bad but also just
| "property". When Facebook started, it was for kids from elite
| schools. It then gradually diluted that by lowering that
| particular bar. Then it was for kids from all schools. Then
| young people. Then their parents too. Clearly, it's far from
| dying in absolute terms, but it's certainly no longer what it
| initially was. To many initial users, it's as good as dead
| though.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31363953
| neltnerb wrote:
| It's so predictable that it's frustrating to see people who
| should know better falling for it. Of course it's a fresh
| feel without the trolls. It's not open to all yet, so of
| course it is.
|
| I don't know why they expect it to turn out any differently,
| it's hard to take this tool seriously.
|
| Facebook was fresh once too. It was invite only for elite
| universities so everyone had roughly the same expectations
| for where lines were (they were not in acceptable places, but
| homogeneity helps with that).
| mahathu wrote:
| How about using a tree-like structure to track who invited
| whom to the platform. Offer a generous yet limited number
| of invites to users, potentially adjusting this amount
| based on their positive interactions within the network.
| Permanently ban accounts that violate the rules, and if the
| new accounts a user invites keep getting banned
| (automatically) investigate whether that user is using
| multiple accounts, which would also be against the rules.
|
| I'm sure deciding where to draw the line and clearly
| defining rules, and then enforcing them is a complex task
| (same as in public policy or international relations)
| inherent to any social network, and it is unlikely that an
| optimal solution exists considering the difference of
| opinions. However, could this type of rule help mitigate
| the issues mentioned?
| morkalork wrote:
| It's funny to see people advocate for a classist system
| of nobility hundreds of years later. Please, tell us more
| about how you'd like to restrict a social network to
| those who are, as they say, "well bred".
| krapp wrote:
| You think it's classism akin to advocating for bloodline
| nobility to want a community of people who follow the
| rules and make positive contributions?
|
| Do you even know where you are right now?
| gfodor wrote:
| They expect it to turn out differently because they're
| building something in the style of how the web was built.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| What is Bluesky?
| e4e5 wrote:
| Considering there's no explication on bluesky's website, i
| don't understand why this comment is downvoted
| mullingitover wrote:
| So far it seems to be Mastodon, with some tweaks, and the
| improvement that while it's federated _in theory_ , right now
| there's only _one server_. This addresses the critical flaw
| people point out with Mastodon, which is that because it
| requires you to choose a server it 's too confusing. The
| requirement to choose a hosting provider is why email famously
| never took off.
| Philadelphia wrote:
| Email started off as something you only got through your ISP.
| It then turned into something you only got through Google.
| It's not really an example of a service where the vast
| majority of people make an active choice.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| >the improvement that while it's federated in theory, right
| now there's only one server
|
| has the federation even been implemented? Is it an open
| protocol? Why on earth should anybody trust them not to go
| back on their word once they've gotten enough critical mass
| that nobody wants to leave because that's where their friends
| are (the so-called "network effect")?
| brundolf wrote:
| It's structured very differently from mastodon, please stop
| repeating this meme without any firsthand knowledge
| Jupe wrote:
| https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/05/what-is-bluesky-everything...
| kyleyeats wrote:
| [flagged]
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Apparently Mastodon's decentralisation works better.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| So not even 10,000 posts a day. Is it really worth having topics
| about a barren social network reach the homepage every day?
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| It's not even fully open to the public yet. I'm waitlisted. 10k
| post/day seems great for a closed alpha.
| summarity wrote:
| Pretty good for 50k users (and keep in mind almost half a
| million downloads that can be converted into users)
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| 50K posting users. I have an account but didn't post
| anything, like most people on any social media are lurkers.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| No, as of a couple days ago, Bluesky said they had about
| 50K _total_ users.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/black-tech-twitter-trans-
| users-...
| EwanToo wrote:
| They have around 60k registrations, they've stated that in
| the last 48 hours or so
| gkoberger wrote:
| Yes. It's interesting, from a tech perspective, to a lot of
| people here based on its combination of the decentralized
| nature of the AT protocol combined with usability that seems to
| work for people (compared to Mastodon).
|
| It's small, but it has a lot of interesting ideas behind the
| scenes and interesting people using it.
| herval wrote:
| good ol' hackernews and its "it's a new startup, is it even
| worth talking about?" mob
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| [flagged]
| gkoberger wrote:
| Maybe it's anti-Elon, or maybe it's anti-the-things-Elon-is-
| doing-to-Twitter. Just because the people who like Elon have
| joined a cult of personality doesn't mean the people who
| dislike what he's done to Twitter have done the same.
|
| For example, I still think Tesla's are cool cars and Space X
| is doing exciting things.
|
| For me, Twitter has become absolutely unusable. Every person
| on my FYP and in the replies is someone with 328 followers,
| crappy opinions and $8/month to burn. I went from loving
| Twitter for over a decade to finding it utterly devoid of
| anything interesting anymore. If you happen to like it more
| now, that's great, keep using it! But a lot of people simply
| don't get value out of the app anymore.
| sammalloy wrote:
| Sadly, the people who are sticking with Twitter tend to be
| regressive, anti-democratic, religious extremists who want
| to rollback all the progress in the world to the year 1500,
| confine all women indoors and in the kitchen, and rollout
| and implement roving gangs of morality police in the
| streets just like The Handmaid's Tale. And that's why I've
| stopped using Twitter.
| catiopatio wrote:
| None of what you've described is a fair description of
| the views held by most of the Twitter user base.
|
| I find it striking just how disheartening it is to some
| when a platform like Twitter stops manufacturing consent.
| sammalloy wrote:
| * Twitter verifies far-right group Britain First with
| gold tick (4/23) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2
| 023/04/24/twitter-ve...
|
| * 'From chaos to moments of irresponsibility': Top execs
| reportedly accused Elon Musk of 'perpetuating racism' on
| Twitter in leaked emails (4/23)
| https://fortune.com/2023/04/07/musk-twitter-hate-speech-
| adve...
|
| * Elon Musk's Twitter pushes hate speech, extremist
| content into 'For You' pages https://www.washingtonpost.c
| om/technology/2023/03/30/elon-mu...
|
| * Extremists and Conspiracy Theorists Reemerge on Twitter
| (2/23) https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/extremists-and-
| conspiracy...
|
| * It's hard to see what an avowed far-right militant
| 'would be doing much differently' than Elon Musk with his
| Twitter policies, extremism expert says (1/23)
| https://www.businessinsider.com/interview-how-extremists-
| ben...
|
| * Elon Musk says his politics are in the center but
| extremism experts say he's using Twitter to increasingly
| empower right-wing viewpoints (12/22)
| https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-right-wing-
| extremi...
|
| * Extremists, Far Right Figures Exploit Recent Changes to
| Twitter (12/22)
| https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/extremists-far-right-
| figu...
|
| * Why is Elon Musk's Twitter takeover increasing hate
| speech? (11/22) https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-
| rise/2022/11/23/why-is...
| debesyla wrote:
| Hackernews is also a social network - and it seems like this
| thing works with even less posts per day?
|
| You don't need a huge following to have a functioning social
| group.
| btown wrote:
| Given that Bluesky makes it this easy to download data, it's
| quite alarming that the graph of who blocks & mutes who is fully
| public and easy to extract into a database:
| https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-graph#appbskygraphgetb...
|
| On Twitter, blocking a toxic user does not notify them - while
| they can query the block status of one profile at a time, they
| can never get a full list of people who block them. But it would
| be trivial to create a Bluesky app view that provides this
| inverted index. And some people would be inclined to use the list
| of people who block them as a "target list" of people whose views
| differ from them, to share with their networks as prospects for
| targeted harassment that may even cross into real-life violence.
| (The fact that critics of the infamous Ki*f*ms forum have been
| swatted - and that I am even now reticent to type the full name -
| is just the tip of the iceberg of potential dangers here.)
|
| I hope that Bluesky comes up with a better mechanism here - it's
| tough to do in a federated system, but research like
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1577.pdf may be helpful.
| capableweb wrote:
| It's a tough line to walk. On one hand, if you participate in a
| system where almost everything is inherently public (the
| web/internet, since anyone can screenshot anything and publish
| wherever they want), it's hardly unexpected that information
| that was once public, can remain public forever.
|
| On the other hand, people have some sort of expectation that
| the data they publicly post online to remain in some sort of
| semi-private state. Bluesky app might invite only for now, but
| the underlying protocol and technology makes everything very
| public, forever, and makes it trivial to cache locally (for
| good or bad purposes).
| btown wrote:
| There's a vast difference between "public" and "actively
| surfaced." Indeed, blocking someone on Twitter would not
| prevent them from finding your public profile in an incognito
| window and seeing your posts - it would simply prevent your
| posts from being easily and automatically accessible to them
| in their feed. In practice, this tends to reduce conflict. My
| concern with Bluesky is that it makes it very possible for
| tools to make block information easily and automatically
| accessible - in fact, it would allow a bad actor to create a
| service that shows a feed of _just_ content from people who
| want to block you from seeing it. That 's a recipe for
| disaster.
| brundolf wrote:
| (Saying this as an excited bluesky user and someone who really
| really hopes all of this succeeds long-term)
|
| I think possibly their biggest challenge ahead will be making
| parts of it _non_ -public. Private mutes/blocks, having some
| analogue of Circles for whitelisting post viewers, etc.
|
| Having a _truly_ open and public database - especially once
| signups no longer require invite codes - is going to mean a
| cambrian explosion of tools and clients the likes of which we
| 've never seen before in social media (which is already sorta
| happening even with closed signups). But that might include
| malicious apps that take advantage of that same openness to
| stalk, spam, and harass (especially given it's coinciding with
| a huge leap in AI technology). It might be AT Protocol's
| biggest test.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| Maybe it'd be better to just not have any blocking/muting built
| into such a system at all.
|
| If User A doesn't want to see posts from User B, that's fine.
| User A can have his client filter them out locally, prior to
| when they'd otherwise be displayed. Nobody else has to know
| this is happening.
|
| I don't think that User A should be permitted to prevent User B
| from replying to User A's posts, which in turn prevents User C
| (or all other users) from discovering what User B thinks about
| whatever User A posted.
|
| User A trying to prevent his otherwise-public posts from being
| visible to User B seems pointless to me, as User B could log
| out, or use another account that hasn't been blocked, or ask
| somebody else who hasn't been blocked to screenshot it, or use
| some other way around it.
| aurelius83 wrote:
| I'd love for you to validate the users against the list of
| verified twitter 1.0 users and see what percentage migrated over.
| navanchauhan wrote:
| Another metric I would be interested in looking is verified
| skeeters (people with a custom root domain) vs verified Twitter
| users and separate Twitter Blue subscribers (with < 1 million
| followers)
| bnewbold wrote:
| some quick thoughts/notes (I am on the bluesky team, but this
| isn't an official policy statement):
|
| - content on bluesky _is_ public, but we have not set
| expectations /comms around that well yet, and this dump may be a
| surprise to some existing accounts. where exactly bluesky falls
| on the spectrum from "congressional register (immutable)" to
| "public web" to "public IRC or discord room" to "private signal
| group" is still being worked out, but probably closest to "public
| web"
|
| - the protocol supports both "deletions" (retaining history), and
| "purge" (aka "rebase") to remove all not-current content. this
| isn't exposed via UI yet and accounts have not had the chance to
| purge old deletions
|
| - the federation protocol and unified firehose should make it
| possible for third parties to maintain a live mirror of the
| entire corpus. importantly, it will be easy (or at least
| "easier") to respect intents w/r/t deletions when done this way,
| compared to dumps
|
| - obviously neither "deletion" nor "purge" can perfectly remove
| content from 3rd party dumps and infra, or from hostile parties.
| but it _does_ signal user intent clearly, and we expect as a norm
| that third parties will respect that intent. ADS-B, robots.txt,
| CC licensing are related to these norms, though all unique.
| right-to-be-forgotten, archiving, re-use licensing, use in ML
| training, commercial /non-profit reuse, search indexing, etc, are
| all on our radar
|
| - blobs/images are not included in this corpus
|
| - this specific corpus does not (I assume) include our important
| "label" moderation metadata. at least for our (Bluesky) core
| moderation decisions, that information will be public
|
| - private/group content is not yet part of protocol. eg, no
| built-in mechanism for DMs or follower-only posts. we will
| probably do those eventually, but it will be basically a whole
| separate protocol, not a bolt-on to existing stuff. wildly
| different privacy/security concerns with non-public content
|
| - there are some other cool projects, like
| https://bsky.jazco.dev/, working with the full social graph,
| pulled via public API
| brundolf wrote:
| Thanks for weighing in
|
| It's disappointing to hear that follower-only/circles
| (whitelisted viewers) posts are basically incompatible with the
| current protocol. I'd hoped something could be done where the
| post content was encrypted in such a way that only specific
| authenticated users could decrypt it, or something along those
| lines
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