[HN Gopher] Bluesky signups are now open to the public
___________________________________________________________________
Bluesky signups are now open to the public
Author : jakebsky
Score : 275 points
Date : 2024-02-06 15:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bsky.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (bsky.social)
| Kye wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39274438
| wesleytodd wrote:
| yeah but this one is more official right. It is from one of
| their team members.
| riffic wrote:
| why do we say dupe on orange site? this is like the most
| trivial inconsequential thing to call out, let this be duped.
| This is going to be news to _someone_.
|
| to add some more substance to my comment this is how I see
| Bluesky's virality/stickiness playing out: everyone's going to
| move to it, it's going to be an unofficial but incompatible
| "fediverse2", folks will pretend the actual Fediverse doesn't
| exist, and then the actual Bluesky public benefit corporation
| (or some derivative, come on guys you wanna get filthy rich)
| will eventually turn to a data brokerage/ advertising play to
| enshittify the entire thing.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| We say dupe so a moderator can combine the listings into one
| and merge the conversations. The original submission is
| 40mins older, don't worry the people will still see the news.
| A single article with more upvotes and comments will raise up
| further/stay there than 2 articles with moderate engagement.
| riffic wrote:
| okay that actually makes sense I appreciate your
| explanation.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| What's bluesky again?
| worldsayshi wrote:
| A Twitter alternative.
| pier25 wrote:
| by Jack Dorsey (he co-founded Twitter)
| pfraze wrote:
| Jack directed Twitter to fund Bluesky when he was CEO of
| Twitter, but Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and the
| technology & app was created by Jay and her team (which I'm
| a part of).
| pier25 wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification.
|
| Is he not involved in it anymore?
| pfraze wrote:
| He's on the board but he's never been involved directly
| Mashimo wrote:
| Just from reading the page it seems like a mix of twitter and
| reddit. You can follow certain channels instead of an
| algorithm.
|
| Not sure what they mean with "Dock it every port, your network
| comes with your" Is it federated?
| legohead wrote:
| Can't choose your own handle (it's taken).
| chomp wrote:
| Your handle can be your personal domain or any domain also.
| arcalinea wrote:
| Yep -- tutorial and some examples:
| https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-
| tutor...
| legohead wrote:
| My domains are not my handle, and even so, I can't buy a
| domain with the handle I'd prefer (it's taken).
|
| My point was subtle, that this shouldn't be an issue. It has
| been solved in various ways.
| the_duke wrote:
| I feel like this would have been a lot more impactful a year ago,
| when the Twitter drama was in full swing.
|
| Feedback: the homepage looks more like a tech product pitch site,
| and the announcement post also doesn't look very polished. I
| guess the target for Bluesky isn't so much the "regular
| Facebook/Twitter/IG user", more the nerd.
|
| Side question: what's the interop story between Bluesky and
| Mastodon now?
| angulardragon03 wrote:
| Afaik no interop - they use different protocols.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I am not sure, during the Twitter drama was in full swing Meta
| tried to launch an alternative, and how long did it last? A
| couple of weeks? I think social sector is filled, with boomers
| on facebook, cool people on instagram, kids on tiktok, woke on
| twitter, meme people on reddit?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Meta tried to launch an alternative, and how long did it
| last? A couple of weeks?
|
| If you mean Threads, it's currently up to 130M monthly active
| users[0]. Estimates for Twitter late 2023-early 2024 are
| between 350-400M MAU.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/threads-now-reaches-
| more-1...
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Ah okay, didn't know that, I've read some time after the
| launch that it was going desert, somewhere on an article
| linked here, I am not a social network person, so wasn't
| following it
| piperswe wrote:
| Who are these users? I haven't heard a single person
| talking about actually using Threads.
| jakebsky wrote:
| There is some work by others to make this possible:
|
| https://docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed
| Retr0id wrote:
| > I guess the target for Bluesky isn't so much the "regular
| Facebook user", more the nerd.
|
| I think it's more "regular Twitter user". It has implementation
| details that interest nerds, but my read is that the target
| audience really is regular users.
| lionkor wrote:
| Wow that comic invokes very unpleasant feelings for me. Super
| weird, way too corporate for a ... comic...? Seems confused.
| Their big selling point is blocking stuff you don't wanna see?
| Thats the big selling point? And... exploration!?
| dmix wrote:
| I've seen the word "block" about 20 times since trying out
| Bluesky. Seems to be a core part of the culture there to
| aggressively block anyone posting stuff you don't want to see.
|
| On Twitter I just curate who I follow so I don't see annoying
| stuff and that's worked perfectly fine for me.
| chihuahua wrote:
| The comic feels like self-parody.
|
| "Come with me to the wonderful land of BlueSky, where
| everything is * _open*_ and * _magic*_ and all bad trolls are
| blocked! "
|
| "That's amazing! I think I'll like it here!"
|
| "YAY!"
| jakebsky wrote:
| This is a big milestone for Bluesky!
|
| We've had the federation sandbox running for over six months but
| we're now able to commit to open federation on the production
| network this month as well. There's also stackable moderation
| coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate
| moderation labeling services that users can choose to use.
|
| The technical challenges of setting up an (efficiently) scalable
| decentralized social network were quite interesting. The
| infrastructure itself is quite decentralized, with standalone PDS
| instances and two small shared-nothing datacenter PoPs. We're
| using SQLite with millions of individual databases for each
| user's repository and ScyllaDB for the global indexing service
| (AppView).
|
| https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architect...
|
| If anyone has questions, technical or otherwise, some of the team
| should be around today to answer them.
|
| Edit: HN'ers might also appreciate this paper written primarily
| by Martin Kleppman about Bluesky and AT Protocol
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239.pdf
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which
| enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling
| services that users can choose to use.
|
| Very excited for this - IMO, this is federated social media's
| biggest promise.
| cdchn wrote:
| "We tag trolls so you don't have to."
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, so I'll
| explain further.
|
| Currently, if you want to be part of a social network, your
| options are to opt-in to Zuckerberg's moderation or Musk's
| moderation.
|
| It would be great if these were _actually_ opt-in (as in,
| you can be part of a social network without opting in to
| their moderation polices) and if you can use anyone's
| "moderation list."
|
| I think ultimately this would allow for freer expression
| than exists on current social networks.
| muglug wrote:
| Thanks for all your hard work!
|
| Twitter is an obvious influence on Bluesky.
|
| Was the team able to benefit from the experience of working on
| Twitter, or were most of the big problems novel?
| pfraze wrote:
| None of us worked at Twitter actually, but we chatted with a
| lot of folks who did.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Why not use ActivityPub?
|
| Why should we trust Dorsey again?
|
| What is one good reason to use Bluesky over Mastodon?
| TheCleric wrote:
| Dorsey isn't even involved. He kicked it off but hasn't had a
| hand in it for a very long time.
| jakebsky wrote:
| 1. _" Account portability is the major reason why we chose to
| build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be
| crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server
| shutdowns, and policy disagreements."_
|
| https://atproto.com/guides/faq
|
| 2. Jack Dorsey is on the board but has no day-to-day role in
| the company. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and is in
| control. The protocol is also designed not to require trust.
| The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow
| it to survive Bluesky becoming evil.
|
| 3. Bluesky has a different approach in many ways. One of the
| biggest differences is that Bluesky is (IMHO) the first
| decentralized social network that is highly usable by regular
| non-technical users.
| shafyy wrote:
| I'm more worried about the financing of Bluesky. You have
| taken VC money, and we all know what that means - growth at
| all costs.
|
| > _The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The
| network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it
| to survive Bluesky becoming evil._
|
| I feel like we have seen this movie play out a few times.
| There are always way to close things down the road. For
| example, I can imagine that even with federation there will
| be a power law of distribution, and there's a high chance
| that most users will end up on official Bluesky servers.
| This means that you could one they stop federating, and
| most users would be backed in a walled garden. Sure, the
| protocol would be out there in the open, but it wouldn't
| matter because overnight it would lose most of its users.
|
| I trust that you and the initial team has genuine
| motivation not to do this. Forgive me for being cynical,
| but history does reapeat itself.
|
| I think the only antidote against this is regulation, as
| we're seing now with the DMA in EU that forces WhatsApp and
| other gate keepers to open their platform to other clients.
| Kinrany wrote:
| > There are always way to close things down the road.
|
| If nothing else, Bitcoin is a successful existence proof.
| Maintaining control may be easier, but it's safe to say
| that Satoshi wouldn't be able to take control back now.
| AJ007 wrote:
| The big lesson to me has been for a platform to be open,
| there must be both third party clients and third party
| servers. A service that has only one backend server that
| no one else can run (looking at you Signal) isn't ok
| anymore. Even worse, Twitter or Reddit being "open"
| because they have an API: that's all bullshit, and you
| are setting yourself up to be rug pulled. We don't need
| to hear these lies anymore and it's time to move on from
| the services making either of those claims. I'm waiting
| for a little more progress and third party control to
| make a judgement on Bluesky.
|
| Users should think of this in terms of buy in cost. If
| you use a particular platform for 10 years, and build a
| community on it, you can take advantage of that and you
| get a mostly free service. But at some point the bill
| comes, and you move on. However, I keep thinking that the
| reason why some of those open third party protocols -
| even including email - "suck" is because so much of the
| time and focus has been on these proprietary, commercial
| communications platforms.
|
| I feel so old now I went from thinking email is a
| terrible way of communicating to, actually Facebook is
| far worse. Instead of seeing updates from my friends I'm
| looking at a firehose of noise of things I can't control
| and have zero interest in. Nearly 20 years later, I use
| e-mail every day and Facebook 0.
|
| Veering off-topic, but seeing conversations running for
| many years over the standards implementation and feature
| parity of the clients and servers both for XMPP and
| Matrix (meaning each separately, not inter-operating XMPP
| and Matrix, but rather each protocol has many servers and
| many clients, all trying to keep up with a moving
| protocol spec without breaking backwards compatibility),
| I have to laugh that a piece of legislation can just
| magically open the doors a some potentially very
| convoluted and continuously changing communications
| platform to third parties.
|
| It could be even more self defeating and monopoly re-
| enforcing if those platforms are relaying to users of
| third party apps the features they are missing along with
| warnings about non-existent encryption and everyone can
| read their messages.
| wesleytodd wrote:
| Point number three is critically important and no matter
| how many nerds complain it is not activity pub or some
| crypto thing, the company focus on delivering a product
| which is viable to use by normies is awesome.
| AJ007 wrote:
| The account portability is probably the biggest problem
| with the fediverse right now.
|
| I finally signed up for Mastodon despite reading little to
| nothing positive about it on hn. It was easy to use, and
| the signal to noise ratio was vastly improved from my
| Twitter experience.
|
| However, that lack of account portability means users can,
| have, and will continue to get cut off. Servers cost
| thousands of USD per months with no revenue and domain name
| ownership can magically vanish for many reasons. With no
| business model for server operators, these are significant
| issues.
|
| That confusion for users may even be the primary force that
| drives them over to something like Facebook's Threads.
|
| There are analogies to e-mail here for the server operator.
| If I said any numbers I would be making them up, but I'm
| assuming 1 Mastodon user costs a lot more, both in
| compute/bandwidth and support, than 1 e-mail user. Free
| servers are not going to scale.
|
| Account portability doesn't solve this, but it means if
| something happens to one server operator, that user doesn't
| churn in to the ether and never return. I've been keeping
| an eye on https://fedidb.org/ (not my site.) While total
| users and servers keep going up over the past year, active
| users keep dropping. It could be something related to how
| they record usage, but it isn't a promising thing.
|
| I'm less skeptical about long term adaptation. Most of the
| negative sentiment I've read on hn about Mastodon just was
| wrong. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft are all fully
| accelerating in to ad business models which will make much
| of their products less unappealing by the day. If history
| is any lesson, when a new competitor shows up without ads
| and a similar or better experience, the incumbent is in
| trouble.
| treyd wrote:
| You _can_ migrate your account between instances and take
| your followers and follows with you. Server shutdowns are
| rare, since administrators tend to proactively limit
| registrations when activity starts to be a financial
| burden. Avoiding the growth-at-all-costs mindset means
| that instances can stay sustainable.
| lapcat wrote:
| > You can migrate your account between instances and take
| tour followers and follows with you.
|
| You can _if_ the server is operational. If the server not
| operational and cooperative, you can 't. And you can't
| migrate your posts, only your followers.
|
| > Server shutdowns are rare
|
| Not rare enough though.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> You can if the server is operational._
|
| And if Bluesky's servers stop being operational? Where is
| your data hosted?
| pierat wrote:
| Its not even that.
|
| Look at Shitter and Reddit: they just turned off API
| access and introduced heavy rate limits to webpage loads.
| Good luck scraping your account details with that.
|
| Enshittification is a thing with ALL commercial services.
| And eventually BlueSky will have their "The sky is
| falling! Crank the money extraction lever." And I'd move
| that timeframe up a LOT if they took VC money.
|
| Feces, err, uhmm VCs want their hockeystick growth to be
| a hockeystick. They want their 30x , 50x, or 100x.
| treyd wrote:
| The handful of moderately large instances that have shut
| down rhat I'm aware of gave _long_ notices, in a couple
| of cases over a year, before actually going offline.
|
| The only notable counterexample I remember was
| BitcoinHackers.org shutting down suddenly with a note
| saying "haha look at how easy it is for mastodon
| instances to shut down go use nostr", making it a self-
| fulfilling prophecy in that case. If you have other
| examples I would like to know about them.
| lapcat wrote:
| I've personally had to migrate instances twice. The first
| time because the instance suddenly became nonfunctional,
| and the administrator went AWOL. The second time, I
| discovered that the incompetent admin had silently
| enabled auto-deletion of data including posts and direct
| messages.
|
| Now I'm finally on mastodon.social, which wasn't open for
| new users the first two times that I needed an instance.
| vidarh wrote:
| That, to me, is an argument for improving the existing
| account portability of ActivityPub, not for starting from
| scratch.
|
| To me, the Not Inventented Here feel to Bluesky makes me
| want to stay far away. People will bridge it to
| ActivityPub anyway.
| rglullis wrote:
| Nostr solves the account portability, albeit poorly.
| (Your identity is your public key, so if the key gets
| compromised your identity is as well)
|
| I am more excited about Takahe, which decouples the
| servers running the federation from the domains holding
| the actor ids. This means that a hosting provider like
| mine won't need to allocate one whole instance for each
| user that wants to have their own domain.
|
| There is also a FEP from the developer of Mitra which
| aims to flip the ownership of the account keys, which
| would prevent cases of servers going under and stopping
| users from recovering their identity.
| timeon wrote:
| Can you elaborate on point 3? What do you think are the
| differences or pain points of Mastodon that Bluesky fixes?
| ngrilly wrote:
| Questions 1 and 3 are answered in the paper.
| Kye wrote:
| What's the thinking on BGSes? I haven't seen much talk of who's
| expected to run them or what they'll look like, but they seem
| to be the linchpin of reliable data portability.
| jakebsky wrote:
| A Relay (we used to call it the BGS) crawls all of the PDS
| hosts on the network and aggregates the data. This makes it
| possible for services to subscribe to all events on the
| network without putting load on PDS hosts directly.
|
| Anyone can run a Relay. They're somewhat comparable to Linux
| distribution FTP/HTTP mirrors.
|
| Bluesky will always run a Relay, but other organizations will
| hopefully as well. We expect these might be organizations
| doing other things in the ecosystem, universities, and
| possibly open consortiums.
| Navarr wrote:
| Is it completely infeasible for BlueSky to federate with
| ActivityPub while maintaining the pros of its architecture?
|
| If Threads, BlueSky, and ActivityPub all interconnected it
| really would be a great opportunity to compete on the software
| / UX front
| jakebsky wrote:
| There has been some work by others already on this front:
| https://docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > we're now able to commit to open federation on the production
| network this month as well
|
| Aha, this is good to now. Looking forward to standing up my own
| PDS.
| coldpie wrote:
| The obvious question is what your business model is. I know
| about your "we plan to sell domains" post from a bit ago[1],
| but that seems... optimistic, to me. Not sure I want to buy
| into yet another startup with no business model (e.g. Keybase).
|
| [1] https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
| jakebsky wrote:
| Bluesky is in good financial shape for quite some time based
| on existing funding. And we're also working hard to be
| sustainable, which we believe is entirely feasible given our
| small team. But we're also ensuring that everything required
| to make the network sustainable over time is completely open.
| coldpie wrote:
| That's not a very inspiring answer :( The consequences of
| taking VC money are going to come home to roost at some
| point.
| jakebsky wrote:
| We'll see! The history of funded companies popularizing
| open protocols is not without precedent. I'm inspired by
| Netscape, which was the VC-backed company that made the
| web happen.
| coldpie wrote:
| A notable difference is that Netscape _had a business
| model_ , namely, selling Navigator. Anyway, enjoy the
| ride.
| vidarh wrote:
| Saying they "made the web happen" is just nonsense. They
| had one of several popular browsers, and one of several
| popular web servers. As much as I stayed up late to
| download new Netscape betas, had they never existed the
| web would still be just fine, and the customers of the
| ISP I ran at the time would have just used another
| browser.
| andybak wrote:
| Hmmmm. I would argue the web would have been significanty
| different. There was a fairly big gap between Mosaic and
| Internet Explorer that Netscape filled and it was the
| period that largely defined the web as it came to be.
|
| Since IE was developed specifically to counter the threat
| of Netscape - it was also defined by Netscape.
|
| What other browsers of note were around in that period?
| vidarh wrote:
| Netscape 0.9 was released in October '94. IE was released
| in August '95 and the first version was just a licensed
| rebrand of Spyglass Mosaic (which despite the licensed
| Mosaic name was _not_ a version of Mosaic).
|
| There was a number of browsers coming up at that time,
| and Mosaic was if anything what drove much of that early
| boom, as the most successful option that led to both
| Netscape, Spyglass, and by extension IE.
|
| Remember that Mosaic was readily licensed (and source
| available, though not under an open source license) -
| there were a number of other Mosaic offshoots (e.g.
| AMosaic for Amiga was released in December '93, with
| datatypes support)
|
| Other browsers than Netscape around that era, excluding
| the text based ones, included:
|
| * 1992: ViolaWWW (Unix; pioneered embedded objects,
| stylesheets, tables, client-side scripting); Erwise
| (Unix); MidasWWW (Unix)
|
| * 1993: Spyglass (licensed the Mosaic name, but written
| from scratch; also the origin of IE), AMosaic (Amiga),
| Cello (Windows), any number of Mosaic licensees, Arena
| (Unix, Linux, NeXT; pre-release in '93; full public
| release '94; Arena was co-written by the later Opera CTO
| Hakon Wium Lie, and pioneered layout extensions that
| turned into work on stylesheets and eventually CSS)
|
| * 1994: Argo (Bert Bos - co-creator of CSS; Unix; testbed
| for style sheets alongside Arena, and one of the first
| heavily plugin based browsers, with most functionality
| provided by plugins), IBM WebExplorer (Mosaic licensee);
| Slipknot (Windows; a really weird one which dealt with
| lack of SLIP/PPP connections by "hijacking" a Unix
| terminal connection, running lynx to retrieve the HTML,
| and then using zmodem to transfer both the HTML and
| images...)
|
| * 1995: IE (licensed version of Spyglass); Grail (Python;
| supported client side execution of Python...); OmniWeb
| (Mac)
|
| * 1996: Amaya (Unix, Windows, Linux, OS X), IBrowse
| (Amiga), Aweb (Amiga); Opera (Windows initially);
| Cyberdog; Arachne (DOS, Linux including framebuffer...;
| still updated as of two years ago...)
|
| Netscape took a lot of users from various Mosaic
| licensees, like Spyglass, and browsers like Cello; had it
| not existed, sure, things would have looked different,
| but timeline-wise the gap was narrow. Many of the browser
| - like Opera - that launched after Netscape had started
| development before Netscape launched, and others were
| abandoned in some cases directly because of Netscape.
| Some were probably no big loss, but Netscape's brief
| dominance contributed to the near monoculture we had for
| many years.
|
| There is no doubt it had improvements over Mosaic - I
| remember vividly the day the release with background
| image support spread across campus and every webpage
| looked garish for the next several years - but it was an
| advantage measured in months, and with competition
| heating up until Netscape stunted it for quite some time
| by becoming as dominant as they did until IE started
| catching up.
|
| A lot of the things Netscape is sometimes remembered for
| were not Netscape firsts either, or areas where they
| necessary had a lead. E.g. client-side scripting, style
| sheets, etc existed before Netscape; work on CSS was
| ongoing at CERN around the time Netscape launched etc. At
| most things would have looked different, and maybe some
| things might have taken a bit more time without Netscape
| scaring Microsoft. But I also remember a lot of ire at
| how Netscape pre-empted a lot of standards at the time by
| just throwing stuff at the wall, and untangling the mess
| they left took years.
| steego wrote:
| I remember that time and I too appreciate what the
| different browsers contributed feature-wise, but you're
| missing the big picture.
|
| In late 1995, Netscape released a browser that provided
| investors a comprehensive proof-of-concept online
| platform that was billed as the operating system for the
| Internet and they were being offered an opportunity to
| get in on the ground floor.
|
| JavaScript and CSS didn't matter. Investors were looking
| at SSL for eCommerce, Java applets, plugins, VRML,
| RealAudio, etc.
|
| Netscape stood out because nobody else was selling a
| comprehensive online platform with a compelling and
| plausible vision.
|
| The World Wide Web became something because a crap load
| of money was invested into developing browsers.
|
| It wouldn't have happened on its own to this degree and
| none of those browsers were on their way to becoming a
| household name.
| vidarh wrote:
| In late 1995 the market was even more crowded than when
| they launched in '94.
|
| IE was already out. Opera was around the corner. Netscape
| was already close to its peak market share.
|
| Plenty of people were selling alternatives, plenty of
| developers had funding. A lot of money had started
| flowing into browsers before Netscape. Had Netscape not
| soaked up the funding it did, more of that would just
| have flowed elsewhere.
|
| The argument is not that Netscape were irrelevant, but
| they were one - big, sure, - player among many racing to
| commercialise features that already existed before
| Netscape.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Maybe I'm just being a hater, but the inspiration being a
| web browser that failed after being acquired by AOL at
| dot-com level stupid high prices, doesn't inspire
| confidence at all. Sure, it helped pave the way for
| Firefox, but Netscape itself never actually did anything.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Netscape created the first highly usable web browser,
| which introduced most people to the web. They also
| created SSL (TLS), JavaScript, the first high performance
| web server, and much more that that made the web go.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Oh yeah, I'm not denying that Netscape pioneered a lot of
| stuff. They also would have went out of business had they
| not been bought by AOL at a stupid, dot-com inflated
| price.
|
| You can do something that creates a lot of changes in the
| world, but if your business model involves giving people
| things for less than it takes to produce then I don't see
| how that's a business. What are VCs expecting to get a
| return on their capital? What's the plan to actually make
| a profit? Is the plan just to get bought out at a
| stupidly inflated price, similar to your inspiration of
| Netscape?
| vidarh wrote:
| They pioneered very little. Viola pioneered client side
| scripting, stylesheets and more. Netscape _popularized_ a
| number of things, thanks to heaps of cash that let them
| market heavily, and in the process overtaking a bunch of
| competitors, and snuffing out many of them. They did have
| a great browser that was best for a period of a few
| years, but it 's not like there weren't plenty of
| alternatives either out or right around the corner when
| they launched.
|
| Fully agree with you they would not have survived long if
| the AOL sale hadn't happened.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Perhaps Jake is saying that it is more important to make
| the world better right now than to have 100 year business
| plan. It sounds like Jake is willing to lead the charge
| for now and risk death later if it means that the concept
| succeeds under any flag.
|
| Or maybe I'm just putting words in their mouth.
|
| What if the founders of MySpace are totally ok with its
| place in history and happy that social media under any
| name carries on their vision? Maybe they don't consider
| that a failure.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Highly *used.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| They may have done all those things and more.
|
| How did they actually make money? What's your equivalent?
| vidarh wrote:
| They sold the browser until that market was yanked out
| from under them, and they leveraged control of the
| homepage into sales of their serverside packages, and
| then they sold out to AOL before their longevity was ever
| tested.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It was a rhetorical question.
| vidarh wrote:
| This is an exaggeration. Yes, people flocked to Netscape.
|
| Because, yes, it was marginally better than what was
| available, especially on Windows. But the main _feature
| improvements_ that drove that initial rapid adoption was
| Netscape ignoring any attempt at agreement over standards
| and adding new "trinkets" like background images etc. in
| each release.
|
| And yes, they created Javascript, in a rush, but there
| already were other client-side scripting options.
|
| They were important, but their importance is inflated by
| looking back at a timeline where they won. We'd have
| lacked none of these things without them. They were one
| of many, and they were ahead in terms of features, but
| not by much, and the pressure they were under also left a
| wake of chaos.
|
| E.g., sure, they invented SSL, rushed it out with massive
| security flaws (that was a fun time... one of the gaping
| holes was that if someone ran Netscape on the same host
| they ran their e-mail on, which was not unusual, you
| could get a whole lot of the bits needed to cut down on
| the cost of bruteforcing the SSL key by triggering an
| e-mail bounce to help you narrow down current process
| ids), but there were prototypes of encrypted socket
| layers around for two years already by then e.g. see
| Simon S Lam's work on SNP [1].
|
| "Nobody" used Netscape's web server - which wasn't
| developed by Netscape anyway (it was acquired from Kiva,
| unless Netscape had a pre-Kiva web-server I've forgotten)
| - it was way too expensive. It was a market leader, yes,
| but in a crowded tiny niche of commercial servers. I ran
| an ISP around that time. I sold packages to businesses,
| and we'd have _loved_ to convince customers to pay for
| Netscape server software, but most people stuck with NSCA
| HTTPD, and quickly switched to Apache 1995 onwards.
|
| [1] https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/simon-s-
| lam/
| londons_explore wrote:
| Wow, all those VC's must have walked away very rich,
| considering how popular the web turned out to be!!!
| pjlegato wrote:
| Netscape didn't invent the web, its open protocol, or
| even the first browsers. They did not make the web
| happen.
|
| Netscape had a business model (charge people for browser
| software.)
|
| Netscape also went bankrupt. It was a colossal failure as
| a business.
| gumby wrote:
| Netscape did not start out an open source company --
| quite the opposite. It was a saving throw once Explorer
| took away their dominance. And I wouldn't say it was a
| successful move.
| rglullis wrote:
| Sorry, this is a non-answer. Is there a business model in
| mind or not?
| jakebsky wrote:
| We've announced one business model and do intend to
| iterate and add others, but that's all we've announced
| for now. The plan is definitely to be sustainable over
| the long-term.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| Honestly this is fucking whacko to me. "We've
| incorporated a legal entity whose entire purpose is to
| make money, but we have no idea how that's going to
| happen." How is this even allowed?
|
| Anyway the answer is ads. This just means it's going to
| be ads. It's always fucking ads. No one has ever gone
| into a capitalistic venture sans business plan and ended
| up doing anything besides selling fucking ads.
| andruby wrote:
| I really hope they do freemium.
|
| If they can run it with a small enough team, then
| freemium could be feasible. Sell special tools and
| functions to the power users.
| coldpie wrote:
| Ads are the most frequent answer, but it's not the only
| one. There's also the team getting acqui-hired, or
| getting bought by a competitor & shut down, or just plain
| old going out of business and sold for parts. None of
| those are good for users, obviously, but they are all
| viable paths for repaying VCs in absence of a business
| model.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| Sure, I guess I meant for long-lived products.
| rvnx wrote:
| A bit macro and optimistic view about sustainability (in
| general, not specific to Bluesky):
|
| If everything goes according to the prediction of
| economists for 2024, a light crisis should decrease
| consumer confidence in the US.
|
| One of the solution to re-energize the economy might be
| to lower interest rates.
|
| Which means that if interest rates go down in 2024,
| companies are going to be able to borrow at extremely low
| cost.
|
| In such environment, does the question of business model
| even matter ?
|
| If your task is to raise debt, what you need is to sell a
| dream, not have a way to generate money.
|
| ==
|
| Back to Bluesky:
|
| The bigger danger for the company now is most likely its
| own users.
|
| "Open ecosystem"/"Freedom"/"Free-speech" users tend to be
| greedy and consider everything should be free, and at the
| same time are very active when it's about criticizing.
|
| The "normies" of Twitter / Instagram, are likely higher
| spender because of the importance that vanity / self-
| promotion has in their life.
|
| One key could be for Bluesky to focus more on content,
| than on technology.
|
| Even on Telegram, people join groups and people, they
| don't really care if the source-code is here or not, or
| who controls what (because no matter how, this can change
| in the future).
| rglullis wrote:
| Speaking as someone who has been stubbornly offering
| paid-for-access Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix (and now Funkwhale)
| accounts at communick.com for 5+ years, I learned already
| that very few individuals are willing to put their money
| where their mouth is. Everyone loves to complain about
| the exploits of the tech companies, but no one really
| cares about paying for a service unless it gives some
| sense of exclusivity.
|
| What is going to make or break the alternative social
| media networks is the institutions. If/When newspapers
| (not journalists) start setting up their own instances,
| if companies put up support accounts on their own domain,
| if influencers start mirroring their social accounts on
| their own sites to try to their push their own brand...
| then I'll start believing that we have a chance.
| rvnx wrote:
| It's difficult, we compare two different views, one from
| tech-perspective, and one from user-perspective.
|
| I understand your arguments about the technology, they
| are absolutely correct, but they attract a typology of
| niche users, which are _extremely_ demanding and very
| difficult to convert to paying users.
|
| Twitter, the platform is very glitchy, the owners are who
| they are, the developer access is horrible, but still, I
| am using it, because there is exclusive and fresh
| content.
|
| Bluesky is an interesting project, but I can strongly
| suggest leaning toward content/user-focus than pure-tech,
| in order to secure a stronger business-model (and
| eventually, as a consequence, a sustainable + open
| ecosystem).
|
| Focus on onboarding great content first, and then walk
| back to the tech, not the other way around.
|
| For example, to support more extensively those newspapers
| or institutions to onboard the platform, and most of all,
| all these unofficial content creators.
|
| There are also some things which feel very strange, like
| the main description of Bluesky when you search for it on
| Google: "Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is
| not what this is".
| Ruthalas wrote:
| This sounds interesting to me, but visiting communick.com
| I can't figure out how much the service costs, nor see
| any way to find out. I see a sign up page, but it also
| has no pricing info.
|
| Can you direct me to that in info?
| rglullis wrote:
| Yeah, I am in the process of simplifying the offering and
| split down the site for managed hosting and the
| "standard" service. https://communick.com/packages/access
| should you give a link to the package: $29/year for
| Mastodon/Matrix/Lemmy/Funkwhale.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > we're also working hard to be sustainable
|
| When people ask you what your business model is, they are
| asking you _how_ you are going to do this.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| On the other hand, Jack Dorsey has proven himself as someone
| who can be very successful founding a large microblogging
| social network with no business model.
| ysavir wrote:
| I think Elon Musk proved Jack Dorsey to be that someone.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| >There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which
| enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling
| services that users can choose to use.
|
| Will people be able to opt out of your moderation services?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It sounds like you have to opt-in.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Yes, every part of the Bluesky (atproto) network is
| composable, including moderation (labeling).
| tracker1 wrote:
| This is my big question as well. As long as I'm able to block
| at an individual, or even org level, I'm generally okay
| seeing a feed of those I follow.
|
| Most social media moderation in my experience tends to be
| heavy handed. Most jokes could be offensive to someone and
| likely are. I'd prefer to preserve the collective works if
| George Carlin and Richard Pryor over heavily filtered
| systems.
|
| Edit: appears to be completely opt in and based on tagging...
| Wonder about positive filtering by tag now...
| skybrian wrote:
| Any plans to improve the search engine?
| jakebsky wrote:
| Yes, it's always a bit of an after thought (unfortunately)
| but we have improved it already a couple of times.
|
| And like most things with atproto, there will likely be
| protocol support for pluggable search engines, so users can
| choose their search provider(s).
|
| It's already entirely possible for others to operate atproto
| search engines since all the data is public and available.
| daveloyall wrote:
| Y'all let the public in before finishing your wait-list. I
| joined the list on 2023-03-02.
|
| Y'all didn't email me that signups were going to be public.
|
| Y'all didn't email me when signups actually went public. I
| found out about it here.
|
| ...And, let's see.. Yep, my handle is taken.
| pierat wrote:
| Well, join Mastodon! Find a community (server) that fits your
| liking and get your username! You can talk with anybody on
| other servers, but the one you choose is your homebase!
|
| https://joinmastodon.org/servers
|
| At least you're not succumbing to a commercial interest who
| will inevitably enshittify for eventual profit extraction.
| ipqk wrote:
| Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.
|
| On the other hand, the benefit of decentralized services is
| that your handle being taken shouldn't (eventually) matter,
| because you can just find another server.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Sorry about that. You definitely should have received a
| waitlist invite. We did invite everyone on the waitlist
| before launching. The deliverability of those emails was
| quite high but it's possible it went to the spam folder or
| something else went wrong.
|
| Something like 1 million of the users that joined came from
| the waitlist.
|
| Most users on HN are probably able to navigate using a domain
| handle, which is really the recommended and most
| decentralized option.
|
| https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-
| tutor...
| omoikane wrote:
| Same here, I was on the waitlist for a few months, during
| that time I saw no evidence that anyone joined Bluesky via
| the waitlist. Eventually I got lucky and found someone who
| was giving out invites on Twitter, but by then all of my
| friends are no longer interested in joining yet another
| social network.
|
| I hope Bluesky prospers since it has some features that
| Mastodon and Twitter lacks, but it has a lot of catching up
| to do.
| pentagrama wrote:
| I tried to sign up and it requires a phone number to verify
| trough SMS.
|
| Question. The phone will be attached to my account or is for
| one-time verification? If the latter, it is removed from blue
| sky database at some point?
|
| Thanks.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| How many social networks recently, Lemmy? The other one with
| crypto guys? This one? It's 2005 all over again? I am wondering
| if it's either because it's a relatively easy thing to code or
| because investors are likely to throw money at it?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Probably because we need new ones badly. Reddit and Twitter are
| two sinking bot-infested enshittification ships and we need a
| new place to go. Network lock-in is proving to be a very
| difficult nut to crack in the dystopia we have created though.
| You need people to jump ship but no one wants to go where the
| millions of eyes aren't.
| miroljub wrote:
| Why do you think any halfway popular social network won't be
| infested with bots and commercalizers?
| RankingMember wrote:
| My hope anyways is that there are more effective
| countermeasures. I remember Twitter not being nearly as bad
| before, but that was possibly just because verification
| actually meant something more than "have $10" and blue
| checks weren't turbo-boosted.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| The fact that the verification system is paid, and that
| is abused by bots, means twitter no longer has any
| incentive to remove said bots.
|
| Its basically the entire ad industry, there's little
| proof ads work, the metrics for ads are all inflated, yet
| its one of the biggest money makers out there. Same deal
| with the bots grinding views and likes for marginal
| payouts.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Reddit wasn't for a long time. Having leadership in place
| that actually cares about the users and doing something
| about bots would go a long way. Maybe when Reddit IPOs and
| it is a huge bust we can get some new sites going.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| More, smaller networks seems like a big improvement over a
| handful of too-big, everyone's-there networks.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I think the "everyone's there" networks were nice due to the
| cross-pollination aspect. I would see random trending stuff
| that I didn't know I would find interesting pop up.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| I've been on for a few months now. It feels like 2014 Twitter in
| that it doesn't have gifs or video, so you will see some very
| good jokes.
|
| A number of people I used to follow on Twitter are over there but
| seem to have broken out of the posting habit and are quieter now.
|
| When I look at the "discover" tab I don't usually see much stuff
| that's interesting to me. It's a lot of men posting thirst-traps,
| furries, bog standard too online politics, and discussion about
| what's going on on Twitter
|
| Edit to add: people really like to advise blocking. It's to the
| point that new users are often advised to add a profile photo and
| an intro post before following people, because you might get
| blocked just for not having those. I don't know what this is
| about - possibly because there's no private/locked accounts? It
| seems really strange to me.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| The network effect is very strong.
| RankingMember wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how the fragmentation in the
| post-Twitter landscape eventually consolidates. To your broader
| point, I think it's an interesting time where there's
| trepidation over just becoming Twitter 2.0 versus making some
| improvements that improve the experience of the platform. Even
| before Elon, Twitter definitely had some pain points, such as
| repetitive gif-replies and toxic political stuff, as you
| alluded to.
| packetlost wrote:
| Yeah, I've tried to seek out and post technical stuff but it's
| mostly people virtue signalling, rage baiting, and complaining
| about other sites.
| j4yav wrote:
| I made an account to check it out and was surprised to see it
| was just recommending nothing but US politics outrage bait,
| just like Twitter.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| I think a lot of that is on mastodon fwiw, and some hasn't
| left Twitter
| packetlost wrote:
| I've mostly been able to curate my Twitter feed to not
| include that stuff. Similarly for Mastodon. The problem is
| BlueSky tries to add algorithmic feeds while not doing it
| well enough to learn that I don't want to see it.
| flkiwi wrote:
| I tried to create a curated feed on Bluesky. It didn't go
| well. It interpreted my unambiguous keyword in the
| technology space as applying to content in the uh
| personal massage space. Much, much prefer Mastodon's
| direct hashtag following.
| AJ007 wrote:
| I think the future has to be feed ingestion that is 100%
| controlled by the user. To some extent we were there with
| RSS readers. I'm still able to retrieve Twitter feeds
| with an RSS reader. Everything comes together in one
| place, in order.
|
| If this is done on device and everything is archived, it
| starts getting really powerful. For example, after the
| 737 MAX door incident, I searched "Boeing" in my RSS
| reader and instantly had a list of news stories going
| back over the past year. (The number of 737 incidents
| that has been happening around the world is a lot more
| than what sits in the top of the news, but that's another
| discussion.) A local LLM could even summarize large
| amounts of stored headlines and tweets going back over
| years, and that's tech that works today.
|
| I don't want third party ad platforms (which now consists
| of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and more)
| measuring, running tests, re-ordering, and deleting on my
| communications. The LLMs and machine learning
| advancements are going to just make this more invasive,
| ugly, and manipulative.
|
| Sure, hn is largely about VC backed startups going on to
| try to have a multi-billion dollar IPO. It's also about
| disrupting incumbents. I can't think of a better path to
| disruption than coming up with business models that choke
| off their user-bases and end ad monetized surveillance. I
| for one have no interest in a future where I wear an
| Apple/Facebook/Google controlled AR/VR headset that has
| cameras to make sure my eyes are looking at all of the
| ads which are targeted based on the other pixels it knows
| I looked at. (I feel like a paranoid schizophrenic
| writing that, but that is what they are making.)
| 008289x8820 wrote:
| Look man, I'm a regular HN reader and even I don't buy
| into this. Are ads really the problem they are made out
| to be here? I'm asking because I don't mind and haven't
| mind about seeing an ad in years. In fact, I think they
| are perfectly good compromise when it comes to monetizing
| a website. Even HN has ads for gods sake. I even was okay
| with those old porn ads in The Pirate Bay or in 4chan,
| etc. Sure, if it's too much of that it can get annoying
| but whatever. On the other hand, the vast majority of
| people don't even know what RSS is and haven't even
| noticed a change in Twitter in the last few years. I'm
| sure most of them, believe it or not, aren't even aware
| of the transition to Elon Musk.
|
| I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but perhaps
| you and the tech industry in general are vastly
| overestimating a extremely niche opinion and a
| "nothingburger". For example, cookies. Now we have
| extremely annoying cookie banners everywhere, when they
| didn't matter at all. Why? Because if I'm using an
| icognito browser, what are they going to track? Do you
| think I REALLY care? What are they going to do with that?
| Track me and offer me catered ads? I don't think "they"
| can, but even if they do, big fucking deal.
|
| I'm a lot more worried about Know Your Customer policies
| on everything, or social media platforms (or even hosting
| platforms) deplatforming you if they don't like your
| opinion, or the FBI planting child porn on your site if
| they want to take it down. Do you think I'll worry about
| an AD out of all things?
| delecti wrote:
| IMO the biggest problem with Mastodon is that for a while
| decentralization was the biggest selling point. It led to
| the place being full of a lot of pedantic dorks. The
| situation did improve as Twitter exploded and various
| communities migrated in herds though.
| CM30 wrote:
| This is sadly a bit of a problem with most Twitter
| alternatives right now; many more niche communities haven't
| moved over (or have only chosen to go to one of them), so
| there's a good chance you won't find content you're
| interested in. Mastodon seems to have more of the tech crowd
| from what I can tell, but even then it's maybe 1% of the
| audience you might have had on Twitter.
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| Most "Twitter alternatives" don't deal with the fundamental,
| sensation-seeking oriented flaws in the medium and just turn
| out to be Twitter with more perpetually upset losers.
|
| It's disappointing, because a lot of work has gone into
| these. Especially Mastodon and Pleroma.
| packetlost wrote:
| I somewhat like Mastodon's model where you can have mostly
| focus on members within a community that maintains/owns the
| instance. Federation completely optional, though connecting
| communities more explicitly would be really cool!
| panarky wrote:
| _> thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics_
|
| Maybe the biggest problem with Twitter never was its
| centralization.
|
| It shouldn't be surprising that cloning Twitter mechanics just
| to decentralize it would result in the same signal-to-noise
| ratio as Twitter.
| delecti wrote:
| Regarding your edit, much of bluesky's culture is developing in
| reaction to Twitter, or based on lessons learned from it. That
| block-first attitude is a response both to the kinds of bots
| that are endemic on Twitter, and to the kinds of engagement-
| bait that made it such a mess at times. New follower looks like
| it might be a bot? Block. See a skeet from someone who looks
| like an asshole? Block. Don't feed the trolls, just block and
| move on. Personally I tend to mute, rather than block, but I
| think lots of social media would be better if people didn't
| boost things they dislike for the purpose of dunking or
| disagreeing.
|
| And to be clear, not _all_ of bluesky 's culture is a response
| to twitter, a lot of it is just the kind of lighthearted
| playfulness you can only get on a small and new social network.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| I mute annoying posters (the frequent users who already have
| >5k posts tend to be uninteresting to me and obviously show
| up more often in feeds), that makes sense to me.
|
| How goes my experience improve if I block a bot that follows
| me? Follower bots is a platform problem
| delecti wrote:
| I think it's mostly the same motivation as blocking
| assholes, partly "I don't want to be part of your attempt
| to game the algorithm" and partly "I don't want to see
| this".
| everybodyknows wrote:
| What is a "skeet"?
| delecti wrote:
| The unofficial name for a post on bluesky. It comes from a
| combination of "sky" and "tweet". The people running the
| site don't like that name, which of course only made people
| embrace it even more.
| pests wrote:
| It's also slang for ejaculation, so there's that.
|
| As Lil Jon might say, To the window, to
| the wall! Til the sweat drop down my balls
| Til all these bitches crawl Til all skeet skeet
| motherfuckers, all skeet skeet god damn! Til all
| skeet skeet motherfuckers, all skeet skeet god damn!
| delecti wrote:
| Incidentally that's also a big part of why the people
| running the site don't like the name, and why the users
| do.
| psionides wrote:
| Yeah, I strongly dislike this blocking culture there, because
| blocking also affects the other person's experience on the site
| - they won't be able to follow threads where you're involved.
| There's no reason to not use muting instead if you just want to
| get someone out of your view, except if you do it out of spite.
| who-shot-jr wrote:
| All the single word handles seem to be taken! :(
| paxys wrote:
| You don't need a bsky.social handle. Bring whatever domain you
| want.
| psionides wrote:
| Get a short domain somewhere and use it as the handle, custom
| handles are cooler anyway :)
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Musk has done a lot of questionable things, but does anyone
| remember how actually unusable twitter was before the sale? Musk
| Twitter has its own set of problems but Jack has proved he has no
| idea what he's doing
| hedora wrote:
| At this point, whenever I go to twitter, it shows status
| updates that are years out of date. For example, compare this:
|
| https://ubuntu.social/@launchpadstatus
|
| to this:
|
| https://twitter.com/launchpadstatus?lang=en
| internetter wrote:
| This is because you are logged out.
|
| Please note that this is _not_ me advocating for this
| practice. It has broken the web in immensely frustrating
| ways.
| hedora wrote:
| Given that it appears to be completely broken (last tweet
| for that account was 6 hours ago, and it's showing a 6
| month old cached version), why would I bother creating an
| account?
| internetter wrote:
| I agree. It's ridiculous. I was simply explaining why
| this behaviour happened.
| biggestfan wrote:
| When you're not logged in, the profile view shows you the
| most liked posts from that account, not the most recent.
| Not sure why.
| jiripospisil wrote:
| I remember that before the whole fiasco of a sale Twitter was a
| place where I could follow interesting tech people. These days
| those people have left for Mastodon etc. (or stopped posting
| entirely) and were replaced with hoards of $8 spammers whose
| only interest is to push inflammatory content to generate the
| most views and get paid for it.
| timeon wrote:
| > how actually unusable twitter was before the sale?
|
| I do not know how _usable_ it was but at least I was able to
| see the posts. Now I 'm not. Well except for some lucky
| occasion when it shows the post just without replies.
| psionides wrote:
| ... no? It was very usable before, it's much less usable now.
| TillE wrote:
| Dorsey isn't running Bluesky, he's just one member of the
| board.
| mobiuscog wrote:
| What does it offer over Mastodon, and following hashtags as
| topics ?
| bobajeff wrote:
| With the promises of AT Protocol I wonder what the reality of
| starting your own competing site to bluesky would be if it were
| to become as popular as Twitter. I've also been looking into LBRY
| too and have the same question in regards Odysee.
|
| I'm sure we won't know until someone tries. I have a feeling
| there might be some unforseen network effects or barriers that
| build up over time to prevent someone from coming along with a
| better site. I'm just curious to see what they are and how
| insurmountable they might be.
| paxys wrote:
| Pretty ironic that when Twitter was imploding _Meta_ launched a
| competitor that was fully compatible with ActivityPub /Mastodon
| while the team dedicated to building an open competitor (Bluesky)
| created a proprietary protocol that nobody uses.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Threads has been promising to integrate with ActivityPub since
| it launched. To date they've done very little and their
| timeline extends until the end of 2024.
|
| I'd personally be very happy if Threads gives up control over
| their users but it remains to be seen. ActivityPub also lacks
| the very strong account portability feature that made AT
| Protocol necessary.
|
| AT Protocol is completely open source and the Bluesky network
| is completely open. The Bluesky network has had an open API for
| a year with full access to all public data (no auth required):
| websocat
| wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos
|
| More info on: https://atproto.com
| ianopolous wrote:
| To be clear, strong account portability predates Bluesky by
| ~5 years. Peergos[0], as reviewed by Jay before Bluesky Inc
| was created, has had this for years:
|
| https://book.peergos.org/features/migration.html
|
| [0] https://github.com/peergos/peergos
| threeseed wrote:
| > To date they've done very little
|
| Not true. You can now follow Adam Mosseri's Threads account
| from Mastodon.
|
| And like you said they are committed to fully rolling it out
| this year.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Limited functionality for a specified subset of users
| counts as "very little" to my mind given that they launched
| 6 months ago and have a team of hundreds working on it.
|
| But like I said, I sincerely do hope Threads follows
| through on their plan to federate. But it's just not
| correct to claim that they already have.
| threeseed wrote:
| Maybe you I and understand the software development
| process differently.
|
| Supporting one user end to end is a huge milestone and
| the first step in rolling it out to the other hundreds of
| millions of users. Especially when Threads isn't a
| standalone platform but is built on top of Instagram
| which means we could see it integrated with ActivityPub
| as well.
|
| The fact that Meta cares about ActivityPub at all is a
| huge win for open, interoperable standards.
| mattl wrote:
| FWIW, you can now follow people on Threads from Mastodon and
| interact as if they're just another Mastodon user.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| Did threads launch with compatibility? Because I know a lot of
| "nsfw" creators that choose Bluesky over Threads because
| threads rules over NSFW content.
|
| Bluesky wasted a few opportunities they could have grabbed
| market share from Twitter simply because a) you needed and
| account to view posts (now fixed) b) you needed a code to sign
| up (now fixed).
|
| But has their ship sailed? L
| Sol- wrote:
| Reading testimonials from people who seemingly enjoy Bluesky, it
| sounds like the main perk is its exclusiveness and feeling like
| the good old days when Twitter was just for hardcore social media
| nerds? Is that that a recipe for success and wouldn't opening up
| undermine it?
|
| I don't see how any Twitter clone would avoid the pitfalls that
| make social media like Twitter fundamentally annoying. It's not
| about the technology or being federated or not, but about such
| internet-scale communities just not working well. You'll always
| end up with online drama about the silliest things and terminally
| online power users.
|
| Everybody hates Discord, but I think more communities should
| strive towards isolating themselves from the broader net to keep
| conversations civil.
| WD-42 wrote:
| This exactly. It's not the platform, it's the people. I think
| social networks work fine for small niche communities where
| conversion stays focused. The problem with all general social
| networks is that they eventually all devolve into political
| flame wars. Everyone is just over it.
| timeon wrote:
| Niche communities around some topic work well if people that
| are interested come and go.
|
| But if the niche is artificially created by fact that
| community is gated, then such community is not sustainable.
| Cabin fever and general fatigue of users.
| bombcar wrote:
| Reddit _almost_ solved it because they figured out a way to
| make a large collection of small communities, but then that
| slumped into the melt as it was likely to do.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't understand how people believe they just "end up" like
| that. You don't ever need to see celebrities and related junk
| online. Just follow your friends and don't follow anyone else.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Stuff like that is automatically shoved into your feed.
| jeffbee wrote:
| On what platform? It's not true on bsky or twitter.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| It's true on Twitter.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Only if you read the algorithmic "For You" feed instead
| of the chronological "Following" feed.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| The obvious answer is that people want it.
|
| I follow a bunch of musicians. I love going to concerts, and
| it's the easiest way to find out when they announce tours.
| The unfortunate reality is that scalpers make buying tickets
| a terrible experience, so unfortunately I have a strong
| interest in knowing exactly when tickets go on sale to
| improve my own chances of getting tickets.
| tootie wrote:
| My dream of social media utopia is that that we see a nonprofit
| organization who makes no bones about their moderation policy
| and enforcement or their revenue and expenses. I think
| centralization is just the only way a network can grow to
| useful size or behave predictably. It's not really a social
| network, but my model for this is Wikimedia. They've built
| something incredibly durable, centralized, aggressively
| moderated and financially viable.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| >we see a nonprofit organization who makes no bones about
| their moderation policy
|
| The problem is that the rules will be made by humans and will
| be enforced by humans. This will never be even close to
| perfect, especially with bad actors which are inevitable when
| a platform gets popular enough.
| tootie wrote:
| I don't think the goal should ever be "perfect". The
| problem I see with any commercial endeavor (this is
| probably as sideways critique of capitalism) is that if you
| have profit as the superseding interest, it will always be
| in conflict with being fair or being inclusive. At the same
| time what someone like Elon Musk clearly doesn't understand
| is the fundamental conflict between having an environment
| that fosters fruitful conversation vs absolutist free
| speech. Just having a platform that has a clear number goal
| of "free sharing of information and idea" at the top says
| clearly that it will come before platforming troublemakers
| or letting advertisers put their finger on the scales.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I keep thinking something closer to BBS networks... There are
| local boards you can chat on, but also the network boards.
| Usually by topic or interest.
|
| It's not instant, like social media, but lends to longer
| communication.
|
| More like a self hosted, distributed Facebook group, less life
| Twitter.
| jmull wrote:
| > internet-scale communities just not working well
|
| I think you have to dig into that, and figure out _why_
| internet-scale communities don 't work well, and then whether
| or not bluesky addresses it.
|
| First of all, what does internet-scale really mean? I think it
| has to be that, to some degree, everyone is talking at everyone
| else.
|
| For twitter and some other social networks this is because
| users don't fully control their feed -- they see what an
| algorithm decides they should see... and the algorithm is
| designed to increase engagement... because ads are how the
| social network makes its money. So you have content creators
| competing to make the most engaging posts and twitter doing its
| best to deliver those posts.
|
| So I think it's probably twitter's ad driven business model,
| combined with the sad fact that it's a lot easier to engage
| people with anger and outrage than with civil, thoughtful
| content, that leads to a social media wasteland more than
| whether you need an invite to join.
|
| I don't know if it will work, but if bluesky stays away from an
| ad-driven business model, they can let people control their own
| feeds and creators aren't incentivized only for engagement and
| it might stay a nice place to visit and hang out.
| flkiwi wrote:
| My experience on Bluesky was:
|
| 1. A direct port of the ragescrolling, today's-main-character
| culture of twitter 2. Complaining about mastodon and linux on a
| premise I haven't been able to tease out but appears to relate
| to open projects being inherently untrustworthy and private
| projects that receive funding being trustworthy. 3. Hyping
| Bluesky's ease of use (it is identical to Mastodon in every
| meaningful respect, except where Mastodon offers some
| additional functionality like private posts).
|
| I got out. I love a lot of the people that moved there, but the
| rage culture alone was what I originally left twitter to avoid.
| It's kind of a cultural AOL in the post-twitter-social space,
| with all that entails.
| rurp wrote:
| I agree that internet-scale communities are pretty bad for many
| (maybe most) topics. But Discord goes too far in the other
| direction with terrible discoverability. Most posters who would
| be good contributers to a given group never learn of its
| existence.
|
| The old school forum model does the best job of threading that
| needle that I have seen so far. Forums are easy enough to
| stumble across when searching a relevant topic, while the
| narrow focus makes them less of a magnet for stupid trolls and
| attention seekers.
|
| Reddit solved the hosting and setup problems of a forum, but
| that company is so far into the enshittification spiral that it
| hardly seems like a worthwhile place to invest much focus.
|
| I wish that all of the neo-Twitter resources where going
| towards making better forum-like platforms that actually
| encourage thoughtful discussion while also leaving space for
| more lighthearted posting.
| speps wrote:
| Nice, hopefully it'll drown some of the more niche streams and
| surface more mainstream ones.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I'm glad this happened as late as it did and that Threads
| absorbed the FB/IG people first. Let Twitter/Threads remain the
| home for the influencers, spammers, the eternal September.
| Hopefully Bluesky continues to attract a steady stream of early
| adopters but the followers never take over.
| raesene9 wrote:
| Slightly off-topic on this, but are there any apps that manage
| posting across BlueSky/Mastodon/Threads/Linkedin?
|
| With the fragmentation of social networks and different audiences
| being in different places, it's a bit annoying to have to
| manually post in different places (taking account of things like
| hashtag formats and post length limits), it'd be nice to have a
| site/app that helped with that.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Definitely. Hootsuite is the one I'm familiar with but it's
| targeted more at agencies or larger content creators and is
| priced for that.
| neogodless wrote:
| There have been a few. I know https://www.hootsuite.com is one
| of those, but does not currently seem updated to support any of
| the ones you asked about!
|
| https://fedica.com/ seems to maybe be a parent company
| (acquisition?) of Hootsuite.
|
| https://buffer.com/publish I first heard about this ages ago as
| a way to build a queue of things to put out to Twitter. They
| likely support Mastodon and LinkedIn now, but probably not yet
| the others. See
| https://support.buffer.com/article/567-supported-channels
| felixthehat wrote:
| ha same! I just last week started building an app for myself
| where I can cross post to mastodon and bluesky (& twitter is in
| progress, threads doesn't seem to have an api yet).
| https://grater.app (screenshot at https://imgur.com/lyefPGv )
| facorreia wrote:
| Why is it collecting dates of birth?
| aestetix wrote:
| Most likely to enable protections for minors. Let's hope.
| anhner wrote:
| Requiring phone number is a straight no go from me, sorry.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Understandable! We hope to relax this but we felt it was
| necessary to maintain the quality of the network for now.
| anhner wrote:
| I thought that is why you might have required it, but on the
| other hand for malicious actors it's trivial to get a phone
| number unrelated to them, while legitimate users are giving
| up their only phone number, possibly exposing it to scammers
| and robocalls (in case of a breach), or having something
| linking to their real identity.
|
| Anyway, hoping you revisit this one day and that's also when
| I will try your app again. Wishing you luck!
| smoothjazz wrote:
| Doesn't this go against the comic in the post that claims
| that it's easy to block what you don't want to see? Also that
| it's an open network? Why not just let everyone in if the
| moderation tools are good?
|
| I definitely would never give my phone number to a social
| network.
| pc86 wrote:
| Having good tools to increase the quality of your network
| doesn't mean you should willingly let the whole network
| decline in quality.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| You assume that requiring a phone number increases
| quality instead of decreases it. I see it as a filter to
| keep thoughtful people off the platform.
| jakebsky wrote:
| The SMS verification requirement is only for the Bluesky
| operated PDS host. Soon (this month) it will be possible
| for others to self-host their own PDS hosts that do not
| have this requirement.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| how will the bluesky PDS deal with the flood of spammers
| on malicious PDSs, like, why is the phone number a useful
| gatekeeping tool if you're just going to fling open the
| gates at the end of the month?
| jakebsky wrote:
| We do have an anti-abuse tool to help flag abuse. It is
| obviously important that PDS operators not allow
| themselves to become overrun with abusive users.
|
| Anyone technical can run their own single-user or low-
| user-count PDS and probably not have to worry about any
| problems.
| omoikane wrote:
| Can people bypass the phone number requirement with invites?
| I still have a few invites left and I am wondering if they
| have value going forward.
| _Parfait_ wrote:
| I think we'd all rather not be flooded by bots so no reason
| to change
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Long time user here, this is definitely not the way to go.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| And it rejects my german phone number. So, double fail. What's
| this obsession with using phone numbers. It's 2024! Any scammer
| can buy a burner phone. Owning a phone proves nothing other
| than that you own a phone.
| meijer wrote:
| Did you possibly enter the prefix +49 as part of the number?
|
| It seems to expect a number without the country prefix,
| starting with a number like "174" or whatever your provider
| prefix is...
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I tried all sorts of variations of my number. It just won't
| take it. I expect their validation is wonky/buggy. I used
| to work for Nokia and remember talking to people
| responsible for parsing phone numbers. This is not a
| trivial problem.
|
| Anyway, it hard rejects +49176..., 0049176..., 0176...,
| 176...; it correctly normalizes each of those to +49176...
| and then rejects the number. My number is fine. Their
| validation isn't.
|
| Anyway, for a new social network to repeat the
| security/privacy mistake of its predecessors (wrongly
| assuming phone operators are trustworthy and users never
| change their number) is just madness. Doesn't instill a lot
| of confidence that a lot of thought went into the whole
| thing.
|
| IMHO, phone numbers as a thing should just go away
| completely. Weird legacy identifiers from the last century.
| Absolutely no redeeming features. Hard to remember, easy to
| spoof. Etc. Why build your new network on the crumbling
| remains of an old one and give a lot of control to the
| typical abusers of the phone system (spammers, scammers,
| oppressive regimes, etc.)?
| jakebsky wrote:
| Sorry about this. We've just made some changes to make
| this less likely of an issue going forward.
| kivle wrote:
| Same problem with my Norwegian phone number just now.
| cdchn wrote:
| I hate tying phone numbers to identity but it is a way to
| slow down the ability to create massive heaps of bot
| accounts. There really isn't a better way. (Insert "better
| ways" that aren't actually better ways below)
| lapcat wrote:
| It requires a phone number now? That's weird. The invites
| didn't require a phone number.
| cdchn wrote:
| Because the numbers were limited before and now they've
| thrown open the doors to massive botnetting.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Likely a means of reducing bot accounts..
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Note, it requires SMS verification
| hedora wrote:
| I wonder if that's true if you set up your own federated
| server.
| jakebsky wrote:
| Nope, it's not a requirement for other PDS operators.
| eviks wrote:
| Do they plan to remove the character limit to also be an
| alternative to other popular social networks?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| The comic on this post is a whole lot of mess. Talking about
| moderation? Talking about "what if I want to leave"? Those sound
| like (1) work for me, and (2) why would I want to leave if it's
| so great?
|
| Uggh. And the fragmentation into silos continues.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _why would I want to leave if it 's so great?_
|
| If you're on an instance in a federated network and the
| instance's admin decides that they don't want to keep hosting
| it, you don't really have an option to stay.
| edavis wrote:
| > (2) why would I want to leave if it's so great?
|
| A lot of people felt burned by the changes at Twitter over the
| past 14 months or so. They made meaningful connections on there
| and with new ownership came changes that altered the character
| of the platform, in their eyes. But because Twitter is
| centralized, it's difficult to move your social graph to a new
| platform in a robust way.
|
| The promise of the AT protocol is being "billionaire-proof." If
| Bluesky gets bought out and you don't like the new owner, you
| can move your entire social graph and all your posts to a new
| atproto service without needing permission from the old
| service.
|
| That would be the nuclear option. A smaller step you could take
| before that is use a different set of moderation services to
| curate the experience you want (more info:
| https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation)
| patwolf wrote:
| Sign up. See the default feed is full of posts celebrating the
| death of Toby Keith. Delete Account.
| edavis wrote:
| I think the "default feed" you're seeing is the "Discover"
| custom feed that shows up if you haven't followed anybody. Once
| you do that, your "default feed" is what your follows have
| posted in reverse chronological order.
|
| IMO, the "Discover" feed can be a bit much sometimes. It's very
| much the collective id of a certain type of social media
| poster. And not always my cup of tea.
|
| But the beauty of Bluesky is there are millions of accounts and
| thousands of custom feeds you can pick from to tailor your
| experience.
|
| For example, here's one where people share photos of mushrooms:
| https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hsqwcidfez66lwm3gxhfv5in/fe...
| thefz wrote:
| Mastodon: Sign up. Immediately receive a DM asking me to fund
| some person's sex change and weight loss therapy. Delete
| Account.
|
| Bluesky: Sign up. Feed is full of cartoons of anthropomorphic
| animals. Delete Account.
| theryan wrote:
| The create account page seems to have incorrect form settings at
| least for Chrome.
|
| The email field prompts to create a new password (and generates
| it there) and the password field there is no prompt.
| ghaff wrote:
| I sort of wonder if the whole short-form social media era just
| sort of faded away. After Musk essentially destroyed Twitter, it
| feels like--although various people casually migrated elsewhere--
| overall, it feels like a lot of people decided that a Twitter-
| like thing just wasn't part of their daily lives any more.
| Sometimes there's a forcing function that takes people off their
| automatic pilot and it feels like Musk caused a lot of people to
| do so with Twitter.
| WaffleIronMaker wrote:
| I agree that, overall, short-form social media is leaving the
| mainstream with Twitter's decline. However, I still really
| enjoy short-form media.
|
| I can't speak for BlueSky, but I've been enjoying Mastodon a
| lot. Following people I like has given me a high enough signal
| to noise ratio that I often find myself saying "Hey! Check out
| this thing I found on Mastodon!". My friend just joined because
| of this, and they've been enjoying it too, specifically for
| programming, infosec, and queer memes (caveat N=2).
|
| Idk. I hope there's a future for it.
| ghaff wrote:
| I still have a Twitter/X account, got a Mastodon account with
| the Muskopalypse, and have had a Bluesky invite sitting in my
| mailbox forp a while. It's just clearly moved on from
| something that was part of my routine to eh.
| Aachen wrote:
| Are there mobile apps for Blueky? When I type bluesky or bsky
| into f-droid, it comes up blank, and I'm not seeing a custom
| repository or even just an apk download mentioned on the website
| either. I thought it was like Mastodon except invite-only (till
| now), so was expecting a similar client ecosystem, but apparently
| it's more like Twitter was: open ecosystem closed software?
|
| Or is it like Tildes whose goal is to have a mobile website that
| is just as good as a native app?
| delecti wrote:
| There's an official app on the play store. I don't know if it
| has been mirrored to any other app stores/repositories, but
| perhaps knowing the app ID will help find it elsewhere.
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.blueskyweb...
| psionides wrote:
| There is an official mobile app for iOS and Android, on iOS
| there are also a few third party ones, not sure about Android.
| hw4m wrote:
| Yet another social media i don't want to sign up for.
|
| Sorry, I'm getting old and grumpy, but I'm not using any of the
| other social media sites, and I'm not planning on adding one to
| the list.
| smudgy wrote:
| Hey! Thanks for the heads up, signed up and now I'm going to do
| what I did when I signed up to Twitter in the deep past... lurk.
| rvz wrote:
| Unsurprisingly, as predicted they eventually lifted the invite
| system.
|
| Unfortunately the interest in Bluesky is not the same as it was,
| but still a viable Twitter alternative when compared to the
| others.
|
| But my goodness this certainly did not age well at all. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35876304
| yawebnw wrote:
| This is a response to Farcaster hitting great metrics lately.
|
| https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1754905898743402558
| srid wrote:
| If you are outside US, joining Farcaster via Warpcast will cost
| $5.
|
| I joined, and the UX does feel quite slick. Mostly it is just
| crypto users on this network.
|
| Note that Farcaster is not decentralized, but "sufficiently
| decentralized"
| https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...
| computer23 wrote:
| I've had some concerns about the namespacing issue.
|
| Bluesky accounts should be permitted to have both a bsky.social
| username and one with a custom domain. If I am a company and want
| to use @myname.com as my username, I would not want someone
| @myname.bsky.social to fall into the hands of anyone else. So it
| sort of necessitates signing up for 2 accounts, if only to
| reserve your name so nobody takes it.
| tristan957 wrote:
| Mastodon solves this through verified accounts.
| CM30 wrote:
| It's nice to see this is the case now, though I worry it may be a
| bit too late. Having BlueSky stuck behind an invite wall gave a
| huge boost in popularity to other alternatives like Mastodon and
| Threads, and even now I'm unlikely to find most of the accounts I
| want to follow on the former service as a result.
|
| It just feels super quiet to me at the moment, and I suspect the
| long time exclusivity played a big role in that.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| bluesky is really a bad name for a social network. sounds too
| entreprisy, compare it to: twitter, instagram, tiktok
| mattl wrote:
| I figured it related to blue-sky thinking.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blue-sky_thinking
| annexrichmond wrote:
| I selected my interests as Cooking, Fitness, Nature, Video Games,
| and my feed has absolutely none of that. Just random politics,
| activism, and jabs at Twitter. Anyway, nope.
| BryantD wrote:
| I don't actually know how the interests are intended to work,
| but I can say that the key feature of Bluesky is feeds. (I know
| this isn't at all obvious.) Feeds are third-party created, for
| the most part, and essentially function as filters. So, for
| example, I follow a movies feed. Any post which includes the
| movie camera emoji, the word "filmsky", or a few other keywords
| is included in the movies feed. It makes it very easy to swipe
| over and see discussions of cinema.
|
| That sounds (and is) a lot like tag-based feeds over on
| Twitter. However, there's additional potential. Behind the
| scenes, a feed is a service which takes the user info of the
| person viewing it and the firehose and decides which posts to
| include based on that input. So "include all posts with these
| keywords" is valid, but so is "include the top 100 posts with
| these keywords, as measured by likes." Or "show a feed
| including only the most recent post from every user the viewer
| follows."
|
| In other words: feeds are the way a third party can build their
| own algorithm for the firehose. Very powerful, very useful.
| ldoughty wrote:
| I found this confusing too
|
| I think the interests section was to try get you to find people
| and feeds.. but after that, the feeds (or just the Discovery
| feed?) are influenced by who you follow.. so if you are offered
| a 'bad' (for you) starting group of people to follow, your feed
| will probably not be great until you find people you like (that
| are active) and follow them too.
|
| Also was unsure what "Follow all +" button was.. why not
| "Follow Selected".. and a 'deselect all'.. I had no idea who
| all but 2 of the suggestions were. Not going to follow a random
| "Computer Scientist" the system picked for me sight/posts
| unseen.
| jayzalowitz wrote:
| Anyone else seem to observe people who previous tended to move to
| bluesky and kill their twitter happened to be radical and
| potentially dangerous politicians (I can think of one in sf off
| the top of my head
| Finnucane wrote:
| "One" is definitely a trend.
| davidw wrote:
| I've been using Threads pretty exclusively lately. It's not
| perfect, but it's got what feels like critical mass and is being
| actively improved.
|
| It'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| I am over social media just like I was over trying to become a
| mayor of something on FourSquare, wasting time on useless virtual
| accolades.
|
| There IS a way to use this to develop your online professional
| brand, but it is so hard not to get bogged down in the swamp full
| of below-average intelligence, bots, and now AI garbage.
| Hiko0 wrote:
| No thanks. Mastodon has been there for ages and its background is
| not another VC funded startup company first burning through money
| and then finding no real way to sustain the platform, finally
| turning to ads and selling user data.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Riffing on a toot I saw this morning:
|
| Don't build your house on rented land. Especially if the rent is
| zero.
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