[HN Gopher] Be wary of Bluesky
___________________________________________________________________
Be wary of Bluesky
Author : kevinak
Score : 201 points
Date : 2026-02-20 23:35 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kevinak.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (kevinak.se)
| davidw wrote:
| Good points, but what's the alternative at this point?
|
| Because of network effects, more users is generally more
| interesting. Blue Sky has "enough" at this point for me to be
| happy there. Programmers like antirez, my bike racing people like
| inrng, my city's mayor and one of our city councilors, and also a
| bunch of urbanists.
|
| Edit: you lose some connections moving around, but I've also had
| friends I've known since the days of IRC. I think I'm mostly
| resigned to picking whatever works best in the moment and being
| willing to move (like abandoning Twitter) when it's not working.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| https://indieweb.org/POSSE
|
| which is not opposed to you being on Bluesky or Instagram or
| LinkedIn or wherever.
| seandoe wrote:
| That's just not practical for most people (the publishing
| part). And in relation to microblogging, are you going to
| publish every 140-character, out-of-context thought on your
| personal website?
| 8organicbits wrote:
| There's other syndication models, although POSSE gets
| talked about most.
|
| If you don't want to get your own domain and run a server
| (not practical for most people) you can still protect
| yourself from being stuck in a single silo by broadcasting
| to many social media sites.
|
| https://indieweb.org/PESETAS
| seandoe wrote:
| And the atproto is pesetas right? You publish to bluesky
| or whatever and the content is replicated to your pds. I
| recognize the minor difference, but if you have the
| energy and wherewithal to orchestrate pesetas across
| silos, surely you can setup a pds elsewhere.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I think of PESETAS as more defensive than what a single
| protocol can handle. Imagine posting to Bluesky and using
| automation to syndicate the post to Twitter, Facebook,
| Mastodon, Threads, and more. If Bluesky goes evil, or you
| otherwise decide to ditch it, you've mitigated the
| network effect as you have followers on other platforms
| already. People can still find you and your content isn't
| lost.
|
| Imagine if Bluesky decides to ban you, and continues to
| ban accounts you create elsewhere. Atproto ensures non-
| Bluesky PDS can see you, but you've lost 99% of the
| userbase.
| seandoe wrote:
| Ok yea that makes sense.
| verdverm wrote:
| There's an ATProto project the main blog sites are
| working together on around distribution and syndication.
| It also has places for the off-protocol sites people post
| or publish.
|
| https://standard.site/
| kevinak wrote:
| Nostr - it has none of the problems mentioned in the article.
| davidw wrote:
| But does it have a critical mass of people?
|
| The Wikipedia page says "Nostr is primarily popular with
| cryptocurrency users, primarily Bitcoin users."
|
| That's not my crowd.
| irusensei wrote:
| I hear you but if you think about it who else has an
| incentive and skills to create something like Nostr? Who
| are the people interested in free speech, signatures and
| decentralization and with the skills to pull it up?
|
| And since you mentioned primarily Bitcoin users those are
| the crypto folks that seem to be very against the idea of
| tokenizing everything.
|
| From what I understand by posting something on Nostr you
| are posting signed events to a list of dumb relays. These
| events can be of many types and include hints of
| discoverability. There is no blockchain and no token and
| the thing they call zap is just a link to a lightning
| address that is up to the client to show.
|
| Your account is your key pair so you are not at the whims
| of a power tripping administrator.
|
| It seems like the perfect nesting ground for non corporate
| user content and pocket islands of communities. Nothing
| prevents someone from implementing a relay or community
| that bans any talk about Bitcoin or crypto. I for one would
| love to see closed content focused relays in Nostr.
| verdverm wrote:
| > Your account is your key pair so you are not at the
| whims of a power tripping administrator.
|
| But you are right back to the same UX issue that
| prevented crypto mass adoption, i.e. lose your keys, lose
| everything
|
| Very few want to own that risk.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Isn't Mastodon an alternative?
| davidw wrote:
| Not in terms of having a critical mass of users for many
| topics or being very accessible for a lot of people.
| loeg wrote:
| If you're concerned about critical mass, Bluesky is also a
| dead end.
| davidw wrote:
| I mean, I explained in my original comment exactly why it
| is not a dead end for me. It has 'enough' of the things
| I'm interested in to make it worthwhile.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| I can't comment on the "critical mass", since I haven't got
| the numbers. But what exactly does "accessibility" mean in
| this context? What are the challenges of opening an account
| in mastodon.social?
| verdverm wrote:
| The first challenge most people have when starting AP /
| Mastodon is that they are presented with a choice "pick a
| server" before anything else. That's what I hear most
| often anyway.
|
| The other challenge that AP has as an ecosystem is that
| they have been hostile to anyone wanting to build an
| index or business. People need to eat and they turned off
| a lot of developers who'd love to make their living
| building social media tech outside of the corporate
| oligarchy.
|
| ATProto welcomes all, even if there is the occasional
| drama or hostility.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Go outside
| dangond wrote:
| I might be misunderstanding something about atproto, but isn't it
| always possible to export data from bluesky because all it takes
| is reading your data, which is done by any app interacting with
| your pds anyway? If they block that, they're blocking atproto
| functionality entirely, no?
| 8organicbits wrote:
| > If they block that, they're blocking atproto functionality
| entirely, no?
|
| Keep in mind, twitter got rid of their API. Google got rid of
| XMPP federation. Bluesky breaking or defederating atproto
| wouldn't impact most users, so they'd probably get less outcry
| than those examples.
|
| https://support.google.com/code/answer/55703?hl=en
| verdverm wrote:
| Yes, there are backup services that can help so you cannot be
| locked away from your data too.
| runako wrote:
| When reading any essay about the perils & merits of Bluesky's
| architecture, save yourself some time by searching for "Blacksky"
| in the post. If they don't address Blacksky, more than likely the
| author's understanding of the space has major gaps.
|
| (Blacksky is the/one of the furthest along in building competing
| versions of each part of the AT proto stack.)
| kevinak wrote:
| I know very well what it is, it doesn't change anything in the
| grand scheme of things. I wish it did!
| runako wrote:
| Re-reading my reply, it is worded more harshly than I
| intended. My apologies.
|
| I do think it's a critical omission to not address the main
| player(s?) who are working on key parts of this, and where
| they may yet run into problems.
| api wrote:
| Does it require people change defaults? If so then 99% will
| never use it.
|
| A system or protocol is whatever the easiest user journey is.
| Anything outside of that will never be seen by many users
| unless there is some value to be gained by going there. And
| that value has to be something gained now, not a hypothetical
| like insurance against future closing of the network. People
| don't like to buy insurance.
| tpdly wrote:
| I think these are reasons that Mastodon and Nostr aren't ever
| going to have a critical mass of users, remaining a niche
| thing for people who care about the hypotheticals (which is
| fine). Imho, BlueSky is the only distributed social media
| project that has a chance of meeting users where there are
| with usable search, realtime discoverability, and other
| consequences of centralizing event-busses.
|
| People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact
| is that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You
| can do social-media over email a la Mastodon (which
| admittedly is pretty great), but most people will trade that
| for a walled garden.
|
| The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much
| charity, which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be
| funded more like public libraries than ad tech.
| verdverm wrote:
| For some context
|
| 25G < PLC postgres < 100G, depending if you want to keep
| all the spam operations (> 50%) and/or add extra indexes
| for a handle autocomplete service (like me, takes it over
| 100GB with everything)
|
| Repo data (records) is in the double digit TB range (low
| end, without any indexing, just raw)
|
| Blobs are in the Petabyte range.
|
| I aim to find out current and accurate details soon.
| weare138 wrote:
| But how is that 'decentralized' which was the entire point of
| Bluesky and the AT protocol to begin with? We're just back to
| running centralized services. Without decentralization this is
| just XMPP with extra steps. You might as well just run
| something like Movim and save yourself the hassle.
| runako wrote:
| There's "decentralized" in the sense that every device runs
| the whole stack. In an analogy to another protocol, this
| would be like running SMTP and IMAP on your phone and laptop.
|
| Then there's "decentralized" in the sense that the protocols
| that govern are open and anyone can plug in without
| permission. This is how email works in practice. Most people
| do not choose to run their own email servers, but they
| nonetheless benefit from the fact that people who are
| interested can do so and provide email service.
|
| Bluesky is the second kind of decentralized.
| verdverm wrote:
| > the entire point of Bluesky and the AT protocol
|
| is really to find a good enough middle ground that has
| competitive enough UX to get people off of the fully
| centralized, locked in social media providers. In the broader
| context, ATProto to me means user choice and provenance,
| which ATProto does better than any other protocol. See all
| the parts beyond just data hosting, where the entire
| distributed system is plug-n-play. [1]
|
| ATProto not being purist, preferring pragmatism, is what
| attracts me over alternatives like AP and Nostr.
|
| [1] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-
| engineers
| atherton94027 wrote:
| I mean it's a repo with 1 very active contributor
| (https://github.com/blacksky-
| algorithms/rsky/graphs/contribut...), I get that they decided
| to skip on that
| carb wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksky
| atherton94027 wrote:
| Sorry I'm not sure I understand your point
| carb wrote:
| Sorry, meant say that Blacksky is much more important
| than the metrics you point to, with more detail on that
| wiki.
|
| They're the first alternative full stack, the first
| alternative AppView, and that is something that the
| author should have mentioned. However, it weakens the
| argument so they left it out.
|
| "Number of contributors" has never meant impact. You
| wouldn't dismiss openssl or curl, ya know?
| mcint wrote:
| It's good FUD. You re-iterate their talking points. (Also, no
| CTA, no takeaway, just _" worry!"_)
|
| As others have said, the data has to be publishable to be useful.
| We do have data export laws. The format is known to be ready to
| use interoperably, not some private schema--atop the PBC
| commitment, which will at least have moderate legal costs if not
| a guarantee. It has unequivocally set a new high bar.
|
| They seem pretty locked in to doing what they committed to. The
| day may come when they turn. It may come first by friction, but
| the turn has to be pretty complete, because the data is pretty
| open. What's needed to view it, use it at all, is pretty close to
| what's needed to host it.
|
| "The site whose value prop is sharing your posts and data with
| other apps may stop sharing your posts and data with other apps."
| _Yeah, it 's possible. It's also possible they just close._
| AgentME wrote:
| Bluesky is architected so you can export your data and follows
| and followers to your own or someone else's infrastructure at any
| time. There are some groups that have taken that offer and moved
| off of Bluesky's infrastructure (see Blacksky). The fact that
| most people aren't doing that is a sign that people are happy
| with how Bluesky-the-company is running things. What's the issue?
| kevinak wrote:
| Most people were happy with Twitter as well
| AgentME wrote:
| And Bluesky is better because you're not locked in and can
| export your posts, follows, and followers off of their
| infrastructure if they start being evil or you randomly feel
| like it. Companies like Twitter effectively wield network
| effects to stop people from leaving. All of one's activity on
| Twitter increases the sunk cost to keep them on Twitter in a
| way that's not true for Bluesky.
| mh- wrote:
| I don't have a horse in this race, but:
|
| _> [..] machine-readable archive of information associated
| with your account in HTML and JSON files. [..] including
| your profile information, your posts, your Direct Messages,
| your Moments, your media ([..]), a list of your followers,
| a list of accounts that you are following, your address
| book, Lists that you've created, are a member of or follow,
| [..], and more._
|
| (Note that I actually elided some additional things that
| are included in the export, for readability's sake.)
|
| https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/accessing-
| your-x...
| AgentME wrote:
| You can't actually use your followers and following list
| from X on other sites. With Bluesky, you can move your
| profile onto other infrastructure, continue to see posts
| from people you follow, and make new posts that your
| followers still see like nothing happened. It's like how
| if you own your own domain name, you can set your MX
| records to whatever email service you want and change it
| when you want without affecting anyone you're having
| email conversations with.
| mh- wrote:
| Ah, I see. Your use of the term "export" made me
| misunderstand. Though now that I've thought about it for
| a few minutes, I'm not sure what verb makes sense [to me]
| there. I guess "migrate?"
|
| edit: also, thanks for clarifying!
| verdverm wrote:
| yes, "pds migration" is a phrase you see more often
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I recognize that Bluesky is at present more open than
| Twitter and that all of the necessary building blocks for
| the infra are publicly available. That's good of course.
|
| However I think the view you expressed there is misguided.
| If Bluesky locked out third party infra tomorrow presumably
| the vast majority of people would not move. Thus vendor
| lockin via network effects remains. (Ie you are always free
| to leave but you'd be moving from a metropolis to a
| backwater.)
|
| The only scenario where this isn't true is one where no
| more than a few percent of the people you interact with
| reside on any given node. By that metric small AP nodes
| pass while large ones such as the flagship Mastodon node
| fail. Similarly Gmail and Outlook fail while any self
| hosted mail server passes.
|
| It's not an easy problem to solve.
| verdverm wrote:
| There would be a revolt if Bluesky did that and doubt
| they will be so self-destructive.
|
| I'd rather be optimistic than nihilistic about it. It's
| still early and there are a lot of good things happening.
| esseph wrote:
| That's a very strong statement to make.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| I generally liked Twitter before but not as much as now,
| since now it's not so heavily trolled by far left activists.
| zem wrote:
| whether you agree or not, asking "what's the issue" misses the
| point very badly, since the article is almost entirely about
| what the issue is (i.e. that most people will not change
| defaults and the default is to centralise on the bluesky
| servers)
| AgentME wrote:
| The fact that the system is built around this escape hatch
| makes it miles better than almost all other social networks.
| An escape hatch doesn't need to be used by most people to be
| valuable.
| kevinak wrote:
| Nostr doesn't have these issues
| pfraze wrote:
| I know when I'm using a Nostr app because its logo is an
| endless spinner.
|
| At the scales these systems run at, you need large
| indexes. Distributing those indexes across many nodes
| would require a breakthrough in federated queries, and if
| you have one of those lying around I'd pay good money for
| it.
| verdverm wrote:
| Nostr has different issues, people are where their
| preference for dealing with them is
| AlienRobot wrote:
| It's weird to focus on that when there isn't a single thing
| in software that doesn't suffer from "everyone will just use
| the default anyway"
| zem wrote:
| yeah I'm not saying the blog is right or wrong; I'm just
| saying that describing bsky's features and asking "what's
| the issue?" means you aren't engaging with what it's
| actually saying.
| jmull wrote:
| I'm not the previous poster, but I don't see any cogent
| points in the article to engage with in any depth.
| kevinak wrote:
| Nostr doesn't have these issues
| Retr0id wrote:
| There doesn't seem to be a timestamp associated with this
| article, but it is based on outdated information.
| kevinak wrote:
| How so?
|
| I should add a time stamp to the blog.
| shablulman wrote:
| It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of a fresh social
| graph, especially when the migration feels so organic. However,
| the author makes a poignant point about the inherent tension in
| building a protocol while simultaneously acting as its primary,
| VC-backed gatekeeper.
|
| The real test for the AT Protocol will be whether it can truly
| decouple from Bluesky PBC before the pressures of monetization or
| an exit strategy kick in. Right now, we're benefiting from the
| "honeymoon phase" of a platform that needs growth more than
| revenue, but history suggests that the bridge to true
| decentralization needs to be fully built before that dynamic
| inevitably shifts.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Bluesky isn't my bank records, isn't my photo archive, isn't my
| github, isn't my Documents folder.
|
| I don't care if Bluesky goes away, gets bought, whatever.
|
| Social media is disposable like a retail outlet. I'm sad if the
| coffee shop around the corner goes out of business, but there are
| 99K coffee shops in the US. I can go to another one.
|
| As it is, I don't use Meta or X.. because they're led by
| despicable beings. Bluesky gets a pass for now, and has enough
| interesting people that I show up and have a chat. Like a coffee
| shop or a bar.
| davidw wrote:
| This is where I'm at, but it _would_ be nice if it had some
| more longevity to it, as there are costs to switching to the
| next thing and the thing after that.
| 627467 wrote:
| I dont get why you're downvoted.
|
| Social media should be treated as disposable. Anything that is
| not yours (as in, is hosted by someone else - for free) should
| be disposable. In fact id even argue that any media should be
| treated as disposable. You wouldn't hoard all the material
| things your accumulate in life, why would you hoard random
| tweets, comments and reactions forever?
|
| If its worth it, surely you'll find a way to keep it in a way
| that doesnt demand a third party to do it for you for eternity,
| no?
|
| "Switching costs" man... people move between countries with
| vastly different languages and cultures and they adapt, make
| new relationships, refresh ideas. Is switching from database A
| to database B that difficult really?
| dasil003 wrote:
| This feels like the healthiest take (other than just opting out
| of social media entirely). I wish there wasn't this tension
| between scale and freedom/diversity. I wish the dynamics of
| tech were a little less winner-takes-all. But such is the
| nature of global digital distribution. Decentralization and
| local-first are nice ideas but they create a pretty high
| barrier to entry that keeps a lot of interesting people out. If
| I'm going to be on social media I don't want to be in a
| cesspool like Twitter but I also don't want to be an
| idealogical hobbyist bubble.
| qwertox wrote:
| > If an acquirer disables exports, it doesn't matter that the
| tools existed yesterday.
|
| Don't they have to give you your data upon request? And the
| cheapest way is to offer an export function? Wasn't this thanks
| to the EU (GDPR Article 20)?
| Spivak wrote:
| Also, at best this says not to host your data on someone else's
| computer and keep control of it, which is a thing Bluesky
| explicitly supports and encourages.
|
| Will normal people do it, no. But you can.
| asadotzler wrote:
| They can give it to you in the least useful way imaginable and
| will. What we want and expect is an export that can be easily
| imported to some other provider and that's where the "good
| guys" can differentiate.
|
| I can export decades of web browsing history, bookmarks,
| logins, etc. and import into any other browser with almost no
| trouble at all. Try to export your mainstream social network
| (facebook, twitter, insta, tiktok, etc.) content and
| connections and import it into another social network and let
| me know how that goes.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "That's the same argument people made about Twitter. 'If it goes
| bad, we'll just leave.' We know how that played out."
|
| Yeah, I left.
|
| (And in fact I am wary of all social media.)
| eviks wrote:
| So it played very poorly, you lost personal data and most
| importantly, social connections, and acquired a weariness
| yellowapple wrote:
| Whereas if Bluesky went evil tomorrow only the "acquired a
| weariness" part would happen, given that it's straightforward
| to move to a new PDS and take the entirety of your personal
| data and social connections with it.
| wmf wrote:
| There are specific steps Bluesky could take to decentralize the
| network. These are going to sound extreme but I agree with the
| article that it will never decentralize on its own. (Nothing will
| ever decentralize on its own so this isn't a criticism of Bluesky
| specifically.)
|
| 1. Strongly encourage backups.
|
| 2. Force users to migrate off the "official" PDS until it has
| less than, say, 40% market share.
|
| 3. Make the mobile apps use third-party relay/appview by default
| (could be randomized).
| chickensong wrote:
| > Strongly encourage backups
|
| Or invert this, and make it local-first. It's your data, and
| publishing it to a network is a form of backup. Either that, or
| the client holds a local copy by default.
| wmf wrote:
| It's not clear to me what a local-first social network would
| mean. The point is for other people to see your posts.
| chickensong wrote:
| The data is local-first, but it's designed so that you
| publish to online networks. The point is to invert the
| current model of putting your content into someone else's
| network and hoping for the best, or expecting users to
| remember to run some manual backup that's probably going to
| be a pain to do anything with.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| >> You can self-host a PDS. Almost nobody does.
|
| Who would've thought true decentralization means everyone hosting
| their own server? Yes, each user would have to pay and maintain
| it, but that's the cost of decentralization. ATProto at least
| makes it easy to jump ship if shit hits the fan and not have to
| start from scratch. Try doing that with Twitter/Instagram/Etc.
| publius_frog wrote:
| (Throwaway account.)
|
| Several people have mentioned that "you can just own your own
| data, so that's enough, right?"
|
| Interoperating with Bluesky requires you to either 1) opt into
| the did:plc standard, which is a centrally controlled certificate
| transparency log, or 2) have all your users create did:web
| accounts by manually setting DNS records.
|
| So it is not possible to build on Bluesky at all without opting
| into this centrally controlled layer. This original post covers
| this, but maybe not in enough detail to stop commenters from
| missing the point.
|
| Bluesky the company controls 95%+ of PDSes in the system, which
| control users' private keys, and they're extending PDSes to
| include more functionality that prevents users from easily
| exiting the network, e.g. private data is being implemented in a
| way where Bluesky LLC can see all your activity. The protocol
| changes often and with limited community input.
|
| This is being done because "there are no other ways to do it" and
| "our users are okay with it". The community does pretty
| consistently attack people who dissent (e.g. look at what
| happened when Mastodon leaders objected). There's a lot of
| cheerleading for people who do opt into the system, and there's
| really no incentive for informed criticisms.
|
| It's not really decentralized or neutral infrastructure; it's a
| great network for a number of specific subcultures who have a
| nice space away from X, and I hope the team embraces that.
| verdverm wrote:
| The work to make the PLC _not_ centralized has already begun
|
| 1. Non-profit (separate entity from Bluesky)
|
| 2. Moving to Switzerland (get the f' out of the US)
|
| 3. Consortium control (proof-of-authority)
|
| A PLC read-only mirror implementation was released the last
| week. I've been running one for a almost a year, redoing my
| hardware right now, so it's currently down. There are others
| out there.
| kevinak wrote:
| This is still centralized.
| verdverm wrote:
| It's still good enough
| vvpan wrote:
| > At every layer, the answer is "anyone can run their own." At
| every layer, almost nobody does.
|
| But people do and it is reportedly fairly easy so the majority of
| people are on Bluesky's layers while all is well. But also I
| don't understand why any of this is a reason to be "wary", it's a
| great place to be with some unique technical properties - it is
| way more "open" than any other platform of similar scale.
| bo1024 wrote:
| > But people do and it is reportedly fairly easy so the
| majority of people are on Bluesky's layers while all is well.
|
| The post discusses why, when all is not well, it will be too
| late.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| At this point I despair at anyone who doesn't understand that
| the problem isn't the specific architecture, it's social
| media as a scaled up, algorithmically driven concept. Stick
| so many people on one social graph that can't possibly be
| effectively moderated by humans and it will turn into the
| same pit every time.
| icehawk wrote:
| > That's the same argument people made about Twitter. "If it goes
| bad, we'll just leave." We know how that played out.
|
| Yeah, it played out with my whole social circle leaving, as
| evidenced by the fact that all my friends link me to the bluesky
| post whenever there's something happening now.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| I know noone on BlueSky, I do have friends on X. We liked
| Twitter and we like X.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| same here
| verdverm wrote:
| I salute the solidarity /s
|
| Joking aside, I think what we see in the larger scheme is a
| fracturing of social media. More choice, more competition.
|
| This is a good thing
| jongjong wrote:
| If anything gets too popular too quickly, I just assume it's a
| PsyOp. That kind of growth requires extensive media coordination
| and big money. If you're not paying for a product, then you are
| the product. As sure as gravity.
| verdverm wrote:
| Growth was negative for about a year, it has started growing
| again this year.
|
| https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
| beders wrote:
| This never-ending whining about oooh but my data ... for a
| service that you can use for free is nauseating.
|
| This is a for-profit company running this service. It ain't free
| to operate.
|
| If you don't like that, go elsewhere.
|
| If there is one thing that has been a resounding success on the
| internet it is this: free services that you pay for with your
| clicks. Just look at the plethora of free services you get.
|
| In no other economy would that be even remotely possible.
| kevinak wrote:
| I do advocate for using other networks (specifically Nostr)
| that are not designed like this, but the network effect is big
| and most of my friends are on Blue Sky because they have been
| lured into a false sense of "it's decentralised, I can just
| move! If something bad happens".
| verdverm wrote:
| What reasons do your friends give for choosing Bluesky over
| Nostr. I cannot imagine they would give the same reason you
| are projecting onto them.
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| Bluesky's behavior here isn't surprising.
|
| They already ban signups using email aliases, and apparently
| block alias emails to their unban support address too.
| fsckboy wrote:
| what's an email alias? (in the sense that they would know you
| were using one)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| For more atproto, see their recently redesigned homepage
| https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026
| jeswin wrote:
| True p2p is the only approach that will work, not federation. I'd
| go futher and make the protocol high-friction for federation.
|
| It's true that many p2p attempts have failed, but it's also the
| only solution that doesn't require someone running servers for
| free. There's evidence of success as well: napster (and
| bittorrent). Both were wildly successful, and ultimately died
| because of legal issues. It might work when the data is yours to
| share.
| throwaway0665 wrote:
| I can't imagine a world where a p2p social network is
| practical. Not when each node is an unreliable mobile phone
| that's maybe on cellular. Even with something like ipfs you
| have pinning services, bittorrent has seed boxes, because pure
| p2p is impractical.
| jeswin wrote:
| You can have your other devices and friends replicating.
| wmf wrote:
| That uses a lot of bandwidth and battery. I'd rather find a
| better way to pay for servers than try to avoid them.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I sort of agree, but federation is good. It's funny that you
| use bittorrent as an example because it involves every single
| user running servers for free.
|
| If people can both be an origin for content and a relay for
| content, and modulate the extent to which they want to do
| either of those things, there's not really much of a difference
| between "federation" and "true" p2p. Some people will be all
| relay, and some people will be all content. Some content people
| might be paying relays, and some relays might be paying content
| people. Some relays will be private and some relays will be
| public. Some people will maintain all of their own content
| locally, and some people will leave it all on a specialized
| remote server as a service and not even care about holding a
| local copy.
|
| Also, browsing would either have to be done through a
| commercial or public service (federation again), or through
| specialized software (no one will ever use this and operating
| systems will intentionally lock it out if they see it as a
| competitor.)
|
| The problem with wishing this all into existence, though, is
| that bittorent (not dead) exists and is completely stagnant.
| There is often a lot of talk about improving the protocol, and
| the various software dealing with it, and none of it gets done.
| If bittorrent would just allow torrents to be updated (content
| added or removed), you could almost piggyback social media on
| it _immediately._ It 's not getting done. Nobody is doing it,
| just writing specs that everybody ignores for decades.
|
| So I guess my belief is that "true p2p" is a meaningless term
| and target when it comes to creating recognizable social media.
| "True p2p" would be within a private circle of friends, on
| specialized software. Might as well be a fancy e.g. XMPP group
| chat; it's already available for anyone who wants it. Almost
| nobody wants it. Telegram, Whatsapp, and imessage are already
| good enough for that. They may not be _totally_ private, but
| they 're private enough for 99.9999% of people's purposes, and
| people are very suspicious of the 0.0001% who want something
| stronger.
|
| I actually think you're using "true p2p" here to sort of
| handwave a business model into existence (trying to imply
| mutuality, or barter, or something.) Whereas I think the
| business model is the part that needs to be engineered
| carefully and the tech is easy.
| themafia wrote:
| I've never looked at the AT Protocol before. It seems like you
| could have achieved most of that with existing DNS, HTTP and RSS
| implementations. All they really needed was some file formats and
| some well known URL schems and all of this could have been far
| easier to implement and deploy.
| verdverm wrote:
| This is a good article [1] to get an overview of the "backend"
| of the protocol, it's very plug-n-play. One question I have
| about the setup you describe, how does moderation work? ATProto
| has the best moderation scheme I know of, "stacked." [2]
|
| [1] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
|
| [2] https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-
| moderati...
| pentagrama wrote:
| Site is down at this moment.
|
| Archived: https://archive.ph/PsTrp
| kevinak wrote:
| There seems to be an issue with the caching mechanism that I
| built.
|
| In the meantime the article is also on Nostr if anyone wants to
| read it:
| https://habla.news/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzql5ujf9w2f2ujkj9f552a...
|
| Thanks for the heads up!
| pfraze wrote:
| Yeah I'm the guy quoted in the opening of the article.
|
| Yes. Be wary of Bluesky. That's our whole point. Run the
| infrastructure on your own. Build separate companies.
|
| Most of the complaints here are just about the cost of scale. You
| are able to fetch the whole network and its history, and that
| costs time and money. The only structural centralization is PLC,
| which is being factored into an independent org.
| bjoli wrote:
| Considering how hard it has been, and to some extent still is,
| to run your own Bluesky instance, the main problem is that it
| automatically becomes centralised in a way that no open
| protocol will solve.
|
| If 97% of your users are on one instance it is not a
| distributed platform. Applying this to mastodon, I am pretty
| sure most people would consider it a problem if mastodon.social
| started getting more than 40% of active users (currently at
| about 15 iirc).
| evbogue wrote:
| I'd like to encourage anyone who is wary of Bluesky to check
| out Paul (and Dominic's) back-in-the-day project Secure-
| Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that Bluesky suffers
| from by using content addressable storage and signing key
| cryptography correctly.
|
| The actual SSB codebase has been kind of broken since 2020, but
| I have a fork on my own Github that works and comes with a
| basic client that you can vibe/claw on top of:
| https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc
|
| I'm happy to supply pub invites to anyone who wants to play
| around with the old sbot with me as we work towards making
| social media distributed again.
| verdverm wrote:
| > Secure-Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that
| Bluesky suffers from
|
| I've heard Paul speak about this the other way around, that
| the experience from SSB informed the design of ATProto. I.e.
| ATProto solves most of the issues in SSB
|
| For clarity, ATProto is the protocol, Bluesky is one dozens
| of apps, obv the biggest and most well known outside of the
| ATmosphere.
| evbogue wrote:
| Bluesky does solve a lot of SSBs problems. Both projects
| can learn from each other. The past can become the future
| and the present inform the past.
|
| This isn't just on Paul, Jay has publically stated that she
| doesn't believe users (even powerusers) can be trusted with
| keypairs.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Jay's unfortunately not wrong about that. Hitting that
| balance between "so secure even I can't access it
| anymore" v. "so convenient that cybercriminals can access
| it, too" is less trivial than a lot of the "just use
| keypairs" crowd likes to admit -- even for those of us
| with many years of experience working with SSH and PGP
| keys, let alone people who haven't the slightest idea
| what a "keypair" even is.
| kevinak wrote:
| Moving the PLC to an independent org doesn't make it
| decentralized.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| > _That 's the same argument people made about Twitter. "If it
| goes bad, we'll just leave." We know how that played out._
|
| But they migrated _to_ Bluesky, right? So it played out fine?
| kevinak wrote:
| Right, but they couldn't take their social graph with them.
| They essentially had to start from scratch.
| thangalin wrote:
| > Email is an open, federated protocol. Anyone can run a mail
| server. In practice, running your own mail server is painful.
|
| Wizards can be difficult to develop and maintain. Writing a
| working, useful, functional, robust, informative, environment-
| agnostic, and re-entrant script (or GUI/TUI) can take scads of
| effort. Now that LLMs abound, much of that grind is quickly
| solved. For example, here's a vibe-coded script that to get
| dovecot, postfix, and virtual users set up on my new server with
| mailboxes copied from an old server:
|
| https://autonoma.ca/mail-setup.txt
|
| To vibe code it, the prompt included content from:
|
| https://xtreamsolution.net/complete-email-server-setup-tutor...
|
| After a few kicks at the can (run script, capture errors, feed
| errors to LLM, repeat), it finally configured a working system.
| Reviewing the script, yes, it's beyond painful. It doesn't have
| to be, though; the authors of complex software could produce
| similar guided installers.
| Arainach wrote:
| Writing code isn't the hard part of running an email server.
| Getting your server not marked as spam is essentially
| impossible, not a coding problem, and why everyone gives up on
| this.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > Writing code isn't the hard part of running an email
| server. Getting your server not marked as spam is essentially
| impossible
|
| I've run my own since the 1990's, it is certainly possible,
| there are many others who have done the same. I have no
| issues with email deliverability.
|
| > everyone gives up on this.
|
| Not everyone gives up on it, some do, some don't.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Have you tried setting up a new one, though?
| pmarreck wrote:
| Official Bluesky is the worst online echo-chamber I've ever seen.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| "Find me online Nostr Twitter YouTube"
|
| Sounds like he was worried so much he left Bluesky already.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| With all the talk of LinkedIn's problematic verification process
| and potential issues with Persona verification service being
| linked to Peter Thiel, I wonder why a social network like Bluesky
| couldn't replace LinkedIn. What would it take?
| yellowapple wrote:
| > At every layer, the answer is "anyone can run their own." At
| every layer, almost nobody does.
|
| And at every layer except for maybe the PLC directory, there's
| nothing stopping anyone from fixing that "almost nobody does"
| problem. The fact that such a thing is even possible, and that
| it's seamless to move from one to the other, gives ATproto a
| massive leg-up compared to even other federated systems, let
| alone its non-federated predecessors.
| kevinak wrote:
| How would they fix it?
| wmf wrote:
| It's really the defaults that need to be fixed and anyone
| cannot change those.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _And at every layer except for maybe the PLC directory, there
| 's nothing stopping anyone from fixing that "almost nobody
| does" problem. _
|
| If there's nothing stopping anyone from fixing a problem, and
| yet nobody fixes it, then there's something is stopping them.
|
| Might not be a technical impossibility, or a gun in their head.
| Could be as simple as inertia or addiction.
|
| But saying "the problem is totally solvable" just because
| there's a solution available, is pretty naive. Solutions have
| costs themselves, and not all are created equal or equally
| feasible.
| bccdee wrote:
| Yeah they're describing a real problem, but the cause of that
| problem--a seamless centralized sign-up funded by VC money--is
| the reason bluesky took off to begin with.
|
| Bsky offers an on-ramp to a more decentralized experience, but
| most people won't pay the money and experience the friction to
| move take that ramp. Platforms like Mastodon are entirely
| decentralized, but that means the friction of decentralizing
| happens immediately upon sign-up. The people who don't want to
| self-host PDSes never signed up for Mastodon to begin with.
|
| I try to be skeptical, but I feel like bsky (or something like
| it) is the best way can do re: bringing decentralization to the
| masses.
| heisenbit wrote:
| I suspect European courts would take a dim view on preventing
| export through switching off an existing mechanism yielding
| portability.
| dadrian wrote:
| For someone to come in and buy Bluesky and then hold everyone's
| data hostage, then Bluesky would actually have to have enough
| value that someone would want to buy it.
| kevinak wrote:
| VCs have put in $120 million, so someone thinks that it's worth
| something.
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