Everything happening on Bluesky
theverge.com
theverge.com
At this point they're just kicking the can down the road, postponing the problems that Mastodon already had to face.
If mastodon.social were the entirety of Mastodon, it would seem a lot more user friendly.
- Profiles and posts are portable across hosted instances. If you have a problem with your admins, etc, you'll be able to hop away without much fuss.
- Moderation is decoupled from hosting. They're still working out the details, but the overall vision is that the global firehose is public, and you'll be able to opt in and out of different moderators which operate on that stream. If you don't like what a moderator is doing, you'll be able to just turn them off for yourself. Moderation doesn't prevent people from posting, it allows people to prevent themselves from seeing.
The profile portability story is good, save that as far as I can tell, Bluesky server operators don't actually do much save for provide storage and a place for clients to connect to, specifically because the algorithms and curation are being treated as a separate layer. So ironically I see far less reason for identity portability in that ecosystem since (to my knowledge) the server you're using doesn't have much of an impact on your experience.
Additionally, this layered functional architecture creates new kinds of problems.
For example, with Mastodon, if I'm helping fund my instance (which I do) I'm also helping fund the moderation staff, because the instance architecture and the moderation story are tightly coupled.
With BS, moderation is a separate service which has to be funded... how?
Same goes with curation.
So I still have a lot of questions about the Bluesky model.
And this is all assuming they actually pull off what they claim, and it's still waaaay too early to say if this'll all work in practice.
To an extent, though I still think it's valuable for situations where eg. a host might decide they don't want to host you if you post certain content. In the same way: a website host doesn't normally have much of an impact on your experience, unless they decide to kick you off or otherwise exert control over you
> moderation as a separate service, which has to be funded... how?
It's an interesting question; I think some of it will be answered with algorithmic/AI-based filtering (false-positives are more tolerable if users have the ability to opt out!). People have also talked about a model where you can just share (or subscribe to) communal block-lists. So maybe your circle of friends does its own internal "moderation" just by using the site (blocking people is already a normal part of my day today usage of both bsky and twitter)
With a platform this open and flexible, there are tons of options to be explored!
> And this is all assuming they actually pull off what they claim, and it's still waaaay too early to say if this'll all work in practice.
It definitely is! But I'm excited and hopeful
One of the biggest reasons why people change Mastodon instances is because the instance shuts down.
I had to do an emergency switch because my instance admin went AWOL, and it was breaking down technically. In other cases, the admins decide they don't want do run an instance anymore, for whatever reason.
If posts could be migrated on Bluesky, that would be a vast improvement over Mastodon.
A number of such events have occurred.
I haven't actually heard of anyone moderated off an instance (aside from spammers), but maybe I hang with the "wrong" crowd for that.
Eh, tbh though, I don't know why I was arguing that point, it really doesn't matter one way or another.
You absolutely identified a very good reason to want to switch instances, and why account portability has value in the Bluesky world.
I wish ActivityPub had a better solve for this, but unfortunately a true federated model makes that awfully difficult (since the entire ecosystem has to update its view of where posts are located).
Similarly, if I'm in a length email exchange with a friend on Gmail, and then I move to another service, there's no way to update my friend's account to "rewrite" those emails to point to the new service. It's a deep limitation in the model itself. The only question is whether the tradeoff is worth it (and, to me, it is).
(you can also change which domain your bsky profile is identified by, which, I'm not quite sure how that works at a protocol level but it is possible)
Until you lose control of the domain for any number of reasons and then whoever buys it happily continue on as you. A simple credit card processing problem can lose your "identity" at some point in the future.
Also, to emphasize, regular people who don't do those other things don't have to roll a custom domain on bsky (and are unlikely to). But eg. if NPR wants to make a bsky account under @npr.org, that's really quite good verification that it's "the real NPR account", and then nobody has to deal with any of the politics around verification which have become a dumpster-fire on twitter since Musk took over
This is going to polarize people even further.
Before social media, had you seen people with radical views? Yes there were cults but it was all limited. Social media polarizes people and with this kind of moderation it seems it's only going to exacerbate the problem.
There will be no one left in these polarized groups to correct their course.
Edit: It's going to create more and more groups who don't want to connect and have a discord on common issues.
This presumes polarized groups start neutral and can somehow being corrected away from polarization. People often seek out polarized spaces and then get more polarized but they're starting far from a neutral position.
b) Personally I think butting heads and being outraged by what others are saying is the bigger factor in polarization, which this would actually help with (at least, I've noticed I became a lot more politically nuanced and a lot less emotional when I made a concerted effort to pare down my twitter feed using blocks and mutes)
As far as I can tell, this is only with cooperation of the server owner; since their "DID Placeholder" relies on a server to provide a string of identity updates. ActivityPub can do the same thing with HTTP redirects; and Mastodon supports cooperative profile redirection, which is morally equivalent. Polycentric[0] is a tad more decentralized than this, AFAIK it's specifically designed to make cryptographic keys first-class identities (so called "sovereign identity"). No clue if they've managed to solve the obvious pitfalls of cryptoidentity.
[0] Another censorship-resistant social networking tool being funded by FUTO Tech, of whom Louis Rossman is a spokesperson for
There can then be many ways to implement the filters: voting, dictators, AI, etc.
Seems they're finally publishing more details about it: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture
The blog post seems kind of hand-wavy. One question is, how do they make the few large BGS censorship-resistant?
(I know I'm violating the HN guidelines, but I hate how they've hidden the scrollbar on that blog post.)
There is no such thing. You can try your best but the laws of human behavior pretty much ensure that centralization and cartelization will happen, unless specifically stopped via outside regulators.
Which is much better than other systems; "twitter but like email" is a reasonable goal.
Email and IRC today are, as far as I know, highly centralised, but not in the same way that, say, social networks are.
Even the web is somewhat centralised (and I suppose always has been, to some degree) but it's clearly and successfully federated.
Go to an instance, select a bunch of interests, and have it return a set of instances that are accepting new accounts.
It's meant to be a federated service - it should act like one.
Meanwhile, folks are crowing about how great the vibe is on the platform, and how welcoming it is to victimized communities.
It's, what, 60,000 people?
All invite-only?
With a campaign specifically targeting Twitter power-users?
And very actively curated to push out troublemakers?
Yeah, of course the vibe is good. Now. Let's see what it's like when there's a few million folks on the platform with a small but vocal percentage actively engaging in harassment.
Edit to add:
Now, if they do live up to the hype--if they succeed in building an open, federated, protocol-first social platform that somehow also manages to bolt on opt-in algorithmic curation, moderation, and so forth--then that's great!
But they're a private company, operating a very small platform right now, so it's simply too early to tell if they'll manage to live up to their promises.
It basically has broken down that the nerds and idealists have moved to Mastodon, the twitter elite have gone to BlueSky, the Bitcoin bros have gone to Nostr, and the people who have to use Twitter professionally have stayed with the bigots and conspiracy-theorists that are taking over Twitter.
Even better, if Bluesky and Nostr live up to their promise of open protocols, then maybe we can look forward to some level of interoperability so people don't have to choose one place, but rather than easily connect with communities on many different platforms.
But, speaking for myself, I'm not putting my social eggs in a private corporation's basket until they've proven they'll truly be as open as they say. I've done that and I'm done with that.
…and everyone considers themselves better off without all those other groups shitting up the place.
I agree with the other commenter saying that having everyone in the same room is overhyped.
People deserve to have a fun place to play on the internet, but the less the rest of us know about what goes on there, the better.
Mastodon's culture is safetysm, toxic positivity, put a content warning on everything. Some experience that as discouraging or even erasure.
Many of the negative aspects of Twitter that drove people away (incl pre-Musk era) are repeated here. The ownership is centralized; why would a protocol need a CEO? The network will lean towards centralization as well; let's be real, the default instance will be 1000x bigger than any federated offshoot).
It's frankly unfortunate to see so many of the tech bloggerati trying Mastodon, an actually decentralized solution without a for-profit mission, and then bandwagoning on to this new thing under the guise of wanting some lols, because Mastodon is too boring, they are no slapfights over celebrity/social media nonsense.
I am humbled every time I look at my old code. I'm always disappointed by it. This is because I've grown since I wrote it, so that's a good thing. I don't want my best work to be behind me.
At the same time, I also have to recognize that the brilliant code I'm writing right now will look disappointing in five years.
But we're talking about writing code that you thought was great when you wrote it, but when you come back to it a few years later, you can see how far from great it really was.
Which, for me, accounts for about 80% of everything I've written.
That they did so puts their judgement in serious question.
> paying for publicity about how you super secret private exclusive club is so much better than Twitter
I haven't seen either of those things happening from the bluesky team. I've seen them talk about bluesky, which makes sense, but spamming?
Neither have I seen any ads to join bluesky, which would be weird considering you cannot really join bluesky unless you get an invite.
Where did you see the paid advertisement precisely?
Journalists are flocking to Bluesky, and not Mastodon because Bluesky allows retweets—which Mastodon doesn’t allow. Oh, and about hashtags, direct messages, and post edits not being available on Bluesky? Journalists don’t need them.
If there is so much demand, why does nobody offer a free and open client? This might be a sign that it is hard to write and/or run one.
I tried Nostr and it was extremely easy. Because it is so easy to write and run a client, there are plenty already.
Is there a client online that one can simply use by visiting a website?
Edit: here's one https://skypulse.dvy.io/
High-level explanation of the protocol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35822267
I believe the team plans to move as many things as possible down to the AT level over time
It's invitation-only, with a total of ~50K users, many of whom are non-technical celebrities. That's why.
Also gmail can talk with other email users.
It’s also hilarious that the users are using the term “skeet”. (Interestingly and semi-related, a TechCrunch article said that Bluesky needs sex workers and Black Twitter in order to thrive.)
The fedi will remain a sub-cultural thing. I said that way back in the start of 2022 waves.
again, who owns the PBLLC?
after clearing that up, I suppose my other question concerning Bluesky is if they intend to submit their protocol to the IETF or something. It's weird they're doing this whole thing parallel to protocols like W3C ActivityPub.
The next wave of users running away from Twitter will happen when the orange man takes back his Twitter account and sends his first tweet in years, with the media screaming about it. Probably later this year, but who knows.
We'll see how Bluesky really performs on adoption when that next wave happens.
Mastodon has the interesting situation where enthusiasts want to grow the network by having high profile characters join yet paradoxically the culture is exactly opposite to that. They frown upon influencer culture, anything remotely capitalistic, famous, etc. They're also against basic features like search, quote tweets, recommendation algorithms, anything proven and essential to make a network grow. Admittedly, those mechanisms do tend to lead to the culture seen on Twitter.
Hilariously, that's what people seem to want. The high profile Twitter users that had every chance to join Mastodon, never did. Yet immediately jump to Bluesky.
In response, Mastodon (the company) seems to finally come around and make some changes (easier to join, quote tweets coming, etc).
Ultimately, the moderation approach is going to be decisive. In my view, Mastodon is "toxically safe". It leads to a culture unfit for the masses.
Bluesky's long term culture is unclear to me, but I imagine it will be Twitter-like on the main server.
hellthreads have been a thing on the fediverse since forever, it's as if the people behind bluesky didn't even bother to spend any time there before deciding to do their own thing
"hellthreads" have been a thing on the internet since people started interacting with each other on the internet. I don't think people on the fediverse invented the word either, the first time I saw something named "hellthread" I think was on early Twitter.
Also, I don't think anyone is claiming that Bluesky invented the word. The article just says that a particular thread started being called such, and specifically "the hellthread" instead of the general "hellthread".
https://reason.com/2023/03/17/researchers-pressured-twitter-...
Aside from being on Bluesky’s board of directors.
He openly say he fucked up with Twitter, and his involvement as funder of both Bluesky and Nostr is him trying to correct his mistakes with new platforms that cannot be abused in the same manner.