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.
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.
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.)
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.