I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
worthdoingbadly.com
worthdoingbadly.com
I've seen several posts lately that have made me feel like the HN sentiment towards Bluesky is negative. Throwing them under the bus for the domain validation mistake. Hatred at commercialization of a protocol. Questioning why Bluesky would do anything but become a worse Twitter since Jack Dorsey is at the helm.
C'mon! At least give it the benefit of doubt while in beta! I, for one, frequently lament how fragmented my IM programs have become. I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind the goal.
Do I have concerns that this is another attempt at building a walled garden around something I wish to be open and interoperable? Of course! Do I think it's a net negative on society for someone to be making their attempt? No! Bring on the new tech!
I wish I had a more nuanced argument to make my case because I'm sure there will be tons of replies here telling me why my opinion is bad and I'll be unable to refute them. And those responses will likely make very fair points, but oh well! I needed to at least try to throw some optimism about technology into the HackerNews foray.
Maybe this doesn't add as much to the discussion as vehement agreement or disagreement might to the curious HN reader, but I do really personally appreciate it. <3 :)
I'm a fan of publishing. I think any-to-any publishing is one of the most important applications of the internet.
The most important property of any-to-any publishing is not to (algorithmically or otherwise) turn any-to-any into some-to-many by creating celebrities and boosting the same content to everyone.
I think this is something TikTok (for all their issues) probably got more right than others.
There’s a lot further to go before we perfect this, but Nostr, Bluesky, et al. are doing at least something right.
Sites that do this will outcompete sites that do not.
Decentralized systems do provide an escape hatch, however, so that's good and useful for the minority of users that seek out niches or deep cuts.
One thing regarding bluesky that is often overlooked, and is related to XMPP (Jabber), is that Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP is one of three board members, the others being Jack of Twitter fame and Jay Graber who is the CEO.
Hopefully, the combined experience of running a platform the founder himself consider a failure with the experience of inventing a open protocol still being used today, can create something cool.
But it's way too early to tell, as you say. One can only stand by and see where they end up. They certainly have interesting ideas, but the crux is always in the implementation.
I remember writing a tutorial on how to connect your League of Legends chat of all things to Pidgin, once upon a time. I doubt it still works, Riot's completely remade their client since then....but, yeah, those days were certainly nice.
https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/blue-skies-...
Emily Kisane was on the ep, following their piece that blew up https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon
> In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Erin Kissane and long-time acquaintances of the show Tim Bray and Steve Klabnik.
Isn't it just a variation of mastodon?
Mastodon has a huge flaw in that your identity is not stable. Like email your identity is tied to your provider, and if you change providers you have to change your identity, and all your contacts have to update their addresses boom so to speak.
In Bluesky your identity is stable, with some caveats. It's easy to "bring your own domain" without having to host your own service provider.
In that spirit, I really enjoy:
1. The very good documentation this early in the project! This is not common.
2. The very rapid response developer team that does it live! Once the combination of surprisingly rapid membership growth + no blocks blew up and it became an urgent moderation feature, they had blocks within weeks despite the technically challenging task due to the kind of federated protocol and distributing blocklists. You can tell they have seasoned developers on the team. This is not just any kind of gimmick network trying to cash grab on Twitter exodus like I feel Hive Social was. It is an actual attempt at something better than Mastodon that has a fun, social experience with good onboarding and solving account migration headaches in mind.
3. The rare service disruptions despite the developers having their plates full and commonly introducing updates to the service. This speaks loudly about software architecture skills and being humble to risk management with good software hygiene. This again is not something that just happens but takes effort, experience and intent.
4. The exciting model of DNS approval which I still like. It's bloody fantastic to self-verify in a way that actually makes sense, and it feels very "World Wide Web" in a Tim Berners-Lee way. It uses pillars of the modern Internet in a way to strengthen a service and promises verification at scale. It can do company-wide verifications (domain.tld) as well as contributor-specific ones (username.team.company.tld). So, I dearly hope any misuse can be countered.
5. I worry they are overreaching with the AT protocol and federation but there is the "Shooting for the stars and aiming for the moon" saying here. I can only wish them the best and if I refer to the points above, the developer team seems surprisingly capable and full of actual intent here.
It being such a centralized organization definitely gives me "oh boy, here we go again" feels but it's not like it's not like typical users are going to choose anything better. Eschewing this is the essence of the perfect killing the good.
We don't need 'ultra decentralization' aka a different grocery store on every corner, nor do we want one single grocery store in the middle of the city, but rather just 'choice'.
Frankly it's like most things, we just want to avoid monopolization.
That said, a slightly different Mastodon configuration and a killer use case might enable it to rise aka business adoption.
As a designer and a long-time software developer, I see a TON of Dunning-Kruger Mt. Stupid comments about interface design, usability and what's reasonable to expect of users. Developers are naturally more willing to spend time futzing with social media technology because a) they have the domain expertise to reason about it comfortably, b) they have a high tolerance for high-touch software and take pride in their willingness to wrangle complicated and difficult interfaces, c) they care about the technical underpinnings, and d) because of all that, the space is likely to be populated by people who share their perspectives and interests.
If you take those things away, what incentive to users have to use the platform? I reckon that a lot of folks in the dev crowd don't naturally excel with the whole theory of mind thing, but if FOSS is going to produce tools useful to non-technologists, they should trust others that do. IMO the FOSS crowd desperately needs to embrace this cultural shift.
Not only do most users 'not care' about stuff, it actually is not that important ... until it is.
Twitter is actually 'good enough' for the most part. I don't like it, but I use it and find it acceptable. It's a big thing to ask people to shift gears for no really apparent reason (aka 'Musk says nasty things and is unfair!').
So yes, that is a primary product less: it has to be super, super easy to use and understand. Maybe, maybe, you can find a funnel to get people a bit more up the path of understanding. Maybe.
Which to me makes it just stupid of them to start from scratch rather than starting with interop with the Fediverse and optionally making breaking changes and/or bridging themselves.
E.g. the ability to migrate data more easily is great, but also easily accommodated by a combination of adding a new URI scheme and provide rewriting proxies to federate with ActivityPub instances that don't support it.
It feels like a lot of NIH and desire to be in control that I feel are at odds with building an open ecosystem.
And one of the things that needs to be emphasized that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that twitter was already terrible a *long* time before Musk bought it. Jack and his cronies aren't actually any better than Musk is, they're just smart enough not to make an ass of themselves in front of the entire world. I don't trust them.
Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me. It’s a different type of community/service, one that doesn’t have much value for me. (Not to say it’s bad! I just don’t care for it, it doesn’t do something I want.)
Equally, Twitter wasn’t (and mostly still isn’t) terrible for everyone. Everyone gets to choose what it is! I am particular about who I follow, I unfollow quickly, and I care not for celebrities and people’s “personal brand”.
Twitter is an incredible resource, if you want it to be.
That said, it could clearly be better, and any replacement that prevents a single entity controlling everyone’s algorithmic feed or deciding who can post or what they can say is worth exploring.
And then there's Twitter turning itself into the arbiter of truth. Users were having blue checks revoked as a punitive measure, which means that it's not really about "verifying" somebody, it's just a stupid status symbol.
They have an AI that will automatically ban you on a whim if you talk about certain subjects; i was permanently banned for over a month for making a joke at the expense of anti-vaxxers before amoderator finally reviewed my case and removed the infraction from my account.
Their role in covering up the hunter Biden laptop leak is also disturbing. I don't even think there was anything noteworthy in the leak, but Twitter censoring something that might be embarrassing for a politician under the guise of combatting misinformation is a scandal unto itself.
These are all things that happened before Elon musk announced he was buying Twitter. It is absolutely a terrible, abusive platform and i cannot fathom why anybody would trust Jack Dorsey to run another social network.
Most current anti-Twitter sentiment I see is from people who hate Elon Musk and want to see him fail. Limited principal discussion about what features a communication platform/protocol must have to best enable knowledge sharing and discourse.
I just checked my notifications - of the last ~100, over the last week or so, there's not a single one that isn't directly related to me. I've only posted one tweet in that week.
I remember exactly this form of notification spam that they're talking about, although it appears not to be there anymore.
Fediverse/ActivityPub is not just Mastodon.
I had an automated bot running for a long time on Twitter that I was happy with, until recently when API access was cut off. Now I'm looking for a new platform for my bot to run on as a direct result of recent controversial policy change. Maybe it will be Mastodon or Bluesky, or maybe something else. I think I prefer something more similar to how Twitter was than Mastodon currently is for my needs.
curious what those differences would be for running your bot?
Mastodon would serve exactly the same purpose with the set of people being "ignored" being much larger.
Email newsletter services would pretty much include everyone (on the internet, at least).
What kind of bot did you run?
ML Twitter is fantastic for example.
If nothing else, Bluesky is a breath of fresh air. I’ve found some overlap of people trashing Bluesky to then asking for an invite LOL.
However we have seen the harms of social media in all aspects from the self esteem of teenage girls to harassment to financial scams to stochastic terrorism. This isn't 2007 any more, anyone entering the social media arena in 2023 with all we know today has to be prepared for skepticism, scrutiny and criticism, whether they are closed source, open source, protocol based or fully commercial.
More generally, I have a ton of respect for the standardization process and for the amount of (mostly volunteer!) engineering over the years that had gone into fediverse, but it’s been so long and growth has been so slow that I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a new project to try something different.
I also wish I could actually get an invite to BS. I’ve been waiting a long time and they seem unlikely to actually hand it out at this point.
Others taught me long ago to try to keep something of a 'critical eye' turned on whenever I'm reading news etc. I try not to judge simply for the sake of judging, nor let past impressions completely overwhelm info right in front of me, but having some sort of basic impression / expectation of people, journals, newspapers, websites, etc. is helpful in avoiding some time wastage and filling my mind up with (more) utter nonsense.
I end up disagreeing with / doubting many comments on HN, yet still get a LOT out of reading even those comments - just in the sense of sort of the 'zeitgeist' and what sorts of BS I'm likely to come upon elsewhere.
... IMAO (in my arrogant opinion)
- content on bluesky is public, but we have not set expectations/comms around that well yet, and this dump may be a surprise to some existing accounts. where exactly bluesky falls on the spectrum from "congressional register (immutable)" to "public web" to "public IRC or discord room" to "private signal group" is still being worked out, but probably closest to "public web"
- the protocol supports both "deletions" (retaining history), and "purge" (aka "rebase") to remove all not-current content. this isn't exposed via UI yet and accounts have not had the chance to purge old deletions
- the federation protocol and unified firehose should make it possible for third parties to maintain a live mirror of the entire corpus. importantly, it will be easy (or at least "easier") to respect intents w/r/t deletions when done this way, compared to dumps
- obviously neither "deletion" nor "purge" can perfectly remove content from 3rd party dumps and infra, or from hostile parties. but it does signal user intent clearly, and we expect as a norm that third parties will respect that intent. ADS-B, robots.txt, CC licensing are related to these norms, though all unique. right-to-be-forgotten, archiving, re-use licensing, use in ML training, commercial/non-profit reuse, search indexing, etc, are all on our radar
- blobs/images are not included in this corpus
- this specific corpus does not (I assume) include our important "label" moderation metadata. at least for our (Bluesky) core moderation decisions, that information will be public
- private/group content is not yet part of protocol. eg, no built-in mechanism for DMs or follower-only posts. we will probably do those eventually, but it will be basically a whole separate protocol, not a bolt-on to existing stuff. wildly different privacy/security concerns with non-public content
- there are some other cool projects, like https://bsky.jazco.dev/, working with the full social graph, pulled via public API
It's disappointing to hear that follower-only/circles (whitelisted viewers) posts are basically incompatible with the current protocol. I'd hoped something could be done where the post content was encrypted in such a way that only specific authenticated users could decrypt it, or something along those lines
But I haven't done a deep-dive into the protocol, just a surface glance so far.
The minute Clubhouse removed that invite-only policy, the community died very quickly and everything was replaced by the worst sludge imaginable.
I think you should keep the invite structure, and increase the number of invites to positive users/communities (as you already do!). And use the graph that naturally forms to inform content moderation.
Social shame is a strong motivator that hasn't been properly deployed by a platform yet (mobs on twitter don't count). What I'm thinking about is that if someone you invited directly does something horrible like, posts slurs to a user, then the inviter should also get a notice that their invitee was a horrible human being. And if this inviter's invites end up being toxic people, then it may be a good idea to prune that branch of the tree.
This structure will limit growth, necessarily, but it will also give you time to solidify a new kind of structure and a new kind of experiment in social media.
I think it is possible to have a high-quality social network that scales.
Also, please for the love of god, I want to get my mom to use the platform, can you make sure that stuff doesn't break containment?
Popularity contests, smooching, people & groups ostracized for status game reasons, other forms of social bullying and so on.
It’s maybe great for a frat, but it will struggle for exploring the fallow lands close to controversial topics.
This happens to be where a lot of the really important stuff happens, the explorations that lead to growth.
You can’t solve this by simple weighting. Most novel true and important things are only realized by a tiny minoroty. And if they happen to be unpopular, forget about it.
If the purpose of your social network is to be actually useful for the world, this is an extremely important feature
Don't take this the wrong way, I have no reason to believe that you're a real person and not a fun contrarian bot. And you to myself as well. :)
In either case, our wetware isn't suited for social interactions at this scale. I think small, invite only, social rings are much better than what we have now. Yeah, people are going to play silly games, but we won't see a solution to that for a very long time.
As for the people who are eager to explore the edges of controversial ideas; they should be aware of how to discern a group that values progression through challenge over one that demands consensus, and steer clear of the latter.
And to your final point about being useful to the world, it would be better to strive to build a system useful to just your loved ones and local community. Plenty of people exhaust themselves over words on a screen from fake people on the other side of the planet. We have enough ancient and contemporary text from philosophers and religious leaders to remind us that people, specifically the people physically around us, matter more than anything. But of course, there's no money to be made with IT cookbooks, so we don't talk about them.
Ages ago, I suggested that slashdot (or successor) adopt a mafia-style system of vouching. So that members police their own.
I invite you to slashdot, so your reputation (karma, whatever) impacts my own. In a way, you become my responsibility. To protect my own rep, I may have to kick you off the system.
If you in turn invite others, they also factor into my rep. Kicking you off would also kick off all your invites. And so on.
the most direct analogy is to signed git commits. this is an intentional design decision compared to signing individual messages/posts/etc. A "proof" for a single record in the repo is the commit, the record, and the chain of merkle tree nodes connecting the two.
So you can confirm it was not changed, but cannot confirm that the original addition came from the real person?
I don't see anything in the docs that talk about cryptographic signatures or key management.
Also, I keep seeing discussion about being able to move identities to a new server, but to do that, you need to update your corresponding DID Document -- currently published to https://plc.directory/. Again, that has to be done with the sigining key. What if a server refuses? Is the user stuck and forced to recreate the account/history somewhere else?
I suspect that the solution would be to run on a trusted server, maybe your own.
"Everybody is their own server" is decentralization
If the server just maliciously messed with your data repository, you just use the recovery key. If the malicious content server did not try to rotate the recovery key, you can just use it to reset the signing key, regardless of if the content server rotated it. If it did malicious try to rotate the recovery key, as long as you notice within 72 hours, you can fork a new DID history from some state that was current within the last 72 hours that has your old recovery key.
Either way, you use the recovery key to rotate the signing key, to something you control. Now, you can repoint your DID to a new content server, upload your unadulterated post history to it.
Also, the core of the protocol does not strictly require that the content server have your publishing keys. In theory a client can create new posts, sign them and upload them. This will mean that certain API methods that exist that do things like add a new post won't work, which is theoretically fine if you only ever want to post from fully trusted clients that could be given access to your signing key, create a new commit, and upload it.
Also it is not yet clear if all servers will allow such usage. In theory a content server could refuse to host the data repositories for users if it lacks the signing key for the user.
Footnote: These content servers are formally called Personal Data Servers. I used content servers throughout this post to be clear that I am not talking about plc.directory or other such ancillary servers.
On Twitter, blocking a toxic user does not notify them - while they can query the block status of one profile at a time, they can never get a full list of people who block them. But it would be trivial to create a Bluesky app view that provides this inverted index. And some people would be inclined to use the list of people who block them as a "target list" of people whose views differ from them, to share with their networks as prospects for targeted harassment that may even cross into real-life violence. (The fact that critics of the infamous Ki*f*ms forum have been swatted - and that I am even now reticent to type the full name - is just the tip of the iceberg of potential dangers here.)
I hope that Bluesky comes up with a better mechanism here - it's tough to do in a federated system, but research like https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1577.pdf may be helpful.
On the other hand, people have some sort of expectation that the data they publicly post online to remain in some sort of semi-private state. Bluesky app might invite only for now, but the underlying protocol and technology makes everything very public, forever, and makes it trivial to cache locally (for good or bad purposes).
I think one of the changes they're trying to push through is that since you can't really block someone from viewing your content, if they want to, they're turning it around a bit.
So don't think of blocks as "You won't be able to see my content" but more like "I won't have to see anything of you anymore, and you can't interact with me", which is more accurate on how blocks actually works, even if platforms tell you otherwise.
I think possibly their biggest challenge ahead will be making parts of it non-public. Private mutes/blocks, having some analogue of Circles for whitelisting post viewers, etc.
Having a truly open and public database - especially once signups no longer require invite codes - is going to mean a cambrian explosion of tools and clients the likes of which we've never seen before in social media (which is already sorta happening even with closed signups). But that might include malicious apps that take advantage of that same openness to stalk, spam, and harass (especially given it's coinciding with a huge leap in AI technology). It might be AT Protocol's biggest test.
If User A doesn't want to see posts from User B, that's fine. User A can have his client filter them out locally, prior to when they'd otherwise be displayed. Nobody else has to know this is happening.
I don't think that User A should be permitted to prevent User B from replying to User A's posts, which in turn prevents User C (or all other users) from discovering what User B thinks about whatever User A posted.
User A trying to prevent his otherwise-public posts from being visible to User B seems pointless to me, as User B could log out, or use another account that hasn't been blocked, or ask somebody else who hasn't been blocked to screenshot it, or use some other way around it.
We've been trying that with email and spam for the last 3 decades and I've got to tell you the results are not good.
> prior to when they'd otherwise be displayed.
A has to download the harassment from B just to then filter it locally? Seems like you're putting the onus on A here to do the work. What happens if B sends enough to DOS A's link? Or sends CSAM and now A is committing a crime just by downloading the content?
> as User B could log out, or use another account that hasn't been blocked
Which increases the friction on B if they want to harass A - this is good! We want to make harassment as friction-full as possible!
Email has also dealt with the spam issue mostly. If you blast me with too many emails, you get put on a spammer blacklist and servers will just drop the content without delivering it. It also isn't a crime to be unwillingly sent illegal content which you immediately delete.
Spam is at the core of what makes email a terrible example of a federated system, along with absolutely terrible client compatibility issues.
From the users perspective I can't really see any difference here.
Your ideas for client-side blocking in a federated system may be okay, I don't know. I'm objecting to the "Email has dealt with the spam issue mostly" thing; it absolutely has not.
Do the big email providers even attempt to combat spam? I got an email from booking.com yesterday that literally contains the text "This message is an advertisement." From what I can tell, Gmail hasn't maintained their spam filters in at least a decade.
As someone who has been running mail servers for 20 years, no, it does not. I'm sure other mail admins will agree.
Don't be.
Aren't we talking about blocking and muting known user handles? This is easy, the spam problem would be identifying which handles to block.
> What happens if B sends enough to DOS A's link? Or sends CSAM and now A is committing a crime just by downloading the content?
What happens if B does the same before A had a chance to block them? And why would A's client download the content after reading that B published it from the metadata?
> Which increases the friction on B if they want to harass A
True, but I'm afraid we already know from Twitter that B will do it anyway, aided by either fast user switching or a Tweetdeck-like interface.
This is the same as blocking known spam domains and IP blocks in email. They just switch to a new one. Which is best dealt with at the remote end since the server has a better chance of being able to identify new accounts which are related to blocked ones - Instagram even suggests this for you when you block someone: "...and any future accounts they may create". Having to do this in A's client is much more difficult because it lacks the information that would be useful.
> What happens if B does the same before A had a chance to block them?
A fair point.
If you don’t give A the ability to avoid this by influencing A’s presence on B’s feed, A will quit the platform entirely, and B will have been rewarded (with engagement) and incentivized to stir up mobs in the future. It creates a toxic environment. Blocking is an effective speed bump to this happening!
That's where you lost me.
SMTP by itself has no authentication and we had to add crap on top of it like SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Don't have it? Oops, sorry, to spam it goes. Oh and don't forget about a reverse DNS record for your IP address with a correct domain, otherwise some mail servers will deny you. Want other mailservers to send you emails via TLS? Well, there is DANE, but that uses DNSSEC so Gmail doesn't support it. MTA-STS exists, but it's kinda silly and was made just for people that don't want DNSSEC for some reason, but at least Gmail supports it. For some reason there is also TLS-RPT for reporting about TLS use, so mail servers will send you emails that they used TLS, yay. Want your email address to have a picture? There is BIMI, but some mail servers won't display it if you don't pay few thousand dollars a year for some special certificate. Oh and it needs to be a pretty small SVG.
Oops, your email still went to spam? Maybe your IP is on some obscure blacklist for no god damn reason? Or Outlook just randomly decided to ban your IP, but will offer you to unban it automatically by filling some weird form? Or maybe Gmail decided to randomly put your reply email to spam to someone that emailed you first?
Want to retrieve your mailbox? Oh, do you want IMAP or POP? Obviously you don't want POP, you want IMAP, but you remembered that there is this "new" standard JMAP that is saner than IMAP. Oh what's that? Nobody supports it? Oh well.
User safety is a dealbreaker though. Pretty sure I’m not alone.
Media organizations are hugely vulnerable targets and they — nonprofit or commercial — are not proving resilient to outside pressure and influence. Decentralization is the only sustainable way forward if you want diversity in social media.
Decentralization cannot possibly increase diversity if it doesn't provide strong user safety measures. And decentralization makes that infamously hard problem much harder. I think you would end up compromising on one or the other.
Then again, I shouldn't be surprised. There's a really large trans community active on Bluesky right now, and they've been extremely vocal about what's important to them, with blocking being the thing demanded the loudest (butts being #2).
The dev team blew up their schedule to deliver blocking because of this.
Internet without the training wheels should at least be an option, for those of us who have thick enough skin to dismiss the stuff we don't like without needing a self appointed authority figure to decide for us.
> “Right, boss, apparently because you keep talking about freedom, a large group of people are taking it to mean they have ‘freedom’ to harass people with slurs and all sorts of abuse. People are leaving the site because of it, and advertisers are pulling ads.”
> That seems bad. Quick, have someone write up some rules against hate speech.
People who use slurs are absolute buffoons, and I have no interest in exposing myself to that sort of garbage (so I choose not to go to spaces where it's prevalent), however once there is a precedent for acceptable/unacceptable speech, and a mechanism where that can be enforced, it's inevitable that the definitions expand over time to things that cause advertisers to get squeamish. The paragraph references that very example.
The end result is that anything that could be an idea exchange becomes part of a monoculture of corporate controlled platforms with fairly consistent bounds on acceptable speech. This gives a small group of organisations outsized influence over public discourse, and the consequences of that are significant enough that it's worth exploring it in depth.
I want to be able to access diverse viewpoints, and to engage or ignore as I see fit. I'm suspicious of anyone who would want to make those decisions for me.
There is also a phenomenon where speech outside these bounds prompts people to themselves call for controls and limits to be put in place. I find that very concerning on a societal scale. It works in the interests of those who want to control speech.
Having outlets for fringe thoughts is a pressure release valve for the global conversation, and I worry that sanitising the whole thing will radicalise the people who are collecting in what few low touch spaces there are left.
The whole philosophy behind Mastodon is the idea that literally the opposite is true. Servers that are aligned in their safety feature preferences are able to federate with each other and de-federate with servers that don't share those safety features.
For all of the dissing of Mastodon, one thing even its critics begrudgingly admit is that it has better and more granular controls for privacy and controls that mitigate harassment. Normally when people say Mastodon is bad for this or that reason, they say that these controls are unnecessary or too complicated, but I don't think anyone seriously doubts that they are there. And those controls depend in a fundamental way upon federation. If there's one thing to understand about Mastodon it's that it leverages federation to improve strong user safety features.
As a user I don't want to deal with too much abuse but I also don't want to have to worry about my server not being able to connect to my friend's server. These goals seem like they're at odds. I could see it working if most users coalesce around a single server or a small network of servers with similar rules.
Realistically, there is no way to prevent this.
Even if you prevent B from interacting with A via the platform itself, they can always just take a screenshot and post that. Or copy-paste the text. Or numerous other ways.
It's really not. Incognito window usually work, or something like nitter. Not to mention all the various archives of public tweets.
> Even for a public profile if someone is blocked they can’t use the normal QT option and they can’t reply, which creates much more friction for follow on abuse.
Yes, more friction, but if someone really wants to, instead of quoting, they just take a screenshot of the tweet and posts that instead.
They won't if the profile is locked. It means you have to be logged in to check you aren't on their blocklist (or maybe even it's equivalent to account being private - I'm not up to date on Twitter).
This does not work for locked profiles, which cannot be viewed unless logged in.
I think if we have learned literally nothing else, it’s that social media moderation is hard, and the server is going to have to do some work.
It just can’t be only on users to locally block shit. It doesn’t work.
If the platform is pseudonymous and allows individuals to create multiple identities, such that it's trivial for those you block to view your posts from a different identity, or even by not logging in at all, then "blocking" isn't really blocking anybody except the lazy and the ignorant.
In fact, since most users don't think it through this far, even providing such a fake "block" function is inherently deceptive and user-hostile.
for somebody like myself, i'm just some dude nobody cares about. my twitter blocklist was major public figures who i didn't want to see retweets of in my feed. donald trump wasn't going to get angry at me because i blocked him, it's fine if that's included in some public list.
We had offline mail readers for BBS, CompuServe, BIX, etc.
One feature I truly miss is the TWIT filter. I could block u/VancouverMan and you'd be none the wiser.
The target demographic is very security/privacy-sensitive, so we have discussions about stuff like this, all the time.
If you block someone, they have no idea, except that you disappear from their radar. Even that, only came about, after a long discussion. Before, blocking someone simply meant that we could not see them, but they could see us.
My location is something that I can force off (meaning that no one can find me in location searches). Even when it is visible, it is "fuzzed," so that the location anyone (other than you) can see, is a random one, within a 10Km square.
All visibility/security is enforced at the server. If possible, in SQL, so it never even makes it into the server code. Having API access buys you nothing.
I hope the implementation of this isn't that I can start sampling your location repeatedly and average them out to find out where you live?
If we decide that it is a concern, I already know how I'd deal with it. I would add a "governor," to slow the process down. Depending on how the location is updated, that could be enough to render it worthless. People can't even see the "fuzzed" locations, unless they are registered members of the community. The locator would have to go through a registered account, and those don't come too easily.
However, if someone is that concerned, they would either hide their location entirely, or not join the community. The app is all about people finding each other.
https://robertheaton.com/2018/07/09/how-tinder-keeps-your-lo...
Reading it, I'm not so sure it's "standard," as it seems Tinder-specific, but they have done their homework.
I'll have to see what I can do to incorporate something like that.
I'm sure a dedicated geek could still figure out how to hack it, but our target demographic, despite clamoring for privacy, tends to do Facebook "checkins" all the time.
You may want to expand that in lower population density areas. If there's only one little town in that 10km square the fuzzing does almost nothing.
It’s not urgent, at present, but it could be done. See my answer to another point.
I'd like a social network that's much more public, to compare it's results with twitter, etc. I'm thinking non-anonymous identities and fully public records of votes, etc.
"text": {
"type": "string",
"maxLength": 3000,
"maxGraphemes": 300
}
Nothing about the architecture of the protocol itself? Or better account migration or improved design of name conventions, or improved server performance?
I don't know why they expect it to turn out any differently, it's hard to take this tool seriously.
Facebook was fresh once too. It was invite only for elite universities so everyone had roughly the same expectations for where lines were (they were not in acceptable places, but homogeneity helps with that).
I'm sure deciding where to draw the line and clearly defining rules, and then enforcing them is a complex task (same as in public policy or international relations) inherent to any social network, and it is unlikely that an optimal solution exists considering the difference of opinions. However, could this type of rule help mitigate the issues mentioned?
Do you even know where you are right now?
> My take is, if a community is constrained by quality (eg moderation, self-selecting invite-only etc) then the only way it grows is by lowering the threshold. Inevitably that means lower quality content. To some extent, more people can make up for it. Eg if I go from 10 excellent artists to 1000 good ones, chances are that the top 10% artwork created actually gets better.
> But eventually if you grow by lowering quality, then, well, quality drops.
> I suppose for very small societies, they may be limited by discoverability/cliquiness and not quality, so their growth doesn’t mesh with quality and so they could also get better with size.
> Note, “quality” doesn’t have to mean good/bad but also just “property”. When Facebook started, it was for kids from elite schools. It then gradually diluted that by lowering that particular bar. Then it was for kids from all schools. Then young people. Then their parents too. Clearly, it’s far from dying in absolute terms, but it’s certainly no longer what it initially was. To many initial users, it’s as good as dead though.
My attempt at a solution is to keep it in request-access beta and do targeted advertising only at people who share interests with high-quality subset(s) of discussion on the site, so the new users usually see and can learn what high quality discussion looks like on the site even if all areas aren't mature.
As the site matures you can naturally let more people in until a quite open beta, then full release trying to never take on more than say 10% of the daily active users in any given section/hashtag-cloud per year.
And you want the community to be able to assimilate those who come in versus the newbies overrunning everything.
I’m not on and am waiting for an invite, but if opening the gates means it ends up being a place I don’t want to be, what’s the point?
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----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=tmx/
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----I will say to be on topic that I am enjoying Mastodon, but the network effect isn't there yet. It's a pretty small minority of users from my feed that have either switched or are dabbling in both, so tech stack aside, I feel if Bluesky gets momentum it has the best chance of being a drop-in replacement for Twitter in the near-to-medium term, given the relative simplicity (this isn't a knock against Mastodon, more an acknowledgement of simplicity's factor in mass appeal).
That said, even though I'm rooting for Mastodon, I would not be shocked if Bluesky catches up very quickly. In any case, any of the two is an improvement over a locked down and thoroughly broken Twitter.
What would be more interesting would be to compare Mastodon with bluesky when Mastodon was as old as bluesky is now.
Is this something someone can figure out?
And if that's not a fair comparison, and neither is comparing them straight up by data right now, how could be fairly compare them then?
The subtext is “we can’t compete with AI because it’s all porn and thus super popular”.
My understanding is that Bluesky as a company is building a client experience, and funding the development of the protocol, but the long term vision is for open source and federation, so no central controlling entity.
In fact there are already several other open source competing clients that can be used with the private beta, and Bluesky (currently) has no issue with this.
has the federation even been implemented? Is it an open protocol? Why on earth should anybody trust them not to go back on their word once they've gotten enough critical mass that nobody wants to leave because that's where their friends are (the so-called "network effect")?
This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.
How cid is generated? Is it completely random?
Is that something folks are doing? Can it be done without "doubleQuoting" all of the response column names or without using an ORM?
There's nothing hard being solved.
Ignoring that judging usage based on a still invite only platform is also a little silly.
Just to look at the numbers in isolation is hardly interesting.
how much of reddit is being used for AI? it looks like there's plenty of text in there; maybe we just need to parse the reddit with GPT to filter out the good parts, and got a great dataset
You know in the past, the Internet were designed to be downloadablein the first place, like USENET, FTP, etc.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/black-tech-twitter-trans-users-...
It's small, but it has a lot of interesting ideas behind the scenes and interesting people using it.
You don't need a huge following to have a functioning social group.