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I'm also trying to stay positive.

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.

I don't want to sound cynical but all the things you describe are mostly early stage nimble startups with goos teams. As they grow quality erodes.

Email still works, spam and all.

I really like your take and the one to which it responds. Mastodon is super neat and I'd love to see a broadly appealing open-source, non-commercial, decentralized social media network become dominant. However, the sharp decline in active users since the Twitter exodus supports what I've been saying for years: it is simply too much technical resistance for general social media audiences. I find it annoying and I used to enjoy dial-up BBSs.

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.

I think the issue is partly technical, but mostly product, in that neither Mastodon nor it's servers are very obvious in usage, and finally its 'too decentralized'.

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.

The big thing is that there needs to be a path for users who don't care about the geeky shit to have a compelling experience with very little cognitive load at any step of the process. Us humans will gravitate to sub-optimal options if it offers less resistance... There's a reason the top 12 highest grossing US chains are fast food. BlueSky seems to offer a simple centralized service to those folks AND offer federation for folks who want to be more hands-on! I'm down.

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.

Yes totally but I don't think D-K is necessarily it but you've tapped into a big source.

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.

If they are truly open, it'll get bridged to the Fediverse the way people started bridging to Twitter (but were shut down because Twitter doesn't want to be open), and anything good about the protocols will be adopted whole or on part and subsumed.

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.

> 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.

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.

TBH I haven't paid much attention to it, but as somebody who was already using Mastodon as their primary social network for years before Musk took over, I'm not sure I understand what niche BlueSky is even supposed to fill that ActivityPub/Fediverse doesn't already fill. It just seems like a bunch of guys who got ousted from their jobs trying to invent a new commercial social network.

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 filling a niche, because it has to. Bluesky is designed to one day swallow Twitter.

This tells me that you don’t actually want what Twitter is (was?) good at.

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.

No, i understand what Twitter is. I was using it as far back as 2009. I have a problem with recent pre-musk changes, such as putting posts from people you dont follow and often dont agree with into your feed to make people argue. If you don't post iften enough, several times a day they will even send you notifications for posts that don't involve you and don't even come from people you follow.

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.

Refreshing to hear someone criticize Twitter for pre-Musk censorship and discourse-destroying policies, which indeed go right to Dorsey’s front door.

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.

> If you don't post iften enough, several times a day they will even send you notifications for posts that don't involve you and don't even come from people you follow.

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.

They said several times that they were referring to pre-musk changes.

I remember exactly this form of notification spam that they're talking about, although it appears not to be there anymore.

> Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me.

Fediverse/ActivityPub is not just Mastodon.

Maybe some folks like yourself thought Twitter was terrible before, but plenty of people were happy enough until certain changes by Musk. Mastodon itself had a large growth recently as people left Twitter in response.

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.

> 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?

For an automated bot making announcement-like posts, a Twitter page is simply a web page with subscriptions for those having a Twitter account: you naturally assume everybody has a Twitter account and checks it regularly, or put more negatively, you ignore anyone not on Twitter.

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?

I'm especially interested in what their new protocol offers that ActivityPub doesn't. There are more protocols than just ActivityPub, like Zot6 which focuses a lot more on nomadic identity than ActivityPub does. I'd love to know what it is that makes BlueSky's protocol better and therefore worth adding. Because if it doesn't do anything that other protocols already do, then what's the point?

As someone who's watched some of this but has little personal interest, the differentiation seems to be that Bluesky has a more compelling product on top of its decentralized protocol, judging by the reaction to it by 'personalities' from various domains.

Well, if it offers anything like increased speed and more useable searching thst’s good enough for me.

I don't think "useable searching" depends upon the protocol but the way how something is implemented over it.

If you want nomadic identity, a tiny tweak to expect ActivityPub instances to support a distributed content addressable URI scheme (optionally via proxies) is almost all that is needed, so if there turns out to be a lot of demand for it, it'll get added.

Twitter remains a great and useful social network if you stay in the right circles.

ML Twitter is fantastic for example.

Which Mastodon instances would you recommend? Most of the ones I've seen have a very Twitterish attitude.

> 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.

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.

I'm happy it exists too. By far my favorite discussion about it was Oxide's last podcast:

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.

+1 this. I'm very much hoping they'll stick to the protocol because it seems very well thought out and designed as a social protocol. I see this as a Deno situation where the runtime is free and open and will always be that way, but they build products upon it. That way everyone benefits from a good thing.

People seem to be generally anti-social-media and, furthermore, anti-social-media-magnate.

I'm a fan of publishing. I think any-to-any publishing is one of the most important applications of the internet.

Agreed.

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.

People prefer to receive information that other people get (ie from popular people and large outlets), so algorithmic prioritization of existing popular brands/people is literally just giving (most) readers what they want.

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.

I don’t know if that’s true but it seems like TikTok’s success is at least partially attributable to it not being?

It's not as if TikTok doesn't have influencers and hasn't created a bunch of celebrities.

Positivity…about Bluesky…on HN?! Incredible.

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.

I think this is a good take that I don't need to add much to, to be honest.

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 :)

Pidgin still interfaces with everything, including walled gardens like Facebook :)

https://pidgin.im/plugins/

Holy moly, you just made my day. I will have to give it a shot. I thought that once all the walled gardens developed their own protocols that it was dead in the water!

All the walled gardens supported in the old days of Pidgin were reverse engineered, same goes for the modern walled gardens. The tools for reverse engineering of protocols (like Wireshark) have only gotten better since then.

Please note that Pidgin is still GTK2 but there is a GTK4 version in the works that has a more modern interface. I think they welcome donations to make that go more quickly.

Where can we donate to keep the GTK2 interface as long as possible?

GTK2 itself is dead, so you would need to start with a fork of that. For Pidgin, this appears to be the donate page:

https://imfreedom.org/donate/

Better to be critical of a product in beta than have toxic positivity about it so things can be fixed.

If this were just a fun side project, great, no problem, let's give people the benefit of the doubt.

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.

I don't understand why they wouldn't implement ActivityPub-federation. Instead of strengthening the best federated social network, they chose to undermine it. Why?

on bluesky (sorry) the devs have been super active and responsive and eager to explain their approach. they have talked about this specific choice at length - that after an extensive ecosystem review and lots of thought, it seemed like a different architecture had a better chance of working at scale. I hope they find the time to explain this more publicly but it’s definitely a decision they didn’t make lightly.

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.

Lol, this is HN. Comments are often incredibly negative, and frequently enough - wrong or not quite right, yet arrogant &/ opinionated etc.

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)

I’m excited for blue sky just because I’m excited to see movement in real alternatives to the couple of major social players.

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.

A worse Twitter? The amount of blatant racism, bigotry, and calls for violence have exploded in the past couple of months. These people all buy blue checks so they get amplified. It's insane. My bluesky invite cannot come soon enough.

I haven’t seen this…

https://youtu.be/g1na0OFm89k

> I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist. It might go poorly, but I'm unwilling to write off weird attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in the wild.

Isn't it just a variation of mastodon?

no.

Then what is the biggest difference between the two besides the name of the protocol?

the design of the protocol :)

And that design lead to what difference?

Biggest difference that I noticed is in Bkueaky you identity is not tied to the site you signed up at.

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.

So its mastodon with better identity management?

>better Sounds more like "centralized" identity management.

In what way is it more centralized?

Did you read any content of top posts shown in the article ? …it is quite toxic stuff. Seems like foreshadow . Hate to kill optimism though.

I lot of people hate themselves and the world and complain about everything. I wouldn't worry too much about what the HN unimind thinks about something.