Bluesky Is a Scam
fiatjaf.com
fiatjaf.com
Personally I would have preferred if they implemented federation before going into beta because that is the whole point of a decentralized network. But OTOH there is an opportunity right now to lure people away from Twitter and that opportunity may not exist in a few months. I don't think progressive decentralization, over a span of months not years, is inherently evil.
This may come as a surprise.
But your average cool, interesting person doesn't care whether Bluesky has a decentralised protocol or the intricacies of its identity model.
The reason most people are using it is because it's the closest thing to a Musk-less Twitter.
Blocking/moderation/"censorship" will happen from people's own actions, or subscribing to someone else's actions. If you want, you can just not participate in blocking/moderation at all and have a raw view, but most people will probably opt-in to a moderated view, as the internet is usually (not always) viewed with a moderated perspective.
You basically have to chose between that or allowing the platform to censor anyone, which these "new breeds" of social networks seems to make the choice of doing "personal blocking" rather than "network wide" blocking.
What I think most people want though, is not "blocking" in terms of "no one will be able to see this person" but "blocking" in terms of "I don't want them to be able to interact with me, nor do I want to see their content".
It's an optional thing to disengage from the hype but but not really obvious for normal users.
1. even average people do appreciate the fact that the thing is an open protocol, even if they do not comment about it or understand it or seem to care.
2. average people do follow some leaders when deciding where to move, and the leaders are people that mostly care about these things -- these are the ones being tricked.
Crazy that no one in the relevant circles seems to have realized that microblog posts don't require anything more sophisticated than what a static site generator can produce. The heavyweight server-to-server protocols that we've seen are just way too heavy.
I keep thinking, what if we: 1. Use domains/subdomains as usernames by just... having the content on them.
2. Follow a truly basic structure for index (feed), single post, etc. so that clients know how to consume them easily.
3. For interactions (replies, likes, etc), the client posts them to your own server (or service hosting you) and they're available at a url referencing the original post url on their own domain. ex) mydomain.com/replies/thepostsurl/1
4. It then posts the reply url to the original posts server endpoint, which can accept or not.
5. When a user loads the post, it lists the replies and interactions as a list of links. the client goes and gets their content directly, and renders it.
This would work without any servers actually having to talk to each other or store more than a link for interactions. If you want to confirm the interaction url on receiving a submission, your server could check but it doesn't need to store or cache it.
Am I crazy or would this not work just fine? or, is this what activity pub already is?
A like is nothing more than a way of saying, "I like this". Think. You can come up with a way to do this that doesn't require you to abandon RSS (read: Atom).
If Alice posts something and Bob likes it, then he can say so—from his perspective, he clicks "Like", and in turn this just ends up as another entry in his own feed. He doesn't need write permission to anything on Alice's server, and Alice doesn't need a smart (social protocol-aware) daemon sitting on the line listening. If Alice is subscribed to Bob's feed, then she's already lined up to get it. If she's not subscribed to Bob's feed (and maybe even doesn't know he exists) but is so neurotic/insecure that she craves validation from strangers on the Internet after years of conditioning on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and HN, then she can subscribe to Marge's feed. Marge is Alice's friend. Marge casts a wide net (follows a lot of people) and keeps an eye out for anyone saying they liked Alice's shitposts. When she notices, she lets Alice know: Marge squirts an entry into her own feed saying, "hey, Alice, look over here at Bob saying he liked your shitty Beetlejuice tribute" (which is pretty much exactly the mechanism behind boosts/retweets—except these would be boosts/retweets not of content but of what is known at least in the XMPP vernacular as "presence" information). Also, Marge is actually Facebook/Google/whoever, once they realize how lucrative it is to have this kind of influence and mandate in the next generation of social media.
Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862612>
I'm describing RSS (read: Atom) with better UX. Nostr is a from-whole-cloth new protocol that's fundamentally incompatible with everything I've laid out.
(The video you linked to is unwatchably obnoxious, by the way.)
If you have the latest issue of Creed Thoughts in your word processor, then it's easier than ever to get a URL for it. Choose ".html" when you hit "Save As..." rather than ".docx", and then sign up for one of the unending supply free static file hosts.
There is an argument that people who can't be bothered to figure it out probably have nothing interesting to say, and that may be true in the vast majority of cases, it's not universally true; I'm sure we can find quite interesting social media accounts posted by someone who doesn't have the inclination or time to figure out "free static file hosts".
Who's going to do it for normal users? That's what bluesky is doing and anyone who's interested can theoretically host their own servers.
Username should be owned. Domains are leased.
They're doing things a little backwards, building a gmail before there's a big SMTP network out there, but that's smart. The default state of this positioning now is that they'll slowly drain Twitter of their attention capital ( this is on purpose; their UX is the Twitter UX) so Elon has to respond somehow.
Where is Bluesky's innovation?
I think ActivityPub and Mastodon are alright, but I think a thing that looks and behaves more like Twitter will be more successful at succeeding it than something that doesn't.
I get that Mastodon people are salty about Bluesky. Personally I was hoping Elon Musk buying Twitter would be taking the Jenga piece that collapses the social media tower. But this is how nerds vs capitalists goes, unfortunately, and my evidence is all the walled gardens that sprung up in the fertile pre-web-2.0 internet.
Edit: cool music btw! I like the sophistication of your percussion.
Biting the hand that fed him.
https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#how-it-works
They could be using public keys as identifiers, why are they using nonsense?
They also say: “We're actively hoping to replace it with something less centralized.”
but they're also holding into your private keys for you, which comes with some risks.