Bluesky Frustrations
anderegg.ca
anderegg.ca
I've been on the wait list since Feb 22, but for whatever reason I don't have access. That's just sour grapes, I know, but it also means that others who don't run in the right circles also don't have access. It means the community is intentionally exclusive and cliquey.
I don't know what it is about tech that everyone wants to become the people who abused them in high school, but it's a bad trend and we should be better. If invites aren't going to be chronological they should at least be random. Invite people who are different intentionally. Otherwise we end up with another clubhouse-esque VC circle jerk.
I already knew I didn't want to use it as I have no interest in using a voice/audio based app. But the membership didn't help any either.
Aware that your issue is the approach and the fact that invites are the main way of scaling this rather than just issuing random waitlists, but there is an issue about networks which I assume they are needing - i.e. users already on there will want their friends on there with them, as it is a social network.
The issue about creating networks of people that know each other and interact is probably pretty key to building a real social network - see how Facebook rolled out by college campus.
But, the inability to check any post by people already there is absolutely unacceptable. Not being able to verify a screenshot of public figures is just a huge no-no in my book.
All posts are publicly accessible though -- here's Jake Tapper's posts for example
https://bsky.social/xrpc/com.atproto.repo.listRecords?repo=d...
EDIT: This client lets you look up any post/profile without logging in https://blue.amazingca.dev/?username=did%3Aplc%3Aupkgvxvhn4e...
I have a negligible following on social media and don't know anyone over there so I don't think they're being cliquey with the invites.
To someone else's point, they're doing a lot of firefighting. When I got in, your followers list did an infinite loop, "hellthreads" were causing errors every time you viewed a reply, and content moderation was (and still is) constantly breaking (NSFW stuff keeps breaking through on their placeholder "what's hot" algorithm). I was able to register @salesforce.herokuapp.com as my handle, etc.
I think it's a beta in the truest sense of the word and you'll probably get an invite soon.
The problem is with the product space not the product. There is no fix for all these issues - only compromises. Bluesky will not be any different - people will be toxic, unhappy with moderation, unhappy without moderation, want blue checkmarks, think blue checkmarks are BS - blah de blah blah blah.
Precisely! This is what has been ticking me off about the Bluesky love-in so far; it's as if people are so desperate to call something "new Twitter" that they forgot the systemic factors around why Twitter turned bad.
Today, BSK is exclusive. Getting an invite gives one the ability to peer into what's happening at the cool table. It's invite-only, so most people there will be cool and not try to clickbait or build clout.
Problem is, Facebook was exclusive once too. It didn't last. Twitter also was once just a quirky little online space. Then the Arab Spring happened and now everybody writes with an assumed gravitas, as if their 280 chars are going to be featured in a CNN story.
I also signed up months ago and yet am still waiting for an invite.
Being controllable by one guy who does dumb stuff on a whim?
That's a tough, tough nut to crack, I think.
On one hand you can just make something totally open, and then it turns into a "hive of scum and villainy" and normal people don't want anything to do with it (something like: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-k... )
Or you can have strong moderation and ownership. When that goes well, like HN, it's about as good as it gets in terms of being a mostly pleasant community to participate in. But that could all go away, if, say, YCombinator sold it to the Saudis or the Kardashians or whatever...
I can't for the life of me figure out why someone who was doing some genuinely cool stuff like rockets would want to get involved with something where even when it's working pretty well, people are going to complain about it and think it's unfair.
The entire twitterverse has been complaining loudly about how terrible twitter is for years before Musk considered buying it. The problems are inherent to the product-space, not the owner.
Musk simply came in and screwed with the brand. His ownership didn't really affect the toxicity of the platform as far as I can tell (although he has definitely contributed to it with his personal usage, e.g. dogecoin shilling). If anything, he actually took heat off the overall toxicity by shifting attention to his own actions.
This is not at all my experience. The new thing with the 'blue check' replies makes it much, much worse.
He let a bunch of right wing extremists back on, as well as various and sundry other bozos.
Now he's given Tucker Carlson, the guy Fox fired for being too racist, a platform again.
Especially when it feels like the "more closed than open" is presenting itself as "open source" in what feels like a bait-and-switch to piggy-back on the goodwill of the actual open source ecology with a goal towards moving people (back) to more closed, corporate controlled tools.
("bait-and-switch" was the word I think I was looking for here.)
Literally 100% of this is open source. (Oh wait I think maybe one of the mobile apps isn't yet, but like, it's react native, IIRC, so it shareds most of it with the web app, even if not 100% of it is.) Yes it is true that there's no open governance yet. That is a problem. But let's talk about problems in a straightforward way, grounded in actual details, than in FUDdy ways.
"They are competing and I would have preferred if they weren't" is much easier to have an actual conversation about than "they're trying to EEE mastadon", which is inflammatory, inaccurate, and does not promote mutual understanding.
Personally, I believe that driving this towards meta-conversation is less useful to "promoting" mutual understanding than trying to use an analogy towards EEE as a way to describe feelings about a project. Analogies are useful constructs and dismissing analogies as "inflammatory and inaccurate", especially analogies involving feelings and opinions, is its own "inflammatory and inaccurate" move.
I'm surprised how these old tricks still work very well.
If Bluesky can catch the journalist as Twitter did there is a good chance it can replace Twitter. Even though I saw some news outlet set up their own Mastodon servers.
I'd gotten into the habit of catching up on social media in bed before getting up in the morning. Then I noticed that I was getting up pissed off most mornings, so stopped the habit as an experiment. It was the difference between being my naturally cheerful self in the shower, and some species of low level rage monster.
I've spent a life as a voracious newshound and infovore but have come to see info-gluttony as somewhat analagous to calorific gluttony. The sources of calories really do matter. A more hygienic media bubble is a better place for me to live.
Users don't need to 'Choose a server' and aren't confused on signing up and know how to use basic features like search and can find the users that are who they say they are. For BlueSky, two months with this growth in adoption is very early days.
But we will see what happens when the invite system is lifted and if the users are retained enough on BlueSky and what the users on Twitter will decide to move on to if Twitter gets 'worse'. But it seems that BlueSky so far is winning amongst the rest of the other failed alternatives that have tried for years to challenge Twitter.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/#:~:text=Anyone%20can%....
BlueSky is already worse because you can't just link to public skeets, you need to be in the special club to see the stuff people post. Sure, you could use some kind of external service that parses the underlying data, but what user is going to use that?
I'll happily stick to Mastodon until the people I follow all disappear to nostr or BlueSky. I might give running a BS server a go, but with the utter lack of documentation there is now I'm guessing that'll be in a few years at the earliest.
I already do this for Twitter, given it fucks up Discord embedding, and also use a similar tool for Bluesky, called psky. All you have to do is turn the "b" in "bsky" upside down, and change it to "psky". Not hard to use. I've heard some Bluesky clients also give out "share" URLs that are world-readable.
That said I agree that posts should just be public (and my understanding is that the current state is temporary).
The devs have said that they don't intend to lifting the invite system, because having a tree of who invited who is a powerful tool for detecting things like spam.
It is not part of the protocol proper, and so once federation is turned on, it will be lifted in that sense, but it's not yet known how widespread the invite system will be used throughout the federation.
This could be me. I’ve always used social networks with an assumption that everything I did was public.
> 2) Blocking: Your list of blocked users is public. Anyone can see it through the API. Someone harassing you? They, and all of their buddies, will know as soon as you block them. People can build profiles of who's ripe for harassment just by searching for large blocklists.
But Twitter has a huge "This person has blocked you" page? This doesn't sound like a massive upset to the status quo.
Ivory is a fantastic UI for Mastodon. Mastodon's only big hiccup really is the confusion around picking an instance. But that will go away once a few "normie" instances get a foothold and serve as a kind of "America Online" for the Fediverse.
Secondarily the fact that it doesn't tune for engagement means casual users will tend to bounce off of it (since there is nothing to sink them in and keep them coming back). But to many that's a feature rather than a bug. Akin to losing smokers by banning smoking in bars.
I don't use Mastodon (nor Twitter, nor Bluesky, etc.), but if that sort of thing did appeal to me, Mastodon would be the only one that would be acceptable precisely because it doesn't tune for engagement.
"Tuning for engagement" and/or using the usual "stickiness" tricks is a huge red flag to me.
for Mastodon being key here because they still haven't made it able to correctly talk to non-Mastodon instances (I'm convinced[1] this is because they've used `int64` for their status IDs despite the spec saying don't.)
[1] My Akkoma instance shows no posts - status IDs are opaque, non-`atoi`-able strings. My GotoSocial instance shows many posts but they are all the same post - status IDs all currently being with `01` which would explain the presence of posts and all being the same. In summary, stupid.
It has already succeeded at being a decent social network for people for whom Twitter was too toxic.
I don't see Mastodon being less toxic, the whole mastodon.lol (~70k users) drama over a video game was a perfect example of that.
On the other hand it also showed to me that single user self-hosting is the only way to go with Mastodon.
My point was more that there's no real profit motive to Mastodon, so it can't fail in that sense, which is generally what we're talking about when we're talking about web services.
If 75% of the new people on Mastodon eventually go to BlueSky, the people who remain will probably be perfectly happy to remain on Mastodon, and I don't know how one can call that a failure.
Moderation is also way better on Mastodon, so even with those features, the impact should be lessened.
Tech doesn't get funding because it's good, it gets good because it's funded. Blusky will be the Windows to Mastodon's linux.
That's not the reason, the reason it will fail is that although federation is a strength in some ways the other way is you're putting your faith in maybe just 1 person moderating and maintaining the instance you choose. If you build your audience at one address that place might disappear overnight if that persons life circumstances change and then (correct me if I'm wrong) you need that persons permission to move to another server.