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Comment by DelaneyM | Hacker News Reader

The biggest frustration I have with Bluesky is the velvet rope and its consequences on community building.

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.

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I can't say I blame them for not wanting to suddenly have to firefight 1 million users on an immature platform.

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.

I don't think they even have anything (note I am purely speculating) beyond a single ec2 instance at the moment. it's going to take a lot of time to scale the necessary infra to support the demand

So decentralized it can't even run on a second server yet...

I also don't blame them for being invite-only and have no intention of begging people for an invite.

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.

They have self authenticating data structures no? Someone should be able to write a program that can verify any post.

Yes, only a web-frontend client is missing, see someone else who downloaded all posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845504

That's on the client, not the protocol. A few folks have built clients but for some reason hasn't made this a feature.

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 will also say, looking at the quality of the app in its current state, they just do not have a strong enough engineering team. They've been working on this for years and the UI/UX is extremely rough.

I get and agree w/ your general point. But at least for Bluesky watching folks in my feeds talk about getting access it's been a pretty diverse group. Much, much, much more diverse than Clubhouse. And by that I mean across industries, economic groups, etc and not just "diverse within Technology"

Watching folks in my feeds talk about getting access to Clubhouse back in the day and not getting in was a pretty diverse group too ... I think I might still be on the waitlist at clubhouse - by the time my number came up I had less than zero interest in the whole thing.

Granted both our posts were anecdata but what I didn't add was that for me Clubhouse was the opposite. The folks I knew joining Clubhouse were very much cut from the same cloth.

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.

I signed up for the beta on February 21st and got my invite last week at the top of May as they started letting folks in. From a graph I saw, they only had a couple hundred users til about April, then the May batch brought in another 50K (of which I was one). It's at 65K total now I think.

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.

It was quite telling how easy it was for Musk to buy Twitter. Most founders of successful startups fight tooth and nail to hold on to their company but Twitter rolled over so fast the deal was done before Musk had a chance to change his mind.

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.

Hey you seem like a cool person, I'll have an invite soon if you want me to send you one, my email is in my profile here :)

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