Bluesky facing degraded performance due to record high traffic
bsky.app
bsky.app
The number of participants on Bluesky is small, and everyone seems to know each other. Getting even a single like on a post is an accomplishment, and getting 16 likes (I think) gets you onto What's Hot. Approximately nobody is interested in technical discussions; Mastodon is much better for that.
The vibe on Bluesky is weird. Everyone is very enthusiastic about being there, and most of the discussion is about being on Bluesky. Someone said that everyone is Extremely Online and much more interested in meta-discussion than discussion, and I'd agree. Bluesky is all about the in-jokes and memes, which turn over at a dizzying rate, much faster than even Twitter. It's a very horny place, with lots of butt photos.
I don't want to be negative about Bluesky. For people who want a tight-knit community to chat with, it's great. But don't feel like you're missing out if you don't have an invite code. (BTW, I don't have any to give out.)
Edit: I'm not hyping Mastodon here, just comparing Twitter alternatives. Unfortunately, so far I've found that Twitter is the best choice for me. I get maybe 10% of the interesting technical discussion on Mastodon that I get on Twitter. And I still don't understand how to work with the federation. There's also Newsmast, a new social app that reached out to me, but there's approximately 0 content there.
One thing I forgot to mention about Bluesky is that it looks exactly like Twitter, so much that I can forget which app I'm on. It's very different in that regard from Mastodon, which is like alternate-universe Twitter.
A large chunk of the Apple nerd ecosystem I followed on Twitter moved, and I like that I can still follow them.
But everyone else I followed either never moved or quickly gave up and seems to have taken up residence on Bluesky.
So without an invite code, and the possibility Twitter will disappear real quick, I’m left with no way to follow them and I’m just forced to miss out.
There’s no way to get a code if you don’t know someone. There is no indication when signups will open. I have no idea what my place in line is. I’m just screwed.
What were the types of people who moved over to Bluesky?
Mastodon can give a very poor reception. There are a lot of people who seem to consider it there and are mad other people are showing up and not following their self-imposed rules on all servers. Instantly telling people they’re doing things ‘wrong’.
The people (not many, I think, but enough) can be rude about it or downright hostile. They’re like the RMS GNU/Linux brigaders of social networks.
And they drive people away.
I’ve seen a lot of people say they don’t want to be on Twitter due to Elon actively encouraging horrible things, and Mastodon treated them (or a friend) poorly.
Even if they’ve tried both, they say Bluesky feels more like the fun old twitter, whereas Mastodon can be very serious (I’ve seen this problem too).
I sort of get the feeling Mastodon lost it’s big moment due to the behavior of many users.
I haven’t been on Bluesky. Someone gave me a code (thanks a ton!) but since signups are locked at the moment I haven’t been able to jump on.
Bluesky is the only real contender right now. It doesn’t matter that it has a low user count. The main threat is that there’s no real incentive for people to run their own BGS. We’ll see how that pans out.
For 'short bits of social interaction and media content sharing', there are like a dozen sites with very active userbases these days.
There's one extra step, I think that's not terrible.
This would only slow growth, invite only is also terrible onboarding so it sort of invalidates that take.
Mastodon won't take off because it is NOT a Twitter replacement. Discoverability and fragmentation are problems that Mastodon will never be able to solve. These problems mean it's never going to be 'the place to go to figure out what is going on'. It might be the place for you to figure out what's happening in your specific interest group and that's fine but it's a different use case.
Go look at the list of servers each instance chooses not to federate with. Some of these are reasonable 'they botted us', some of them are ideological 'they are tankies', some are weirder/legal like 'they did not use the correct GDPR policy'. Some are capricious like 'fuck that homeserver admin, I just don't like them so we're not peering with them'.
I can't wrap my head around it, I know I'm a class of former Twitter user that used the service to figure out what was happening either globally or on a local scale (using geocode searches). I had follow lists on there of people in specific interest areas but I wasn't on there to be a part of a community, I do chat instead for that. I'm on Mastodon now and the people on my homeserver I think are probably all fine but I don't have a lot to relate to them about and they don't post too much about current events outside their interests. I can't just search federated messages, I can view the stream of them, but I can't search and it kills it for me.
I love the concept of federated services, I admin a matrix homeserver, but the structure of Mastodon makes it hard for me to recommend that anyone register anywhere else other than mastodon.social because homeserver admins are extremely reluctant to ban this instance permanently and if you ran your own instance there's going to be a ton of admins that just block you for X reason.
I was there for the skeets and hellthreads and whatever other meme of the day: it's pretty awful and if you're not participating, you get no likes, because the memelords are the ones racking up high scores.
No likes in themselves is not bad but they're a proxy in this case for real discussion, which is what you'd want if you're talking about React or Go or Rust or whatever.
Bsky is just... I open it and post things sometimes, but all the people I've found on it who I've followed don't even do that, so it's kinda empty (at least in the tech space).
I do like their mobile app a hundred times better than Twitter's, but ten times less than Ivory.
Reminder that you really shouldn’t feel like this regardless of the quality.
1. Open the site up
2. Implement a polished user interface (bizarrely even Truth Social looks and performs better than this)
I do not have much hope that this is going to quickly change. I think at this point, the best hope we have for a Twitter exodus is to Instagram Threads.
They limit who can sign in, but openly publish all data via their API.
So one could use an AT protocol client to read, or a web based client like this one:
I just made an account, let's see how this thing works:
@gnod.bsky.social
@donohoe.dev
(Email in the profile)
Bluesky is VC funded and there’s expectations of revenue growth down the line.
You can use your own domain as your identity. Even when you use a service like bsky.app, you can use @yourdomain.com as your handle. And switch to any other service to publish under the same handle.
Anything can just start ignoring traffic and not showing content.
I remember when Google Talk used XMPP federation. Lots of people ran XMPP servers. Then Google turned off federation and only Google Talk users could chat with other Google Talk users.
Unlike email, Bluesky essentially has one service. There's no culture of openness there. It wouldn't be hard for them to decide that they'd become the single service in the future. 99% of users aren't going to leave for a different provider and they could simply black hole stuff from other providers.
I'm not saying they want to do that, but saying there's no lock-in is wrong at this point. Bluesky could shut down their ATProto entirely and just close if off and 99.9%+ of users wouldn't notice a thing.
Bluesky can only be considered open once there are many other home servers and the Bluesky home server isn't the vast majority of traffic. Let's say it's 2025 and Bluesky has 500M users and there are 10 other servers with 5,000-500,000 users. Let's say one of the alternatives seems like it might be a threat to Bluesky's business model. Bluesky simply stops sending its posts via ATProto and then users on those other servers need to migrate to Bluesky. Total lock-in. Now, if it's 2025 and Bluesky has 50M users, ATProtoX has 100M users, SkyNet has 200M users, SocialSky has 25M users, etc., then it's hard to lock someone in. Bluesky couldn't cut itself off from 85% of the network. Bluesky could cut itself off from 0.001% of the network.
Just because Bluesky is using the ATProto today doesn't mean they'll continue to. As long as Bluesky is essentially 100% of the content/users/etc., it's easy for them to pivot away from openness toward lock-in. It's only open if they can't cut others off and as long as they're the source of almost everything on the ATProto, they can always pivot away. Yes, with the ATProto you can move servers. That doesn't mean Bluesky will continue to use ATProto and have openness around posting/viewing content.
the only thing keeping lock-in right now is the PLC directory, which I think has plans to be owned by consortium eventually.
It is unrelated.
It's like insisting blockchain transactions are immutable when Etherium issues updates all the time to reverse transactions that happened due to hacks.
Why waste your time and others posting lies on the internet? Easily debunked ones at that.
BTC had a similar fork in its early days to work around a bug that actually minted illegitimate coins, yet maxis sweep that under the rug.
But you knew this, you knew what the DAO fork was. You know when it happened. You knew it was the first major smart contract. You know the context it happened in. You know the community overwhelmingly supported it. You also knew it hasn’t happened since, yet you still went out and lied.
Why?
Honestly, so many of the comments here are, but what if?? The what-if scenario is built-in to the design and is in fact more resilient than other protocols like ActivityPub.
But if account portability existed and worked, imagine this scenario: Larry Ellison wakes up one day and decides that Elon is having so much fun that he wants a social media site too. The minute the sale is announced, all the account portability APIs are disabled, and the website switches to a hard login wall. They start aggressively throttling and banning users that look like scrapers. They send a DMCA takedown to archive.org, who obliges and removes the wayback copies. They disable viewing followers and following so you can't even get your graph out. Now what?
The problem of trusting someone else to host your social media page is that you have to trust them. If your answer is "Jack wouldn't sell the company", then I can't help but note that he sure sold Twitter to Elon. If your other answer is "Larry Ellison would never do something unethical and customer-hostile" then uh...
But, if the AT protocol even makes it another ~6 months without that happening, it will become impossible. You won't need to "trust" anyone to host anything, and if you want you'll be able to take your data and go somewhere else. That's the vision, and that's so far exactly what the folks at BlueSky have been building.
So no, the answer isn't "Larry and Jack wouldn't do those things" the answer is, "They'll have to act very quickly and in ways that are completely out of character for them, not to mention the staff at BlueSky would have to all sell their souls which is also completely out of character for them as well."
But yeah, if you're a cynic I guess everything is on the table.
for the record it's not entirely clear who are the specific shareholders of Bluesky PBLLC other than a vague mention it was "the team itself".
Strictly speaking, no, they don’t, and neither do regular LLCs. Corporations have shareholders, partnerships have pattners, and LLCs have members.
I'm not sure where to find clear "membership" of the PBLLC but I assume they have to file paperwork showing something where they are registered. I haven't been paying too close attention but I'm sure some people are interested.
Until they don’t.
> I just made an account
Isn’t BlueSky invite only?
It baffles me that this pattern is not better understood in this crowd.
I'm going to make a prophetic statement and say that all digital social networks in the long run limit are not sustainable. The digital content generated on them has no real economic value and probably never will because the social connections they enable are inherently not monetizable.
Same logic applies to bluesky networks and servers.
The reason the model runs the way it does and collapses is because we inherently understand that most communication should not be economically restricted. We don’t have a good social network because capitalism isn’t a good way to create them.
Well, it sounds completely stupid. Do the plebes never learn that soon enough, their own community will be sold back to them after hijacking conversation for $$$$$ ?
"We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues. We’ll keep you updated when invite codes will resume functionality.
We’re excited to welcome more users to our beta soon!"
I'm just stating the obvious, which is that whether a service is centralized or federated has nothing to do with it. Mastodon would melt long before operating at Twitter scale, for example. (And to your points, I don't think that's necessarily bad.)
But, if there's any company on earth that should have 20/20 hindsight about this, it's Twitter. Post-"fail whale" era and pre-Musk, the service weathered far larger challenges without collapsing.
E.g. signups have hit ~6x what they were earlier today but it's still only an average of one signup per instance per hour.
Maybe it's bad when lots of people want to interact with information all at once.
Or maybe when access to information is gated behind a bunch of javascript client/server interactions.
On the other hand, I'm out of touch and still just write static HTML pages when I can get away with it :þ
That's what PeerTube is good at. Each video has a home site and a master copy, and each watcher helps to redistribute the video. So, if your cat video goes viral, your tiny server doesn't get hugged to death. At least in theory.
This is less distributed than bittorrent or Usenet. It's just distributed caching. Only videos currently being watched are replicated.
Now, PeerTube doesn't help with discovery. PeerTube sites only list their own videos. For this to take off and replace YouTube, a discovery mechanism (what we used to call a "search engine") is needed. Those exist.[1] (There are others, but some have bad SSL cert warnings.)
If you break the problem into discovery, hosting, and caching, all three parts are tractable. And no one part has enough authority to get uppity and act like they're in charge.
No-one learns.
> Our systems are currently experiencing some degraded performance as a result of record-high traffic. You may notice some slowness in-app as a result. Our team is working to resolve this issue.
> You can view our system performance status here: status.bsky.app
1) The ToS has clauses in it against scraping
2) There is a login wall that enforces agreeing to the ToS before seeing any content.
#2 is true for now, I can't verify #1.
Also, I didn't sign anything.
It's hard to take this generously. What do you mean by this, specifically? Are you saying "I didn't take out a pen and sign a physical piece of paper"? Or are you saying "I didn't click anything that says "I agree to the ToS"?
What actions are you intending which you feel are enabled by not signing anything?
The court ruled for hiQ and the right to do web scraping. However, the Supreme Court, based on its Van Buren v. United States decision, vacated the decision and remanded the case for further review in June 2021. In a second ruling in April 2022 the Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision. In a November 2022 ruling the Ninth Circuit ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties.[0]
Practically speaking, though, the dispute had essentially reached its logical end with the last court ruling in November – hiQ had prevailed on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) “unauthorized access” issue related to public website data but was facing a ruling that it had breached LinkedIn’s User Agreement due to its scraping and creation of fake accounts (subject to its equitable defenses).[1]
So basically, it’s not criminal under the CFAA. Thank god. But that’s just one specific law that doesn’t apply. It still is a breach of contract and various forms of damages and injunctive relief can be found against scrapers. If the two conditions are met that I wrote several posts ago, any business based on scraping sites that have the money and motivation to find relief through the courts will be untenable. That business would find that it cannot sustain itself against repeated court actions taken against it.
ToS != law, only in the very strictest naive sense. There are plenty of laws which deal with what happens once you agree to a contract and then breach the contract. Once you agree to the ToS, you have to deal with the legal framework of business law as it applies to contracts.
If, for example, OpenAI wants to scrape Twitter in violation of the ToS, Twitter could find relief in the form of “specific performance” where the court requires OpenAI to remove all that information from its training dataset and retrain ChatGPT again. Twitter could also get damages for the times that ChatGPT served customers with the infringing model. If OpenAI didn’t fully remove the data, it would be exposed to escalating damages in the form of contempt of court remedies.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
1: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/hiq-and-linkedin-reach-...
(Removed, all used)
Edit: ah, hard refresh of the app fixed that. Sorry!
This adds an additional element of suspense for all the invite code snatchers.
apparently Twitch has issues too
Have another invite but I will need some time to get it from the app because it is not loading for me right now. Just email me and I will send it as soon as I get it
Again, please be responsible! The invite code is linked to me
Sounds pretty centralised if they can just wipe all data like that?
They both run OSS Reddit clones and appear to be gaining the most traction. As a bonus, they're also interoperable with each other, and any other server that installs the software.
True, though the Mastodon compatibility is a bit iffy at the moment; they use ActivityPub in sufficiently different ways that it's not really possible to meaningfully access a Lemmy community via a Mastodon client, for example. I believe if it works at all, you'll basically just see a firehose of comments/posts.
And at those times, compare to now, there were hurdles to finding communities (discoverability) and having them interlinked in a “whole is greater than sum of parts” fashion.
I think Mastadon actually addresses a little bit of that, but also the discoverability especially is going to be difficult with the major search engines having vested interests that don’t align with surfacing results from less centralized platforms.
For example I have never once had a search return anything in the first few pages that links to a Mastadon instance, and can’t even remember that last time I had a useful result from of conversations from a traditional style forum, but I know they still exist because I can find them if I explicitly search for that sort of thing
Pathetic. This insulting post reeks of spam.
(1) reverse the order of the stuff before/after the hyphen (12345-67890 -> 67890-12345)
(2) add "bsky-social-" to the beginning.
Here are the codes:
45whe-qoupi
gmuxm-k6x3j
tc30d-wwpjb
tqunq-rtgar
7wecn-kfevc
I won't be online to delete these so if you use one (or try to use one and find it's done) please leave a comment to save other people from wasting time
Edit: all gone! Not sure how they went so fast
for anyone who wants to join bluesky
Edit: code received
so uh, thanks for that very useful and insightful comment
-----
[*] I'm not voting for any relative of another president, or probably even a relative of a congressperson; though it looks like one, I like to think this isn't a banana republic. Also, RFK, Jr. was against vaccines even when they weren't lying about them, and made his "political" bones by being against windfarms.
He's polling between 45-60 percentage points behind Biden in most national Democratic primary polling; in the few key states that already have state level polling published are mostly in the same range, though he’s only 40 points behind in one recent Wisconsin poll.
“nearly as much support as Biden” is nowhere close to the supported by evidence.
If anyone needs an invite
Thanks in advance!
1. Any news is good news, so DoS yourself to make some news on HN. :)
2. Code whoops causing amplification.