Bluesky temporarily halts sign-ups

It’s wild. I’m not a habitual social media user/checker, so my thoughts should be interpreted within that context.

Anyway, I don’t think anyone can fairly say they’re artificially growing the platform. I’ve watched them fight bots that attempt to autofollow everyone on the entire platform and engineer solutions for blatantly NSFW content filtering (but not blocking as that’s not a direct concern of theirs). They’re thinking really critically about giving users tools to give them the ability to see only the content they want to see. The coolest feature I’ve seen so far is custom feeds, which lets any user create a custom feed using whatever criteria they want to filter posts that any other user can then subsequently discover and add to their own list of feeds as an optional way to view content. For example, there’s a feed that (I presume) uses CV to include every post that includes a cat photo (no hashtags needed). It’s pretty cool.

They’re really on top of it, and when I say that I mean crazy passionate, bordering on burnout levels of on top of it. Throughout all of it they’ve been really authentically engaged, and even playful, with users.

As for users themselves, I’d say at the moment there are still really tight demographic bubbles of users on there, and everyone is an early-adopter, so the 80/20 rule doesn’t apply yet. Although it’s slowly changing, at least back in late May/April there were no lurkers. Everyone seemed to be posting and replying to everything. I find it interesting that they’ve managed to pierce beyond our techno-bubble. Not everyone on there has a technical background. I’d say they trend that direction, but they have writers and artists too, for example.

Lastly, I’ve seen some pretty neat experimenal web apps and chrome extensions being built around it. It’s all very exciting. That being said, this is early days, so it’s to be expected. I have a hunch they’re going to win this space because they seem to be making a concerted effort not to alienate users who are used to the idea of a centralized platform by not overwhelming said users with concerns that extend beyond engagement.

My concern also hinges on that, however, because it can very justly be argued that this is federation-lite or d(i)e(t)-centralization. The underlying foundation of the AT-protocol will be expensive to run. It’s the push/pull dilemma. They’re not shy about this, but they’re not exactly shouting it from the rooftops either, if you catch my drift.

Remember voat

I wholeheartedly agree. With Instagram Threads coming any day now their best chance of success might be gone.

Basically if you had a Twitter presence with at least several hundred followers, you probably knew someone who knew someone who had codes.

It feels empty, like people created accounts then left after a week since there was never the critical mass to support a constant buzz of information. And (this is just my weird very subjective opinion) Mastodon often feels like the unholy child of 2010 Tumblr and Stackoverflow.

After having experienced several migrations, I would avoid like the plague any platform that includes a CEO, even if it claims to supports open standards. Mastodon is a better choice long-term.

I’m still surprised that Meta is planning on using ActivityPub instead of atproto

The comparison isn't about scalability. It's about spin.

The workers wouldn't care. Ray Koch's fanboys on the other hand would have been livid.

you are right, i think it might have still been cached in my browser from yesterday

That’s interesting, thank you. Some interesting projects. But for my question (I should have clarified in it) I was thinking about their infrastructure stack as well.

In general I’m just curious about where the scaling bottleneck is right now.

Not sure what that is. Like a news+activity feed? I think outsourcing recommendation engines to 3rd parties and letting users subscribe to the recommendation engine (which might include ads for incentive) of their choice would be neat. People want stuff recommended to them.

For example, I would want to subscribe to good news sources that are both global and US centric and any infosec related recommendation sources. Others might want content recommended to them if it is shared by people with creds/reputation in other platforms or if they are their friends. I can imagine a "friends and family" recommender that connects to all other social media and recommends events from their in one feed.

Moderation, hosting fees, legal liability, responsibility for accounts (people invest a lot of time in creating content tied to your instance), security,etc... it is federated but all the legal,security, infra,moderation,etc... people across the world that support twitter and the like are no longer there for your mastodon instance but the only thing there that scales down/up with respect to the number of active users is infra support staffing/costs. Everything else is "decentralized" but since it isn't a technical problem, much like most things foss, the responsibility is transfered to whomever runs a mastodon instance assuming they have taken all the neccesary steps to be responsible and reliable in every regard. But in reality, the user is expected to find out through trial and error and word of mouth, which instance is being operated properly. Matrix and other decentralized systems have the same problem.