Bluesky has launched RSS feeds
openrss.org
openrss.org
It all went downhill since then.
The discussion tends to be worse than useless.
I'll implement this "some day"
If something important happens on Xitter/Facebook, it’ll get repeated elsewhere.
My Twitter feed is nothing but posts about what is going on in AI.
While I do follow Elon Musks account, because it may contain something important to know at some point (which rarely happens), I block everyone he retweets in regards to political views so that I'm not affected by it.
I use an ad blocker to remove the Trending panel, because at least here in Germany it is an entry point to the gates of hell, where you are guaranteed to be confronted with the most extremist, anti-government people this country has to offer. Politics are the worst on Twitter, and Twitter feeds that rage in order to have more engagement.
It should be said that for specific contexts, Twitter is the right place to follow, and AI is one of these.
Sounds awful! :-)
These things are absolute brain poison and I don't miss them at all.
I still use Twitter some, but I had a similar experience with Facebook. One day I found myself lurking on acquaintance's profiles and thought: "what am I even doing?". I quit and never looked back.
Problem is, I find Twitter really useful. But you have to keep your stream focused (in my case tech and data). It's really easy to doom scroll. In fact that's kind of the design intention.
The good news is that it reduced my Youtube time as well because I didn't have anything to pair it with. I realized I would watch Youtube and if I was bored or uninterested I may pull out my phone and hop on Reddit. Get bored of Reddit? Find a video to throw on. It was good to put a wrench in this self-reinforcing feedback loop.
Same shit as on Twitter and Bluesky
The whole point of Mastodon is to only get what you want, not the rest. It's easy to build your own network of sources. The explore feed is useless :)
However, my actual Mastodon feed only has content from people I follow, without any recommendations, and that works great.
And 2024 is probably going to be particularly nasty for obvious reasons.
- people who like to argue online
- people who can easily turn any complex topic into a 100-odd character slogans
- people who like to put the world into hashtag-sized boxes
- masochists who enjoy getting into the ragebait du jour
- a vanishing minority who didn't get the memo and somehow the Algorithm has kept them in a bubble of sanity
- bots
Coincidentally most of these groups, including bots, really love the entire US culture war bullshit. They're the one that are keeping it alive, with the help of journalists, the last category of people that live on that type of social media and then report on some newspaper @oneidiotontwitter's troll post as if it were public opinion, in a perpetual cycle of mental and cultural noise.
---
Look outside. People are going about their lives. The sun is somewhere in the sky. Probably not much is going on around you. That's the real world.
But each platform's mechanics encourage certain behaviours over others. The Twitter website (not the culture of it's users), as an advertising-funded platform, is highly geared to optimise for 'engagement', which encourages all of these behaviours.
We blamed the Algorithm, but perhaps the issue was the users all along.
always-has-been.jpg
It's one of the strangest things about the meta-conversation regarding social media. The "left" (I'll use quotes because these things aren't strictly defined) thinks that, for example, anti-immigration sentiment or support for Trump comes from "Russian bot farms" fooling the public. It's unfathomable to some people that smart, good, hard-working people could hold those views.
Also, did you scroll all the way through https://bsky.app/feeds for various interests?
Oh, and one really useful thing that I found for discovery is the little + icon to the left of the Follow button on people's profile pages. It shows suggestions of who they are following, so I built up a bunch of good follows that way.
"My default experience is openly hostile and promotes division"
"My experience is that if you tailor it then it's very valuable".
"OK, but the default experience was hostile and I don't have the means to coerce the good vibes experience"
"Skill issue".
It happens on every conversation about Twitter, less so regarding TikTok and co. But it's an interesting pattern I see all too often.
Troubleshooting does fit common patterns maybe?
I think it's right to try to help people, I often mark things as "Not Interested" if it's divisive, but since we tend to have less control about emotional responses, we all have a sense that we have a duty to fairness and with the understanding that humans tend to want to correct bad information rather than letting it go uncorrected (that's why the best way to get an answer to your question is to post an incorrect answer rather than ask). -- combined, these issues mean you will likely interact in some way with the divisive content if it's delivered to you.
Seeking to actively diminish it is difficult, it requires thought and intentional moves to ignore and flag content as uninteresting or to heavily curate your feeds.
This, I feel, is why it's victim blaming; because the intent of the media platform by default is to engage and they do so by baiting emotional or corrective responses in the interest of fairness.
Yes, this is the tricky thing about internet communities. Bluesky is mostly made up of older school Twitter addicts angry at Twitter's takeover and yeah all they tend to talk about is that and culture war adjacent stuff.
Shows a bit of the naivety of the Bluesky devs they didn't clock this as a problem and try and help people who don't want to talk about that find their community on there.
Exactly. Bluesky was born in the shadow of Elon taking over Twitter. But Twitter still exists, so who went to Bluesky? A lot of people who disagree with Elon's (recent) politics. The politics of Bluesky will reflect that.
It doesn't surprise me that BlueSky goes in the same direction, to be honest.
If you mean said minority groups just trying to exist in a space without harrasment then that is not fine at all.
It is probably due to how Bluesky was populated - a specific demographic of twitter were the first movers to bluesky, and it has attracted more of the same. I guess there is a market for this.
As a side note on Thread and Mastodon: the experience there was different. Thread has a larger tech community so there is actually interesting content (for me at least) and Mastodon, it really depends on the instance, but even on the first instance (mastodon.social) you can find good content if you search by hashtag, and you can find some real nice people to follow (and since it's the multiverse, you can follow from any instance anyway) so it's all about building the social graph you want)
Let people argue in their own bubbles and leave the rest of us in peace.
You mean you moved from a place that showed content you disagree with, to your own bubble. You can admit that without claiming everything outside your point of view is silly.
It used to be that regardless of your position, even active disinterest, this stuff was forced on you, and now that is not the case.
"To find the RSS Feed for a website, just navigate to the website and the RSS feed for it is usually located at the domain of the website followed by /rss.xml, /rss or /atom.xml".
Recently on HN there were infos that pages provide meta links to atom. This is cleaner solution than guessing.
There was also Firefox extension 'want my rss', etc etc.
This should be better explained on RSS site.
At this point, I just use CTRL+U and search "rss" and "atom", hoping to find a the corresponding <meta /> tag. It's a shame Firefox does not automatically display a feed icon anymore, it would be much better if I want to tell non technical people about RSS. Installing an extension is workable but it's also an additional step.
<link href="https://example.com/rss.xml" rel="alternate" title="RSS feed for example.com" type="application/rss+xml"/>
<link href="https://example.com/atom.xml" rel="alternate" title="Atom feed for example.com" type="application/atom+xml"/>
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/me...
Most browsers have removed RSS, so now you need to either read the HTML (which sucks even if you're familiar with it) or just guess. If you want to instruct the general audience on how to get RSS feeds these days, and you don't want to link to browser extensions (because only a few mobile browsers support them), then "just add /atom.xml" seems like the most foolproof solution to me.
It too could use a mention of autodiscovery though.
And yeah that does sound frustrating, maybe file a bug?
I've one test user I'm following where I have an RSS feed from Bluestream and one directly with Bluesky. When they reach parity I'll swap over.
Edit: Yep, https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/issues/2538. My bad; not a Mastodon issue.
Goodbye BS! Even looking at the endless stream of xxx-coint posts on nostr is not that exuasting.
Went back yesterday and it's still that way.
There's literally nothing to read and nobody interesting to follow there.
Threads is already much better overall despite the delayed launch in Europe.
Presumably that is not your experience with it. It's wild how easily an algorithm can skew our perception.
That's because there are a decent amount of indie journalists there and a lot of them are moving away.
And all of this starts with their DIDs being a substring of the hash of your first post? It just doesn't make sense. In these kinds of systems you hash the data and sign the hash, then you can send a message that can be authenticated anywhere.
And thus, RSS is one answer I guess.
No one ever asked for an RSS feed of a Scuttlebot log back before that network was scuttled. Why? because you could authenticate the sender and the posts on your own computer.
Delete can't be real because someone will always have their phone out there ready to screenshot your post.
Imagine the @ protocol was
```<ed25519 Public Key><Signature>```
and that opened to
``` <timestamp><ed25519 Public Key><Previous Post Hash><Data Hash> ```
And the previous post hash could point to a post before a delete if we consider deletes to be real.
The hashes are used to lookup the post content, which we could also send with the message for the sake of convenience.
For key rotation we just need to sign a message pointing to our new keypair, no federated servers required! "My new key is EVxe89AeRwmTT0hfrT7sHe0wAuzvH9Yvg9TFUgqPh4M="
As someone working on a p2p app that has done a lot of user research, I see it as a really good sign when a federated/p2p systems prioritize deletion, because I know based on my own research that it's something users care about and ask for.
BUT, if the content is already out there in a distributed system then you have to expect all of the nodes to respect your delete and not optimize for it.
That's such a bullshit claim. The entity that runs the servers where the data is stored always has a moat. They can aggressively rate limit scraping and simply refuse to provide dumps, and suddenly, they are the gatekeepers to everything that actually matters. Open source has nothing to do with this.
1. while they're still not quite there, the protocol is federated, so they aren't the only servers storing your data once that happens.
2. because stuff is signed to your account, and other PDSes replicate posts, even if your host got weird, you could recover a lot of it. if you want to be extra sure, you can run your own PDS as well. I am not super up to date with how much replication various "reach" services store the firehose permanently, but should be possible to get content from them, for example.
3. I agree that open source doesn't prevent this.
You can always erect walls around things. We at least try to poison pill it enough that if the company tried to, people would exit with the data first. Which is why internally we don't see us as having a strong moat around the data.
That's only true if other large servers eventually emerge. "Federated" systems have a tendency to coalesce into a network wherein a few big players – often just a single one – dominate the ecosystem. Gmail, Matrix.org, the few Mastodon and Lemmy servers that actually matter, etc. are examples of this.
Usually, this leads to the dominant servers dictating rules for everyone else under threat of defederation (already the status quo with Mastodon today). And at the end, you have a hyper-complicated federated system that operates the same way as the centralized systems it originally aimed to replace.
But Bluesky works a bit differently. Users don't work as like, "user@domain", you have the moral equivalent of a UUID. If the host of your PDS decides to defederate with someone else's host, that doesn't mean you're prevented from getting their posts, it just means that like, it's a bit harder to. And if you don't like what your PDS's host chooses with regards to defederation, you move to a different one, and when you do, you retain your entire following/follower graph, and people who follow you don't necessarily even notice..
The closest way to think about it is git, IMHO. GitHub hosts a copy of your project (a PDS of your posts), and you can have one locally too. You can also put up copies elsewhere, and people can grab copies of your project elsewhere. If GitHub decides to stop hosting your project, you can put it up on another host, no problem. If GitHub decides to stop hosting a project you want to follow, you can follow where they move.
This is in sharp contrast to email or Mastodon, though in my understanding, Mastodon has made it a bit easier to move servers lately.
Most criticism of BlueSky/AT tends to be that it's too hard to do things like private accounts, keeping your block/mutelist private, or even deleting posts. (Though the latter is better now thanks to the addition of the moral equivalent of git rebase.)
Federation only makes it easier for everyone to scrape the public data, which most contents of a social network of this kind is. And we all know that by delaying the Federation Bluesky is making sure they will be the most popular and most used instance by default because it makes discovery and easiest engagement.
Depends on what you mean by "engagement and discovery." If you mean, "How will people hear about AT, by BlueSky or by StevesPDS.com, then sure, BlueSky has a ton of attention. But if you mean "engagement with other people's posts" or "discovering other users", that's the same no matter where their content is hosted.
So, the situation isn't so bleak as you describe, but also, yeah, controlling the website or app called "Bluesky" is still a moat (until it's not!)
I believe Twitter does support paid private posts that you can subscribe to, but I've never seen anyone I follow use it
- InviteMember (accepts most payment methods, including Stripe)
- CanalFans (accepts only USDT, and it's only available in Spanish, South American focused)
The way they work is that you add them to your private channel and the bot executes the sale, invites the member and kicks them out if they don't renew their subscription.
Of course they take a commission on the sales.
I mean, yes, it's on the scope of a toy project, but it's definitely not on the scope of a weekend project.
My software development estimation looks like at least 2-3 months with at least 3 hours daily on the IDE (on the Subscription Management side, ignoring the payment gateway, that as you mentioned: it's on Telegram already).
I have some paid substack blogs in my RSS feed. Some give you part of the post in the feed and then you have to click on the post to see the rest (in you’re a subscriber, else not). Others just say “click here to read” and again, if you are a subscriber (I am) you see the post.
However, there are things like firesky.tv which access AT Protocol directly and I believe don't respect that setting. You can make a user RSS feed from firesky by using Filter and setting a user handle.
At least I think I am responding to your issue...
Dorsey hasn't been doing them any favours for a long time, he's all but publicly disavowed it, deleting his account to focus on nostr. He's still on the board of directors last I heard, but if his public statements are anything to go by, he's not actively involved.
Not sure if the same applies to BlueSky, X, TruthSocial etc.
Social networks typically demand large user bases because it goes hand in hand with advertising.
I generally wouldn't trust any social media app that's not used the leadership. Threads is still half baked but at least Mark uses it regularly. And Elon is regularly posting on Twitter.
Some part of that is due to the design of BlueSky. But I think most of it was ironically due to the invite system simply existing. Jack wanted an open platform.
They were actually super early but the invite system squandered that opportunity. For months it was just a tiny subset of oldschool twitter users.
If I was at IG I’d have made the number carry over even if the users were not there yet, seemed catastrophic to sign up day one and see like 10 followers when you have thousands on IG
I've found engagement is surprisingly high, much much higher than Mastodon, but of course it depends on the niche.
Only in a bubble where everybody already has an account I suspect.
2. People may be interested, but they’re people that are outside of the existing niche that is on Bluesky. But clearly BlueSky only wants people that are part of that existing niche. The monoculture.
What?
It was designed that way so they wouldn't have to worry about moderation so much right away.
This doesn't really matter. It's replicated all of the features that matter, twitter has very few user-facing features that matter anyway. The only thing preventing Blu Sky from succeeding is user interest.
If https://bsky.app/settings/external-embeds - I don't have an account.
I'm curious what the partnership fees with Namecheap look like, if there's even transparency to make that public?
I am working on a similar centralized-aggregation system and integrating-partnering with registrars is one future aspect of the system I've been planning; it's of course always a matter of prioritizing resources, and I'll be at a major disadvantage compared to Bluesky with Jack's early involvement/launching it getting BLuesky plenty of press and at least some momentum.
As around a decade ago I wrote a comment and made a blog post of it, all else being equal, the final layer of competition will be governance - which will ultimately be different nodes that govern well enough - including providing enough value at a fair cost - to gain enough mass to begin snowballing and ideally as many as possible find a stable state; then hopefully they all copy the best features and policies of the most successful; the problem here though is virtue signalling is a survival mechanism, and pretending to offer something that may even appear quite similar on the surface may actually integrate an inherent flaw in the system - say allowing for an ideological mob to more easily form and become indoctrinated, say based on very nuanced decisions on how informatio is presented to end users (can it be more easily gamed by greedy or bad-authoritarian actors, etc).
They don’t mention what the business structure of the partnership is, yeah.
BlueSky has a slightly different take than yours, that you might find interesting. Things are split up into “speech” layers vs “reach” layers on top of them. So “governance” gets a bit weird: at the base level, you can say whatever you want, but how accessible that is depends on the popularity of various things in the reach layer. Nobody can stop you from running a PDS and putting your posts out into the network, but if say, the most popular moderation service decides to not show your posts, users wouldn’t see them unless they use a different tool in the reach layer, say one feed that uses it and another that doesn’t.
If you open without connection to any of your peers you first have to find anybody who is active.
I stopped giving them away to random people.
For example I dated this girl who was always stopped for a random search in an airport.
bsky-social-zweux-qaqar
bsky-social-4il6n-kuumm
bsky-social-n23po-7dedu
bsky-social-7fey2-v5fw6
It just feels... cleaner somehow. The slow trickle has, I think, kept it from being overrun by low effort posters and bots.
You say that as if it's a good thing. Bluesky turned into one of the most toxic networks out there. Just browsing the discover feed should dispell any illusions of a healthy community - most posts are whining about american politics or whining about some other unimportant memes like AI art instead of fostering growth about common interests like Mastodon does.
Bluesky had their chance with invite only and curated feeds (with some really dedicated community admins) but they've fumbled it all by focusing on american culture wars instead of the nice thing they had.
Not my experience at all. This is one such strange online remarks.
But if you don't bring your A-game when you're competing against the world's best social media company then what is the point. Meta is already feeding behavioural data into Instagram's ads which means they have no need to monetise it anytime soon. And the free advertising they are running on Instagram/Facebook is bringing in new users at a rapid pace. What advantages does BlueSky have ?
And the fact that there are no AT protocol servers means that you have the ActivityPub ecosystem with such a huge head-start and likely set to dominate in 2024.
Same story with features. We didn't deprioritize the protocol because that's core mission, so we had to put resources there instead of into features. Features will accelerate as core stabilizes.
Shipping a novel technology, building a product, and growing a userbase all at once isn't easy. I wouldn't declare us dead unless we've missed the boat so badly with market timing that nobody bothers, but we have good runway and (IMO) a pretty solid community of users.
¹ Probably. Maybe. Pretty sure.
Now that I’m on the site though, I feel the same about it as I do Twitter: a) Most posts are uninteresting, exist to virtue signal or are by people who _think_ it’s important to try desperately to be funny (which they often are just cringy and not funny) b) It’s extremely confusing to know any context on a reply post when it’s reply 22 of a 39 reply long thread c) It’s not fun or engaging. It doesn’t really add anything to my life d) I don’t want to post myself because inherently I, like many social media users, have nothing worthwhile to say to the digital world - so I choose not to post while others force it anyway.
It’s not my cup of tea and I’ve considered deleting the login a few times. I think I’ve just outgrown traditional social media.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bluesky_Registered_U...
Out of principle, I am refusing to beg on the internet and take invites from the cool kids that have been let in, and at this point I can only assume they deleted all the mere mortals who dared request to join early on.
Then you have the other end, mastodon and federation. At the very least, solves the user culture problem somewhat but does not solve the hidden costs of hosting and moderation at all. Especially if you get a sudden influx of users.
IMO VC money, corporate money, whatever you want to call it, is more or less required to run social media at scale.
With RSS, you can't gauge impressions and engagement with content, and you can't force all sorts of ads into people's feeds.
And the plan is to rollout a "mixed Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them" by late 2024.
http://plasticbag.org/archives/2024/01/how-threads-will-inte...