Bluesky social network drops invite-only sign ups | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky social network drops invite-only sign ups

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26 pointsTomte27 comments

I wonder if we can work out their burn rate from the time between this and the next funding round. They need to get federation up ASAP to maintain credibility.

For comparison: The ActivityPub fediverse doesn't need VC because it's funded by users of each of thousands of servers. It's self-sustaining.

Federation is up and running on the sandbox network: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

The Q1 timeline for public federation seems plausible.

AP had most of a decade to reach this point. How fast will new servers need to spring up + how fast will people need to move off the main one to avoid losing more control to VCs?

Keeping in mind it's further complicated by BGSes and the likely multiple base cost to run vs an average PDS. Someone has to run those to maintain the key benefit over AP unless they came up with an accessible to normal people way for people to self-manage keys and data since the last time I looked into it.

Actually Kye the original incarnation of the fediverse pre-dates the ActivityPub protocol (this shifts your "most of a decade" statement back to 2008) but I think you know this too.

I was talking about AP, not federation in general.

Is it self-sustaining?

mastodon.social is funded on Patreon where it makes 22,750 €/month. That's what, about 9 cents per active user on mastodon.social? And the Patreon isn't only for mastodon.social, but also for iOS/Android apps, mastodon.online (18K active users), and the Mastodon project itself.

That's two servers representing a fraction of the near 2 million active users, and only one of hundreds of platforms.

Even limited to that, it's a nonprofit. You can go and check their financials if you want. Here's 2022 (PDF): https://joinmastodon.org/reports/Mastodon%20Annual%20Report%...

2023 is likely on the way.

The thing about "hundreds of platforms" is that they all have to be self-sustaining. And I have trouble believing that they are vs. just being maintained for free and paid out of pocket as long as it's tenable. The number of patrons for the Mastodon Patreon has actually gone down from that 2022 report (9603 in 2022 vs. 9096 now) and the monthly Patreon revenue extrapolated to a year is 273k€, which is about 50k€ less than what the 2022 report has as (total from all sources?) donations.

According to Graphtreon, paid members for the Mastodon Patreon are down 23% in a year and earnings by about 28% (https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodon). mstdn.social is also down by about 16% / 22% in the last year (https://graphtreon.com/creator/mstdn). Mastodon.world seems to be doing better since all of their numbers are up compared to a year ago, although on a six-month window they are dropping 19% / 25% (https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodonworld).

i would assume smaller AP servers will be straining to federate with services such as Threads soon here...

AP server admins will likely de-federate the largest ActivityPub servers, like Threads and possibly Mastodon.Social if they start generating a lot of inbound traffic on their instances. I predict the AP network will split into the network run by commercial/big entities and the network run by small hobbyists/idealists. Running an AP server that scales to the traffic generated by Threads will be no easy job and not cheap.

Running a Personal Data Service (PDS) on the ATProto network should be much more doable for hobbyists. The relay and app view servers handle search, discovery, and caching to alleviate traffic. So a typical PDS should not see too much traffic. Now just waiting for the Bluesky ATProto network to actually go federated, but I don't think we are too far off from that happening as they've already federated their own PDS into multiple PDSs.

damn, i kinda had the exact same gut feeling about AP servers balkanizing like that... bums me out because that reduces the utility from SMTP levels of adoption to that of exclusively hobbyist webrings.

Can someone tell me the basic difference between Bluesky and Nostr. Jack is a big fan of Nostr and I love it technical side of thing, I know not much about how Bluesky works.

In Bluesky you create an account on a specific PDS (personal data server) and need to authenticate yourself against that server to write content (posts, likes, follows, etc) to your user repository. Content in this user repository is signed and discoverable by relay servers, and app view services. Currently you can't move your user repository to another PDS, so your user is tied to that server for the time being. When posting content you post to the specific server your user repository is hosted in.

With Nostr your identity is truly decentralized. You create a user meaning a private and public key. You then choose which set of relay servers you want to post content to and which servers to pull content from. If you post content to servers A, B, and C users that pull from those servers see your posts. All posts are signed with your private key so the other users can verify that they were in fact posted by you. It does not matter which relay servers you post to, they will happily store your content unless they've specifically blocked you or require some form of white-listing.

So in that way your Nostr identity is not connected to any specific server, you can always choose to post to a different relay. As of today I don't think Nostr relays federate/distribute content to other relays, but this seems to be a possibility for the future.

Edit: Specified that Nostr relay servers don't have to be open by default.

Well now i kinda want to talk about Nostr. I heard of it before but i'm always wary of prototype projects dying.

What's your opinion of Nostr? I like that they seem fond of SSB, and have the same opinions i do of SSB (and it's flaws!)[1]. Though i do find it odd that there doesn't seem to be more attention to somehow chaining/federating/propagating notes between relays. I don't think it needs a super robust method, but from this[1] it sounds like there was basically zero attention put towards that.

[1]: https://fiatjaf.com/nostr.html

I like Nostr because it is designed delightfully simple. I think it already solved most of technical problems (one of remaining ones are key rotation, but it is actively worked upon), and what it needs is solution of social ones (i.e. marketing).

As for federation: first of all, one of basic ideas of Nostr is that a note is published on several relays at once. It adds robustness to the system - one recent analysis shows that on average, one note is published on several tens of relays. Relays do not talk to one other directly per Nostr protocol, so after the publication, notes do not propagate between relays by themselves - but a specialized client can replicate notes from one relay to another. I do not know how often it is done in practice, but it is trivially easy to implement.

"drops" is an autoantonym - it can mean "release / make available" but can also mean "gets rid of / disposes of".

Here they mean "opens sign ups to the public".

I apologize in advance for the cynicism but this is how I see Bluesky's virality/stickiness playing out: everyone's going to move to it, it's going to be an unofficial but incompatible "fediverse2", VC type of folks will pretend the actual Fediverse doesn't exist, and then the actual Bluesky public benefit corporation (or some derivative, come on guys you wanna get filthy rich) will eventually turn to a data brokerage/ advertising play to enshittify the entire thing.

>folks will pretend the actual Fediverse doesn't exist

What is "the actual Fediverse"? Because the Mastodon network is quite fragmented. misskey.io (442k users) has limited federation with mastodon.social (252k active users). pawoo.net (34k active users) on the other hand is blacklisted by mastodon.social. And Threads isn't really federating properly yet, but how much of the Fediverse is just going to blacklist Threads and its supposed 130 million MAU?

By Fediverse I mean the W3C ActivityPub ecosystem. Yes it has a diverse collection of applications but they all talk a common protocol and interop to some degree.

The way I see it, fragmentation is a feature not a bug because it drives a certain amount of competitiveness (Cory Doctorow calls this Adverserial Interoperability) among implementations and users are free to go anywhere else (it's just another sign up):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

What is your point? Are you saying that, because some servers have limited federation, so there is no 'Fediverse'?

Again, what is this "Fediverse" that people keep talking about? Because so far I've only gathered that Fediverse doesn't mean that entities in it will actually be able to communicate with each other, and that Bluesky isn't in it (or that it's in it, but not in the "actual" part of it). Is Threads even part of the "Fediverse"?

I hate the term fediverse to be quite honest.

software that implements the ActivityPub protocol, or historically older protocols such as OStatus is a mouthful.

Completely uninterested in Bluesky as it was the favorite non-mastodon target for the most insufferable people that I'd run across on the old Twitter. I'm legitimately happy for them that there's a place they enjoy participating, but want nothing to do with it.

Twitter is good enough, in spite of Musk’s actions seemingly. Bluesky is, in all observations, Twitter, without Twitter users.

And Threads is just weird. Why would I want to open an app and read whatever random strangers have to say without curation. Just plain weird. Feels like the equivalent of listening to people talk to themselves in public.

Are tweets sorted chronologically again? Or able to be sorted? I had given up.

Last I remember it was very much like the curated feed. I don’t remember a chrono option unfortunately.

seems you've angered the folks who went to Bluesky

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