Bluesky signups are now open to the public
bsky.social
bsky.social
We've had the federation sandbox running for over six months but we're now able to commit to open federation on the production network this month as well. There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use.
The technical challenges of setting up an (efficiently) scalable decentralized social network were quite interesting. The infrastructure itself is quite decentralized, with standalone PDS instances and two small shared-nothing datacenter PoPs. We're using SQLite with millions of individual databases for each user's repository and ScyllaDB for the global indexing service (AppView).
https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architect...
If anyone has questions, technical or otherwise, some of the team should be around today to answer them.
Edit: HN'ers might also appreciate this paper written primarily by Martin Kleppman about Bluesky and AT Protocol
Very excited for this - IMO, this is federated social media's biggest promise.
Currently, if you want to be part of a social network, your options are to opt-in to Zuckerberg's moderation or Musk's moderation.
It would be great if these were _actually_ opt-in (as in, you can be part of a social network without opting in to their moderation polices) and if you can use anyone's "moderation list."
I think ultimately this would allow for freer expression than exists on current social networks.
Twitter is an obvious influence on Bluesky.
Was the team able to benefit from the experience of working on Twitter, or were most of the big problems novel?
Why should we trust Dorsey again?
What is one good reason to use Bluesky over Mastodon?
https://atproto.com/guides/faq
2. Jack Dorsey is on the board but has no day-to-day role in the company. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and is in control. The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil.
3. Bluesky has a different approach in many ways. One of the biggest differences is that Bluesky is (IMHO) the first decentralized social network that is highly usable by regular non-technical users.
> The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil.
I feel like we have seen this movie play out a few times. There are always way to close things down the road. For example, I can imagine that even with federation there will be a power law of distribution, and there's a high chance that most users will end up on official Bluesky servers. This means that you could one they stop federating, and most users would be backed in a walled garden. Sure, the protocol would be out there in the open, but it wouldn't matter because overnight it would lose most of its users.
I trust that you and the initial team has genuine motivation not to do this. Forgive me for being cynical, but history does reapeat itself.
I think the only antidote against this is regulation, as we're seing now with the DMA in EU that forces WhatsApp and other gate keepers to open their platform to other clients.
If nothing else, Bitcoin is a successful existence proof. Maintaining control may be easier, but it's safe to say that Satoshi wouldn't be able to take control back now.
Users should think of this in terms of buy in cost. If you use a particular platform for 10 years, and build a community on it, you can take advantage of that and you get a mostly free service. But at some point the bill comes, and you move on. However, I keep thinking that the reason why some of those open third party protocols - even including email - "suck" is because so much of the time and focus has been on these proprietary, commercial communications platforms.
I feel so old now I went from thinking email is a terrible way of communicating to, actually Facebook is far worse. Instead of seeing updates from my friends I'm looking at a firehose of noise of things I can't control and have zero interest in. Nearly 20 years later, I use e-mail every day and Facebook 0.
Veering off-topic, but seeing conversations running for many years over the standards implementation and feature parity of the clients and servers both for XMPP and Matrix (meaning each separately, not inter-operating XMPP and Matrix, but rather each protocol has many servers and many clients, all trying to keep up with a moving protocol spec without breaking backwards compatibility), I have to laugh that a piece of legislation can just magically open the doors a some potentially very convoluted and continuously changing communications platform to third parties.
It could be even more self defeating and monopoly re-enforcing if those platforms are relaying to users of third party apps the features they are missing along with warnings about non-existent encryption and everyone can read their messages.
I finally signed up for Mastodon despite reading little to nothing positive about it on hn. It was easy to use, and the signal to noise ratio was vastly improved from my Twitter experience.
However, that lack of account portability means users can, have, and will continue to get cut off. Servers cost thousands of USD per months with no revenue and domain name ownership can magically vanish for many reasons. With no business model for server operators, these are significant issues.
That confusion for users may even be the primary force that drives them over to something like Facebook's Threads.
There are analogies to e-mail here for the server operator. If I said any numbers I would be making them up, but I'm assuming 1 Mastodon user costs a lot more, both in compute/bandwidth and support, than 1 e-mail user. Free servers are not going to scale.
Account portability doesn't solve this, but it means if something happens to one server operator, that user doesn't churn in to the ether and never return. I've been keeping an eye on https://fedidb.org/ (not my site.) While total users and servers keep going up over the past year, active users keep dropping. It could be something related to how they record usage, but it isn't a promising thing.
I'm less skeptical about long term adaptation. Most of the negative sentiment I've read on hn about Mastodon just was wrong. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft are all fully accelerating in to ad business models which will make much of their products less unappealing by the day. If history is any lesson, when a new competitor shows up without ads and a similar or better experience, the incumbent is in trouble.
You can if the server is operational. If the server not operational and cooperative, you can't. And you can't migrate your posts, only your followers.
> Server shutdowns are rare
Not rare enough though.
And if Bluesky's servers stop being operational? Where is your data hosted?
Look at Shitter and Reddit: they just turned off API access and introduced heavy rate limits to webpage loads. Good luck scraping your account details with that.
Enshittification is a thing with ALL commercial services. And eventually BlueSky will have their "The sky is falling! Crank the money extraction lever." And I'd move that timeframe up a LOT if they took VC money.
Feces, err, uhmm VCs want their hockeystick growth to be a hockeystick. They want their 30x , 50x, or 100x.
The only notable counterexample I remember was BitcoinHackers.org shutting down suddenly with a note saying "haha look at how easy it is for mastodon instances to shut down go use nostr", making it a self-fulfilling prophecy in that case. If you have other examples I would like to know about them.
Now I'm finally on mastodon.social, which wasn't open for new users the first two times that I needed an instance.
To me, the Not Inventented Here feel to Bluesky makes me want to stay far away. People will bridge it to ActivityPub anyway.
I am more excited about Takahe, which decouples the servers running the federation from the domains holding the actor ids. This means that a hosting provider like mine won't need to allocate one whole instance for each user that wants to have their own domain.
There is also a FEP from the developer of Mitra which aims to flip the ownership of the account keys, which would prevent cases of servers going under and stopping users from recovering their identity.
Anyone can run a Relay. They're somewhat comparable to Linux distribution FTP/HTTP mirrors.
Bluesky will always run a Relay, but other organizations will hopefully as well. We expect these might be organizations doing other things in the ecosystem, universities, and possibly open consortiums.
If Threads, BlueSky, and ActivityPub all interconnected it really would be a great opportunity to compete on the software / UX front
Aha, this is good to now. Looking forward to standing up my own PDS.
Since IE was developed specifically to counter the threat of Netscape - it was also defined by Netscape.
What other browsers of note were around in that period?
There was a number of browsers coming up at that time, and Mosaic was if anything what drove much of that early boom, as the most successful option that led to both Netscape, Spyglass, and by extension IE.
Remember that Mosaic was readily licensed (and source available, though not under an open source license) - there were a number of other Mosaic offshoots (e.g. AMosaic for Amiga was released in December '93, with datatypes support)
Other browsers than Netscape around that era, excluding the text based ones, included:
* 1992: ViolaWWW (Unix; pioneered embedded objects, stylesheets, tables, client-side scripting); Erwise (Unix); MidasWWW (Unix)
* 1993: Spyglass (licensed the Mosaic name, but written from scratch; also the origin of IE), AMosaic (Amiga), Cello (Windows), any number of Mosaic licensees, Arena (Unix, Linux, NeXT; pre-release in '93; full public release '94; Arena was co-written by the later Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie, and pioneered layout extensions that turned into work on stylesheets and eventually CSS)
* 1994: Argo (Bert Bos - co-creator of CSS; Unix; testbed for style sheets alongside Arena, and one of the first heavily plugin based browsers, with most functionality provided by plugins), IBM WebExplorer (Mosaic licensee); Slipknot (Windows; a really weird one which dealt with lack of SLIP/PPP connections by "hijacking" a Unix terminal connection, running lynx to retrieve the HTML, and then using zmodem to transfer both the HTML and images...)
* 1995: IE (licensed version of Spyglass); Grail (Python; supported client side execution of Python...); OmniWeb (Mac)
* 1996: Amaya (Unix, Windows, Linux, OS X), IBrowse (Amiga), Aweb (Amiga); Opera (Windows initially); Cyberdog; Arachne (DOS, Linux including framebuffer...; still updated as of two years ago...)
Netscape took a lot of users from various Mosaic licensees, like Spyglass, and browsers like Cello; had it not existed, sure, things would have looked different, but timeline-wise the gap was narrow. Many of the browser - like Opera - that launched after Netscape had started development before Netscape launched, and others were abandoned in some cases directly because of Netscape. Some were probably no big loss, but Netscape's brief dominance contributed to the near monoculture we had for many years.
There is no doubt it had improvements over Mosaic - I remember vividly the day the release with background image support spread across campus and every webpage looked garish for the next several years - but it was an advantage measured in months, and with competition heating up until Netscape stunted it for quite some time by becoming as dominant as they did until IE started catching up.
A lot of the things Netscape is sometimes remembered for were not Netscape firsts either, or areas where they necessary had a lead. E.g. client-side scripting, style sheets, etc existed before Netscape; work on CSS was ongoing at CERN around the time Netscape launched etc. At most things would have looked different, and maybe some things might have taken a bit more time without Netscape scaring Microsoft. But I also remember a lot of ire at how Netscape pre-empted a lot of standards at the time by just throwing stuff at the wall, and untangling the mess they left took years.
In late 1995, Netscape released a browser that provided investors a comprehensive proof-of-concept online platform that was billed as the operating system for the Internet and they were being offered an opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
JavaScript and CSS didn’t matter. Investors were looking at SSL for eCommerce, Java applets, plugins, VRML, RealAudio, etc.
Netscape stood out because nobody else was selling a comprehensive online platform with a compelling and plausible vision.
The World Wide Web became something because a crap load of money was invested into developing browsers.
It wouldn’t have happened on its own to this degree and none of those browsers were on their way to becoming a household name.
IE was already out. Opera was around the corner. Netscape was already close to its peak market share.
Plenty of people were selling alternatives, plenty of developers had funding. A lot of money had started flowing into browsers before Netscape. Had Netscape not soaked up the funding it did, more of that would just have flowed elsewhere.
The argument is not that Netscape were irrelevant, but they were one - big, sure, - player among many racing to commercialise features that already existed before Netscape.
One can imagine a world without JavaScript...
You can do something that creates a lot of changes in the world, but if your business model involves giving people things for less than it takes to produce then I don't see how that's a business. What are VCs expecting to get a return on their capital? What's the plan to actually make a profit? Is the plan just to get bought out at a stupidly inflated price, similar to your inspiration of Netscape?
Fully agree with you they would not have survived long if the AOL sale hadn't happened.
Or maybe I'm just putting words in their mouth.
What if the founders of MySpace are totally ok with its place in history and happy that social media under any name carries on their vision? Maybe they don't consider that a failure.
How did they actually make money? What's your equivalent?
Because, yes, it was marginally better than what was available, especially on Windows. But the main feature improvements that drove that initial rapid adoption was Netscape ignoring any attempt at agreement over standards and adding new "trinkets" like background images etc. in each release.
And yes, they created Javascript, in a rush, but there already were other client-side scripting options.
They were important, but their importance is inflated by looking back at a timeline where they won. We'd have lacked none of these things without them. They were one of many, and they were ahead in terms of features, but not by much, and the pressure they were under also left a wake of chaos.
E.g., sure, they invented SSL, rushed it out with massive security flaws (that was a fun time... one of the gaping holes was that if someone ran Netscape on the same host they ran their e-mail on, which was not unusual, you could get a whole lot of the bits needed to cut down on the cost of bruteforcing the SSL key by triggering an e-mail bounce to help you narrow down current process ids), but there were prototypes of encrypted socket layers around for two years already by then e.g. see Simon S Lam's work on SNP [1].
"Nobody" used Netscape's web server - which wasn't developed by Netscape anyway (it was acquired from Kiva, unless Netscape had a pre-Kiva web-server I've forgotten) - it was way too expensive. It was a market leader, yes, but in a crowded tiny niche of commercial servers. I ran an ISP around that time. I sold packages to businesses, and we'd have loved to convince customers to pay for Netscape server software, but most people stuck with NSCA HTTPD, and quickly switched to Apache 1995 onwards.
[1] https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/simon-s-lam/
Netscape had a business model (charge people for browser software.)
Netscape also went bankrupt. It was a colossal failure as a business.
Anyway the answer is ads. This just means it's going to be ads. It's always fucking ads. No one has ever gone into a capitalistic venture sans business plan and ended up doing anything besides selling fucking ads.
If they can run it with a small enough team, then freemium could be feasible. Sell special tools and functions to the power users.
The ads let you know what services are not worth your time, or only worth consuming with sufficient adblocking.
They're really doing you a great service by advertising that you're the product.
Also, hope is not lost for ad-free capitalism. For the first time ever I'm actually paying for subscription services that don't have ads (yet). Mostly to do with search and AI.
And don't worry about Phase Two. Phase Three is when the profit will happen.
That's quite the reach. The actual information you got, is them not telling you publicly. Either because they can't, or don't want to.
I mean, I do sympathize with your frustration, tho. Every time I read this lobotomized "Rampart-AMA" PR shit, a few of my own brain cells commit suicide. It's insulting.
If everything goes according to the prediction of economists for 2024, a light crisis should decrease consumer confidence in the US.
One of the solution to re-energize the economy might be to lower interest rates.
Which means that if interest rates go down in 2024, companies are going to be able to borrow at extremely low cost.
In such environment, does the question of business model even matter ?
If your task is to raise debt, what you need is to sell a dream, not have a way to generate money.
==
Back to Bluesky:
The bigger danger for the company now is most likely its own users.
"Open ecosystem"/"Freedom"/"Free-speech" users tend to be greedy and consider everything should be free, and at the same time are very active when it's about criticizing.
The "normies" of Twitter / Instagram, are likely higher spender because of the importance that vanity / self-promotion has in their life.
One key could be for Bluesky to focus more on content, than on technology.
Even on Telegram, people join groups and people, they don't really care if the source-code is here or not, or who controls what (because no matter how, this can change in the future).
What is going to make or break the alternative social media networks is the institutions. If/When newspapers (not journalists) start setting up their own instances, if companies put up support accounts on their own domain, if influencers start mirroring their social accounts on their own sites to try to their push their own brand... then I'll start believing that we have a chance.
I understand your arguments about the technology, they are absolutely correct, but they attract a typology of niche users, which are extremely demanding and very difficult to convert to paying users.
Twitter, the platform is very glitchy, the owners are who they are, the developer access is horrible, but still, I am using it, because there is exclusive and fresh content.
Bluesky is an interesting project, but I can strongly suggest leaning toward content/user-focus than pure-tech, in order to secure a stronger business-model (and eventually, as a consequence, a sustainable + open ecosystem).
Focus on onboarding great content first, and then walk back to the tech, not the other way around.
For example, to support more extensively those newspapers or institutions to onboard the platform, and most of all, all these unofficial content creators.
There are also some things which feel very strange, like the main description of Bluesky when you search for it on Google: "Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is".
Can you direct me to that in info?
When people ask you what your business model is, they are asking you how you are going to do this.
Will people be able to opt out of your moderation services?
Most social media moderation in my experience tends to be heavy handed. Most jokes could be offensive to someone and likely are. I'd prefer to preserve the collective works if George Carlin and Richard Pryor over heavily filtered systems.
Edit: appears to be completely opt in and based on tagging... Wonder about positive filtering by tag now...
And like most things with atproto, there will likely be protocol support for pluggable search engines, so users can choose their search provider(s).
It's already entirely possible for others to operate atproto search engines since all the data is public and available.
Y'all didn't email me that signups were going to be public.
Y'all didn't email me when signups actually went public. I found out about it here.
...And, let's see.. Yep, my handle is taken.
https://joinmastodon.org/servers
At least you're not succumbing to a commercial interest who will inevitably enshittify for eventual profit extraction.
On the other hand, the benefit of decentralized services is that your handle being taken shouldn't (eventually) matter, because you can just find another server.
Something like 1 million of the users that joined came from the waitlist.
Most users on HN are probably able to navigate using a domain handle, which is really the recommended and most decentralized option.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutor...
I hope Bluesky prospers since it has some features that Mastodon and Twitter lacks, but it has a lot of catching up to do.
Question. The phone will be attached to my account or is for one-time verification? If the latter, it is removed from blue sky database at some point?
Thanks.
A number of people I used to follow on Twitter are over there but seem to have broken out of the posting habit and are quieter now.
When I look at the "discover" tab I don't usually see much stuff that's interesting to me. It's a lot of men posting thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics, and discussion about what's going on on Twitter
Edit to add: people really like to advise blocking. It's to the point that new users are often advised to add a profile photo and an intro post before following people, because you might get blocked just for not having those. I don't know what this is about - possibly because there's no private/locked accounts? It seems really strange to me.
If this is done on device and everything is archived, it starts getting really powerful. For example, after the 737 MAX door incident, I searched "Boeing" in my RSS reader and instantly had a list of news stories going back over the past year. (The number of 737 incidents that has been happening around the world is a lot more than what sits in the top of the news, but that's another discussion.) A local LLM could even summarize large amounts of stored headlines and tweets going back over years, and that's tech that works today.
I don't want third party ad platforms (which now consists of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and more) measuring, running tests, re-ordering, and deleting on my communications. The LLMs and machine learning advancements are going to just make this more invasive, ugly, and manipulative.
Sure, hn is largely about VC backed startups going on to try to have a multi-billion dollar IPO. It's also about disrupting incumbents. I can't think of a better path to disruption than coming up with business models that choke off their user-bases and end ad monetized surveillance. I for one have no interest in a future where I wear an Apple/Facebook/Google controlled AR/VR headset that has cameras to make sure my eyes are looking at all of the ads which are targeted based on the other pixels it knows I looked at. (I feel like a paranoid schizophrenic writing that, but that is what they are making.)
I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but perhaps you and the tech industry in general are vastly overestimating a extremely niche opinion and a "nothingburger". For example, cookies. Now we have extremely annoying cookie banners everywhere, when they didn't matter at all. Why? Because if I'm using an icognito browser, what are they going to track? Do you think I REALLY care? What are they going to do with that? Track me and offer me catered ads? I don't think "they" can, but even if they do, big fucking deal.
I'm a lot more worried about Know Your Customer policies on everything, or social media platforms (or even hosting platforms) deplatforming you if they don't like your opinion, or the FBI planting child porn on your site if they want to take it down. Do you think I'll worry about an AD out of all things?
If you want to only ever see a strictly reverse chronological feed of the people you follow, then remove all feeds other than "Following", done. If you don't want to see reposts, then turn off seeing reposts. If you don't want to see replies, then turn off seeing those too. I'm not sure what you experienced which isn't easily solvable. The only QoL feature I can think of that isn't yet supported is the ability to selectively turn off reposts from individual people you follow.
Silos are the answer. Open to all but topic focussed and with no cross-referencable userhistory. Or 100% anonymity with no userhistory i.e. futaba type message boards.
It's disappointing, because a lot of work has gone into these. Especially Mastodon and Pleroma.
Maybe the biggest problem with Twitter never was its centralization.
It shouldn't be surprising that cloning Twitter mechanics just to decentralize it would result in the same signal-to-noise ratio as Twitter.
And to be clear, not all of bluesky's culture is a response to twitter, a lot of it is just the kind of lighthearted playfulness you can only get on a small and new social network.
How goes my experience improve if I block a bot that follows me? Follower bots is a platform problem
As Lil Jon might say,
To the window, to the wall!
Til the sweat drop down my balls
Til all these bitches crawl
Til all skeet skeet motherfuckers, all skeet skeet god damn!
Til all skeet skeet motherfuckers, all skeet skeet god damn!Can't we admit Twitter had the perfect name for it, and now that twitter is gone, we can all just call them tweets?
Its almost absurd. Like if phone companies decided to brand text messages and someone got to "Texts" first so companies came up with "Blurts" and "Yells" or "Phonomails" and now we use a different verb based on which walled-garden we are in.
edit:
In thinking on this more, I do think this might impact the image of the communty. The hot lists and other feeds are dominated by the furry community, which is fine, but not everyone's cup of tea. Now naming posts / the verb be an euphemism of ejaculation... it just feels immature and is everyone going to feel welcome?
I harbor some hope that Elon will firesale off the trademark on "tweet" and someone can put it to good use
But at the end of the day it is still just post on the internet forum.
I don't see how any Twitter clone would avoid the pitfalls that make social media like Twitter fundamentally annoying. It's not about the technology or being federated or not, but about such internet-scale communities just not working well. You'll always end up with online drama about the silliest things and terminally online power users.
Everybody hates Discord, but I think more communities should strive towards isolating themselves from the broader net to keep conversations civil.
But if the niche is artificially created by fact that community is gated, then such community is not sustainable. Cabin fever and general fatigue of users.
I follow a bunch of musicians. I love going to concerts, and it’s the easiest way to find out when they announce tours. The unfortunate reality is that scalpers make buying tickets a terrible experience, so unfortunately I have a strong interest in knowing exactly when tickets go on sale to improve my own chances of getting tickets.
The problem is that the rules will be made by humans and will be enforced by humans. This will never be even close to perfect, especially with bad actors which are inevitable when a platform gets popular enough.
It's not instant, like social media, but lends to longer communication.
More like a self hosted, distributed Facebook group, less life Twitter.
I think you have to dig into that, and figure out why internet-scale communities don't work well, and then whether or not bluesky addresses it.
First of all, what does internet-scale really mean? I think it has to be that, to some degree, everyone is talking at everyone else.
For twitter and some other social networks this is because users don't fully control their feed -- they see what an algorithm decides they should see... and the algorithm is designed to increase engagement... because ads are how the social network makes its money. So you have content creators competing to make the most engaging posts and twitter doing its best to deliver those posts.
So I think it's probably twitter's ad driven business model, combined with the sad fact that it's a lot easier to engage people with anger and outrage than with civil, thoughtful content, that leads to a social media wasteland more than whether you need an invite to join.
I don't know if it will work, but if bluesky stays away from an ad-driven business model, they can let people control their own feeds and creators aren't incentivized only for engagement and it might stay a nice place to visit and hang out.
1. A direct port of the ragescrolling, today's-main-character culture of twitter 2. Complaining about mastodon and linux on a premise I haven't been able to tease out but appears to relate to open projects being inherently untrustworthy and private projects that receive funding being trustworthy. 3. Hyping Bluesky's ease of use (it is identical to Mastodon in every meaningful respect, except where Mastodon offers some additional functionality like private posts).
I got out. I love a lot of the people that moved there, but the rage culture alone was what I originally left twitter to avoid. It's kind of a cultural AOL in the post-twitter-social space, with all that entails.
The old school forum model does the best job of threading that needle that I have seen so far. Forums are easy enough to stumble across when searching a relevant topic, while the narrow focus makes them less of a magnet for stupid trolls and attention seekers.
Reddit solved the hosting and setup problems of a forum, but that company is so far into the enshittification spiral that it hardly seems like a worthwhile place to invest much focus.
I wish that all of the neo-Twitter resources where going towards making better forum-like platforms that actually encourage thoughtful discussion while also leaving space for more lighthearted posting.
Feedback: the homepage looks more like a tech product pitch site, and the announcement post also doesn't look very polished. I guess the target for Bluesky isn't so much the "regular Facebook/Twitter/IG user", more the nerd.
Side question: what's the interop story between Bluesky and Mastodon now?
If you mean Threads, it's currently up to 130M monthly active users[0]. Estimates for Twitter late 2023-early 2024 are between 350-400M MAU.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/threads-now-reaches-more-1...
I think it's more "regular Twitter user". It has implementation details that interest nerds, but my read is that the target audience really is regular users.
Anyway, hoping you revisit this one day and that's also when I will try your app again. Wishing you luck!
I definitely would never give my phone number to a social network.
Sure you'll get people who refuse to sign up with a real phone number, that's a given. Some percentage of those people will be "thoughtful." You'll also eliminate a huge number of bots, automated signups, etc.
It's hard to argue letting all those bots on will not decrease system quality.
Anyone technical can run their own single-user or low-user-count PDS and probably not have to worry about any problems.
It seems to expect a number without the country prefix, starting with a number like "174" or whatever your provider prefix is...
Anyway, it hard rejects +49176..., 0049176..., 0176..., 176...; it correctly normalizes each of those to +49176... and then rejects the number. My number is fine. Their validation isn't.
Anyway, for a new social network to repeat the security/privacy mistake of its predecessors (wrongly assuming phone operators are trustworthy and users never change their number) is just madness. Doesn't instill a lot of confidence that a lot of thought went into the whole thing.
IMHO, phone numbers as a thing should just go away completely. Weird legacy identifiers from the last century. Absolutely no redeeming features. Hard to remember, easy to spoof. Etc. Why build your new network on the crumbling remains of an old one and give a lot of control to the typical abusers of the phone system (spammers, scammers, oppressive regimes, etc.)?
I'd personally be very happy if Threads gives up control over their users but it remains to be seen. ActivityPub also lacks the very strong account portability feature that made AT Protocol necessary.
AT Protocol is completely open source and the Bluesky network is completely open. The Bluesky network has had an open API for a year with full access to all public data (no auth required):
websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos
Not true. You can now follow Adam Mosseri's Threads account from Mastodon.
And like you said they are committed to fully rolling it out this year.
But like I said, I sincerely do hope Threads follows through on their plan to federate. But it's just not correct to claim that they already have.
Supporting one user end to end is a huge milestone and the first step in rolling it out to the other hundreds of millions of users. Especially when Threads isn't a standalone platform but is built on top of Instagram which means we could see it integrated with ActivityPub as well.
The fact that Meta cares about ActivityPub at all is a huge win for open, interoperable standards.
So launch in July 2023, handful of accounts have AP support in November-ish 2023, full AP support end of 2024? I guess it's not nothing, they did have to bolt something entirely new on top of IG's infrastructure. But for a team that big, feels like we'd be seeing more if it was a true priority for them. Plus Threads leaning towards opt-in AP support which will only inhibit uptake (that was the last I heard, anyway).
I'd be shocked if Instagram ever went with ActivityPub, though.
Bluesky wasted a few opportunities they could have grabbed market share from Twitter simply because a) you needed and account to view posts (now fixed) b) you needed a code to sign up (now fixed).
But has their ship sailed? L
On Twitter I just curate who I follow so I don't see annoying stuff and that's worked perfectly fine for me.
"Come with me to the wonderful land of BlueSky, where everything is *open* and *magic* and all bad trolls are blocked!"
"That's amazing! I think I'll like it here!"
"YAY!"
With the fragmentation of social networks and different audiences being in different places, it's a bit annoying to have to manually post in different places (taking account of things like hashtag formats and post length limits), it'd be nice to have a site/app that helped with that.
https://fedica.com/ seems to maybe be a parent company (acquisition?) of Hootsuite.
https://buffer.com/publish I first heard about this ages ago as a way to build a queue of things to put out to Twitter. They likely support Mastodon and LinkedIn now, but probably not yet the others. See https://support.buffer.com/article/567-supported-channels
Bluesky is too much of a woke echochamber and it doesn't even have a real chance at achieving its mission, which was decentralized, permissionless, uncensorable sharing of information.
Unfortunately, this project is dead on arrival. I don't think it will ever reach mainstream adoption.
Unlike reddit, filtering down the feed just doesn’t pay dividends in the way niche subreddits can. I guess it’s because the personalities and views which have been interested in leaving twitter to join bsky all fit the same template.
For instance, the AI, business, tech, and finance communities are simply not there. Performance art, too. Media/politics is there, but the discourse is extremely flat.
IMO, the "Discover" feed can be a bit much sometimes. It's very much the collective id of a certain type of social media poster. And not always my cup of tea.
But the beauty of Bluesky is there are millions of accounts and thousands of custom feeds you can pick from to tailor your experience.
For example, here's one where people share photos of mushrooms: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hsqwcidfez66lwm3gxhfv5in/fe...
It just feels super quiet to me at the moment, and I suspect the long time exclusivity played a big role in that.
Bluesky accounts should be permitted to have both a bsky.social username and one with a custom domain. If I am a company and want to use @myname.com as my username, I would not want someone @myname.bsky.social to fall into the hands of anyone else. So it sort of necessitates signing up for 2 accounts, if only to reserve your name so nobody takes it.
There IS a way to use this to develop your online professional brand, but it is so hard not to get bogged down in the swamp full of below-average intelligence, bots, and now AI garbage.
The email field prompts to create a new password (and generates it there) and the password field there is no prompt.
I can't speak for BlueSky, but I've been enjoying Mastodon a lot. Following people I like has given me a high enough signal to noise ratio that I often find myself saying "Hey! Check out this thing I found on Mastodon!". My friend just joined because of this, and they've been enjoying it too, specifically for programming, infosec, and queer memes (caveat N=2).
Idk. I hope there's a future for it.
Don't build your house on rented land. Especially if the rent is zero.
It'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
I'm sure we won't know until someone tries. I have a feeling there might be some unforseen network effects or barriers that build up over time to prevent someone from coming along with a better site. I'm just curious to see what they are and how insurmountable they might be.
That sounds (and is) a lot like tag-based feeds over on Twitter. However, there's additional potential. Behind the scenes, a feed is a service which takes the user info of the person viewing it and the firehose and decides which posts to include based on that input. So "include all posts with these keywords" is valid, but so is "include the top 100 posts with these keywords, as measured by likes." Or "show a feed including only the most recent post from every user the viewer follows."
In other words: feeds are the way a third party can build their own algorithm for the firehose. Very powerful, very useful.
I think the interests section was to try get you to find people and feeds.. but after that, the feeds (or just the Discovery feed?) are influenced by who you follow.. so if you are offered a 'bad' (for you) starting group of people to follow, your feed will probably not be great until you find people you like (that are active) and follow them too.
Also was unsure what "Follow all +" button was.. why not "Follow Selected".. and a 'deselect all'.. I had no idea who all but 2 of the suggestions were. Not going to follow a random "Computer Scientist" the system picked for me sight/posts unseen.
Unfortunately the interest in Bluesky is not the same as it was, but still a viable Twitter alternative when compared to the others.
But my goodness this certainly did not age well at all. [0]
Uggh. And the fragmentation into silos continues.
If you're on an instance in a federated network and the instance's admin decides that they don't want to keep hosting it, you don't really have an option to stay.
A lot of people felt burned by the changes at Twitter over the past 14 months or so. They made meaningful connections on there and with new ownership came changes that altered the character of the platform, in their eyes. But because Twitter is centralized, it's difficult to move your social graph to a new platform in a robust way.
The promise of the AT protocol is being "billionaire-proof." If Bluesky gets bought out and you don't like the new owner, you can move your entire social graph and all your posts to a new atproto service without needing permission from the old service.
That would be the nuclear option. A smaller step you could take before that is use a different set of moderation services to curate the experience you want (more info: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation)
Or is it like Tildes whose goal is to have a mobile website that is just as good as a native app?
But I appreciate the pointer!
First impression? After selecting only tech subjects, my recommendations consisted of CNN journalists and newspapers. I decided to skip them and was forwarded to the Discovery feed which consists of American politics, Elon Musk hate, King Charles hate, and furries. So many furries.
I don't see the attraction. It's just a different hate bubble.
Its basically the entire ad industry, there's little proof ads work, the metrics for ads are all inflated, yet its one of the biggest money makers out there. Same deal with the bots grinding views and likes for marginal payouts.
to add some more substance to my comment 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", 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.
My point was subtle, that this shouldn't be an issue. It has been solved in various ways.
Sorry, I'm getting old and grumpy, but I'm not using any of the other social media sites, and I'm not planning on adding one to the list.
Is he not involved in it anymore?
Not sure what they mean with "Dock it every port, your network comes with your" Is it federated?
https://ubuntu.social/@launchpadstatus
to this:
Please note that this is not me advocating for this practice. It has broken the web in immensely frustrating ways.
I do not know how usable it was but at least I was able to see the posts. Now I'm not. Well except for some lucky occasion when it shows the post just without replies.