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Comment by declan_roberts | Hacker News Reader

Blueskey seems to have all of these neat features that developers/nerds seem to like, but literally nobody else cares about.

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That's my favourite thing about it, really. It's very interesting at the technical level, but regular users simply do not need to care about any of that. They're adopting it anyway because it works.

Most other "interesting protocol" projects are used exclusively by interesting-protocol enthusiasts.

Are regular users adopting it? I’d never even heard of BlueSky before this thread.

Yes, lots of artists, teachers, econ, and NAFO. The British and Brazilians have had major influx over political spats with Musk

Major news orgs now have accounts too

Well the normal folks will care when one of the nerds creates something personally useful to them. Then that becomes the killer feature that makes the platform sticky.

Will this happen? No clue but it is cool to see someone innovating in this space. Let’s see what people come up with.

Going with an email/calendar/contacts analogy:

Many non-nerds care about having their own TLD and corresponding email address, yet still use Gmail/GSuite, whether via their webapps or IMAP/CalDav/CardDav.

And arguably the most important thing keeping Google accountable for the quality of their products is the threat of users being able to move out on relatively short notice (i.e. without losing all of your historical inbox content and most importantly people being able to reach you via the identifier they know).

Bluesky seems closest to replicating that to the Twitter-like use case. (Mastodon is severely lacking on both portability of identifiers and portability of data across servers; there really needs to be a lightweight middle ground between self-hosting and complete reliance on somebody else's infrastructure).

Isn't that how most applications start, catering to some piece of the nerdery population? For Facebook, it was university nerds before it started to spread, Twitter just had some subsection of the nerds at first, Mastodon/ActivityPub goes after the decentralized/distributed nerds and Bluesky somewhere in the middle the two latter ones.

Let back away a bit more. Isn't this how the Internet started?

I see a trend.

The thing other people care about is whether the platform has the people they want to follow on it.

bsky isn't there yet, but it's growing

A proper decentralized publishing platform would be content addressed not federated which retains all the downsides of centralization.

The bluesky team worked previously on IPFS and Dat/Hypercore and Secure Scuttlebutt. Whyrusleeping - one of the core authors of IPFS - has been an active technical advisor from the start. ATProto is basically those p2p & content addressed techs moved into the server stack. None of us are bullish on client side p2p for large scale publishing or social applications, and we spent 10 years each doing that.

I'd love to hear what the Bluesky team thinks of Nostr. It seems pretty damning to me that a founder of Bluesky is now talking up the latter.

Nostr is tied to the crypto coin crowd, which is largely off-putting to most people

Dorsey is certainly focused on that realm

nostr's protocol is also fairly unstructured compared to atproto. ive researched bluesky, farcaster, and nostr, and their cultural origins have definitely impacted how they have approached their designs.

There is no predicting what approaches will win, but those 3 are the current viable options I think.

FYI I am part of the crypto crowd myself, but I am a SWE looking at these systems, not a CT gambler, lol.

Oh, so what about the origins of Bluesky by the same founder(s) as Twitter ?

That alone gave me pause, as Twitter ended up as one of the most despicable platforms we have to suffer today (and yes, those issues are inherent in its nature, and long predate Musk buying it). But I guess that they might have learned from their mistakes this time ??

Dorsey didn't like the idea of moderation, which sure, probably isn't necessary for a while billionaire guy to feel safe.

Dorsey funded Bluesky and not much else.

One can authenticate message integrity on the client side and the server side, it doesn't have to be a trade-off. The same is true for encryption and decryption.

P2P is hard, but that does not mean undesirable.

Feel free to pick up where we left off, but just know that you're in for a lot of pain on key sync, device pairing, unreliable data availability, poor connection establishment latency, high end-user device resource usage, and very small data indexes which make it nearly impossible to produce even moderately-sized social networks.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. It's not just hard, but the user experience with it is just terrible. The masses will not use it. If the masses will not use something that requires network effects to be successful, there's no point. These problems may be solvable, but I think I'd trust the opinions of people who have worked on it for years and decided to do something else.

It's not that they don't care, it's more that they are used to centralized social media and unaware of even the possibility for a different paradigm.

I have seen them respond with intrigue and support once these things are explained.

attractive developer/nerd features often seeds developers to develop for the platform which will end up attracting more users.

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