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Comment by asadotzler | Hacker News Reader

If the algorithms for sorting and filtering and discovering aren't open source, a social app is not open. It really is that simple. Some open source artifact on your device wrapping proprietary code on a server is not in the category of "open source products" because the only parts that matter are entirely closed. "My HTML front end is licensed MIT" does not make your product which is entirely dependent on secret sauce in your back end open source. Enough with the bullshit. Labels matter and if the current generation on this site doesn't understand something as fundamental as open vs proprietary, we're all screwed.

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They published a nearly layman friendly doc of the platform architecture including a description of moderation a year ago. Great read. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/blueskys-moderation-architecture

> is entirely dependent on secret sauce in your back end open source. Enough with the bullshit.

With all due respect, it sounds like you are not familiar with Bluesky.

As far as I know, the only proprietary code is the single Discover feed, which every user can un-pin from their feeds. My assumption for this being proprietary is so that it cannot be gamed. It could be for a darker reason, I suppose.

However, this is a feed that I use maybe 10% of the time. Aside from the Following feed, I have curated a bunch of my own user lists and 3rd party feeds. I am able to pin these to my feeds list. This is where I spend my time.

Aside from that one significant feed, yet small aspect, literally every other part of Bluesky is open source. This includes client, server, moderation system, and protocol.

> My assumption for this being proprietary is so that it cannot be gamed. It could be a darker reason, I suppose.

As the guy developing said feed, this is indeed the reason. I have a hard enough time as it is with people gaming the specific parameters of the feed, having it fully open would be a huge tax on my time.

Most of the components of the feed are trialed in my personal feeds repo here: https://github.com/whyrusleeping/algoz

You could take the code from there and get to a workable "Discover" feed relatively quickly if you wanted to. Also several of the feeds I have in that repo are among the most popular feeds in the network, especially Quiet Posters (infrequent.go).

Algorithmic curation is, I believe, a key to making (para-)social media enjoyable and Bluesky is the only (semi?) open project I’m aware of investing in this type of stuff. It not being open is a bummer. Is there any good reading material on this topic?

I believe in a world in which people can choose and tune their algorithms, a diversity here should make them harder to game, as well as a highly-weighted „not interested“ button.

It’s surely not the plan to keep this proprietary forever, right?

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