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91 pointsmcyc35 comments

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Someone has probably mapped out some sort of cycle to this ......

Stage 1: new product, hungry competitor wanting eyeballs and users opens up their platform to developers....

Stage 2: developers embrace the attitude and start building amazing things...

Stage 3: the company starts to not like seeing all these products make use of its user base and platform

Stage 4: API features wound back

Stage 5: developers uncermemoniously dumped, API closed

Stage 6: platform hits rocky times, new management arrives, claims to be reborn, reopen platform API to developers

Stage 7: skeptical developers hold back

Stage 8: platform charges $30,000/month for bottom level access

Fool me once, etc etc

Yup, major déjà vu here. Great for students wanting to make a cool demo project and getting a job and forgetting about it after, bad for just about everyone else.

The difference is that it's impossible to wind API features back: as an open protocol, they literally cannot do that. "The future company is an adversary" is a slogan the team uses to help guide decisions.

I'm curious as to what you mean by

> as an open protocol, they literally cannot do that.

From a cursory search, it seems the AT Protocol is solely maintained by Bluesky. Also, AFAICT, Bluesky operates the only sizable/relevant servers. i.e. Neither the governance nor the technical operation are decentralized. (edit: Although the OP call for projects includes options which would probably lead to further decentralization, that doesn't speak to the present state.)

Note that I find it reasonably credible that Bluesky won't do that. I just don't see why they cannot. If there is a massive incentive to make backwards-incompatible protocol changes, say a fundamental security flaw, wouldn't the expected outcome be that Bluesky unilaterally makes those changes?

Virtually all of the code is open source. There are also alternative implementations. So yes, right now, it’s run by them, but they can’t hold the community hostage: if they start doing bad stuff, the community can easily fork.

Ah. I thought (perhaps hoped) you were referring to something more. I think decentralization of the actual data and infrastructure is the key. OSS is necessary but not sufficient. If Twitter were open sourced and widely forked tomorrow, not much would change, since Twitter still holds all the tweets and hundreds of millions of users.

Such a weird timewarp feeling around this stuff. It's like you could go dig up an archived Twitter dev post from 2008, find and replace and post. What a time to be alive (again)

This could be interesting.

Twitter effectively doesn't have an API any more (what they do have is prohibitively expensive for tinkering).

Mastodon has a culture that actively pushes back against many of the things people might want to build - any experiments with things like search or discovery improvements or even potentially algorithmic feeds tend to get a very hostile reaction from long-time Mastodon users.

Bluesky's API is wide open for innovation right now - and you can even connect directly to a WebSocket stream (from JavaScript running on any page) for direct firehose access, like in this demo https://firehose3d.theo.io/ discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159786

Here's my own quick firehose demo: https://tools.simonwillison.net/bluesky-firehose - code here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/af2e50446f6dfc5cb514a7d6aadbb...

I've always felt like the API enabled us to make Twitter a ~success, back before it had critical mass.

I built a small literary journal on early Twitter, and knowing we had a simple way to archive what we were publishing and do stuff like bio-driven contributors notes was a big part of why it made sense to bother investing creative energy on a new platform and social capital convincing writers to make accounts.

It's been frustrating to watch the past few years. I haven't fully decided if I have the energy to reinvent it for a new platform, but poking around at atproto stuff earlier this fall made me more hopeful about the prospect than a similar draft I have on top of gotosocial (even though thw former ia much further from complete).

> Mastodon has a culture that actively pushes back against many of the things people might want to build - any experiments with things like search or discovery improvements or even potentially algorithmic feeds tend to get a very hostile reaction from long-time Mastodon users.

I noticed the same thing about AI in the Nix community. Was really surprised by the extreme negative reaction, as I could see so many applications of AI that could be useful in the Nix ecosystem.

Projects should just bite the bullet and say "AI friendly" so those conservative anti tech users can pre-emptively be pushed away. Might hurt adoption but better than holding back progress. One of the reasons i don't use bluesky much is coz they came out swinging anti AI

I don't see how it's surprising at all, given the current climate of overmarketing and overpromising on "AI" in tech. The most realistic applications are also the most straightforward - academic cheating, machine-generated "art," mediocre automated customer support, and so forth.

It's surprising because I thought Nix users were more discerning and not caught up in binary thinking. Just because it's overhyped doesn't mean it doesn't have any uses or should be rejected completely. I just solved a dnsmasq and systemd issue today in a 3 minute chat with Claude-sonnet 3.5 that I had been banging my head against for 6 hours. Why wouldn't I try to harness that?

Sorry, I'm not part of the Nix community so I don't have the context to answer that. Although I would infer from "so many applications of AI," you meant more than just technical support chatbots.

I find that I want the opposite of the firehose: I want the thoughtful and smart people, and I want it to be about their interests.

I did sign up for bluesky, but it has the same failure as twitter: I don't want to hear about your politics just because I follow you.

I wish there was a way to force users to use 1 hashtag per post and then I could unfollow hashtags - but I suspect it would be playing wack-a-mole.

Really anything that aims to replace twitter should be forced to not optimize for engagement.

> I wish there was a way to force users to use 1 hashtag per post and then I could unfollow hashtags - but I suspect it would be playing wack-a-mole.

I built something like this in a slightly different context for myself.

I doubt it'll ever really catch on widely, but I have a bunch of people who want to read my highlights about tech and nothing else who appreciate my software dev feed.[1]

[1]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development

I was thinking something similar. I want to post #PRQL #dataBS #DataEngineering #OpenSource #Excel #PowerQuery ... I assume each of my followers is only interested in a subset of those tags. I've been considering setting up separate accounts that probably fragments too much.

Great thing about Bluesky is that you can easily create your own custom feeds so I guess we can just start doing it and see if it catches on.

1: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds

So I actually just went ahead and made the thing[1] for Bluesky.

https://blucerne.app

Not only do bluesky users(skeeters? did that catch on?) not tag posts correctly they do that "anti censorship" thing where they share a screenshot of a post so you are guaranteed to see things you don't care about.

There's a culture of encouraging alt text on images, and muting keywords works on the alt text.

yeah no regular user is ever gonna bother using alt texts and bluesky will not implement AI auto generated alt texts so i doubt this works at all

You can use a labeler[0] to classify social media screenshots and hide them.

[0]: https://xblock.aendra.com/getting-started/

You can mute keywords whether they're hashtags or not.

I tried doing that with Twitter a few years ago in an attempt to reduce the amount of posts related to US politics. I don't follow any political figures or commentators, only tech people and artists, but about half the posts on my feed were about US politics.

Although I ended up with a blocklist of around 100 words it was very much a losing battle and a waste of time.

But if people are forced to pick a hashtag, then they will want to correlate around one hashtag. So many things could be releated to politics.

A friend of mine built something[1] that should solve this problem, you subscribe to a tag of a person (or multiple) but not their full feed.

You can still add multiple tags per post, say if it's about music and technology, and if you subscribe to their technology tag, you'll see the post.

[1] https://lynkmi.com

Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B is so cheap now that you could build your own little custom Bluesky reader that filters out political tweets for you based on LLM classification. It would probably cost less than a dollar a month.

Following a hash tag is basically what reddit is

How do you crawl or backfill the existing data?

Like if you wanted to implement a search engine or recommendation system it’s not clear to me how you retrieve a training set.

This is a great question and I am looking for the answer as well.

There is a page[0] in the Bluesky docs on this, though it effectively boils down to “fetch each user repository”.

[0] https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/backfill

Suggested projects for the AT Protocol from the Bluesky devs.

Nope. They want the all in one app/solution. And they want people to work for free to essentially build that one app to rule them all.

This is a nightmare for every still independent software/web developer.

Nope. I've been screwed by Twitter already. Fool me once, ...

Another Twitter with SMS verification paywall - nope, thanks.

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