Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the better criticisms of bsky/atproto I’ve read. So glad to read a good one. Just two comments:

DMs were added out of protocol for exactly the reason the author suspects: users were clamoring for this functionality, and doing it right will take a while. So they’ve alluded to plans to bring them back into the protocol, but for now, most people are okay with trusting Bluesky and being able to do what they want to do. It’s effectively a non-regression from the point of “I’m migrating from Twitter.”

> it seems unlikely that downplaying the role of domains is something Bluesky as an organization will be motivated to do since selling domains is currently a Bluesky business strategy.

It seems like this integration has disappeared, as far as I can tell. They didn’t say anything about it publicly that I saw.

To offer a different perspective, I think this is lazy criticism. There is a fundamental tradeoff between the "sharding strategy" of a social network and user experience. Both bluesky and mastodon are reasonably pareto-optimal given this tradeoff.

Mastodon goes for real "decentralization" with tiny shards of the "content tier", which means:

1. There is a lot of intra-shard bandwidth but relatively limited inter-shard bandwidth. You can create a truly seamless global experience, with global search, recommendations etc.

2. There is no uniformity in user experience (say moderation-wise) as each shard is essentially a personal fiefdom.

Bluesky instead decouples the storage layer from the caching + serving layer. This allows data portability but still allows a truly unified view of the social network.

Users are free to choose between the two approaches and most overwhelmingly choose Bluesky. But it is not very thoughtful to criticize a pareto-optimal design point for compromising one property to gain another.

"I think this criticism is good" does not mean I agree with it; it's just that I have read so many criticisms that are poorly formed, come from a place of ignorance, stuff like that. This one is at least informed, doesn't make any obviously factually incorrect statements, seems to be trying to provide more heat than light, etc.

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