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Comment by crabmusket | Hacker News Reader

What do you think about it?

What I remember about that whole affair is that I'd really respected Jack for starting Bluesky, allowing it to be independent of Twitter (and Jay deserves a heaping of credit for pushing that!), and then losing that respect when he seemed to totally misunderstand what Bluesky had gone on to achieve.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/13/bluesky-is-building-the-...

Jack was pushing Nostr at the time which... seems ok if you're into that. But his arguments in his interview with Mike Solana really didn't make sense to me.

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Bluesky’s attitude seems logical and their reasoning aligns with my thoughts exactly.

If techdirt’s article is to be believed, Dorsey’s departure has to do with going from an extreme to an extreme—from a traditional social monolith to a pure protocol—whereas Bluesky chose to pursue not only the protocol, but also “the app” as the face of that protocol for the ordinary user, and let’s face it: the ordinary user does not really care about protocols.

My speculation about him suggesting people “stay on Twitter” is that Nostr (which he apparently is invested in now) and Twitter are orthogonal, so there is no conflict there, but Bluesky competes with both.

Not a Bluesky user (the invite-only period has put me off for a while), but if they do not compromise on the protocol part (and there are no shenanigans unfolding, who knows, maybe Dorsey found something) their attitude seems to me to be the most reasonable for a mainstream social platform.

What's your issue with invite-only periods? Is there a better way to throttle signups while you scale a system early on?

Being left out of a centralized platform at launch is a big deal. Lack of federation suggested they are not serious about the protocol part, as if it is a second-class crutch and at best a gimmick to attract nerds to another centralized platform. The techdirt interview seems to indicate otherwise, though.

But if you use web scale tech you can scale to infinity on day one right? :eye-roll:

The invite-only system established the main Bluesky instance as a big circlejerk.

It worked with Orkut back in the day where the internet was new and untainted by culture wars.

Bluesky is lefty twitter now and I want no business with that platform.

> Bluesky is lefty twitter now and I want no business with that platform.

I love hearing people say this, because in reality Bluesky covers most of the political dimensions one wants to subdivide a population by except the most toxic of participants. Also, most of the academics have moved to Bluesky because Twitter became toxic / suppressed speech dramatically and at the whims of one Mr. Musk. As per usual, where the "lefties" are the "righties" follow (to use the parlance of the prior comment) be is social media, good policy, you name it.

Plenty of conservatives are there, such as Lincoln project folks, right libertarians, and even National Review & Reason IIRC. But I guess these folks don't count these days as conservative (despite definitionally being so, just not aligned with modern US Republican policy planks)? Not sure.

Anyhow, I'm enjoying Bluesky for what it is -- a new social media platform that isn't fully encumbered by bots and nonsense for a bit.

> Twitter became toxic / suppressed speech dramatically

But what kind of speech is supressed nowadays on X? what about Bluesky? does Bluesky not supress any speech?

> But what kind of speech is supressed nowadays on X?

Is there even a way to find out, considering their main feed is a product of opaque suggestion algorithm and very few use the Following timeline as the main mode?

> what about Bluesky? does Bluesky not supress any speech?

The end-user is put in charge of that and by default it’s a chronological feed, I believe, which means no suppression unless it’s something illegal in US (CSAM, links to CSAM, etc.) and Bluesky could be held responsible for distrubuting that stuff.

Sure. CSAM.

Meanwhile Twitter is now openly suppressing links off-site. For financial reasons rather than ideological ones (although the latter may also be occurring).

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