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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky is two completely separate things:

1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership.

2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.

There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up sowing a lot of confusion about it.

I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block, private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.

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I got the impression from Christine Webber that the Blue sky protocol could not practically be federated, there's a bottleneck (relays iirc) that can only be properly implemented with huge resources, and which scales quadratically

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Bluesky is designed for the appearance of federation.

Also the appearance of no political baggage, but that’s not actually true either.

Discussed a bit here:

How decentralized is Bluesky really? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215410 - Nov 2024 (16 comments)

Would be silly for anyone to take the other side of that bet. It's clear most people don't care. Early on I tried to explain to people why their feature requests didn't make sense in the federated design, but eventually I gave up. And to some extent Bluesky gave up as well. People were demanding DMing be a feature of the site so eventually they just added DMs that are centrally stored on their servers.

And rightfully so, because it’s a stupid feature to not have and most people want an app not an ideology.

Email is DM and that's decentralised (despite best efforts of Microsoft and Google).

So is Matrix.

Maciej -- I disagree based on the conversations I've had IRL with normal users about Bluesky.

The scuttlebutt is that many people have heard that the index, the directory, and the signing keys are centralized.

The good news is the signing keys are not in the hands of the users so we could in theory rewrite all of the messages on the protocol.

If you had those keys would you choose to do this?

I agree and don't believe 1) is the killer app for 2) but it definitely helps make 2) viable because at least there is a production social app running on it.

> 2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.

I got the impression from the Dorsey interview that this was his commitment, and that he left because they weren't interested in that. They're just trying to be a twitter clone that picks up angry twitter users who hate Musk.

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> That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population.

> Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik...

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The problem for Bluesky is that those people aren't actually leaving twitter, they're still using twitter more than they use Bluesky.

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

> 1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership.

Not the current, but the previous one when Dorsey owned Twitter. And I don't know what's worse, honestly.

> Twitter clone without the political baggage

I tried out Bluesky last week in hope of finding a social network which ticked this box, but my feed was full of anti Elon Musk / Trump messages. So it was very political from my initial experience.

This was after the setup wizard process where I selected tech/science/entertainment preferences.

Perhaps I did something wrong or didn't give it enough chance?

Either way I deleted my account.

What they meant to say was the "right" kind of political.

Nonetheless this is an issue that's still not fixed in bsky.

I'll use myself as an example. I don't want to see America politics because I don't care about the nothingburger posts that surrounds Trump.

There's a setting to blacklist certain words or topics. It does not work. I hope they fix it at some point, because I don't spend much time on there, and I'd like to.

That's always going to be hard work using a US-based platform. Whatever its downsides, Mastodon is noticeably less US-centric and it shows in the content.

True, avoiding all posts with "Trump" or "Elon" would be amazing. I don't live in the US either and it's just too much drama for me.

It was the same with Brexit. Those 2 years I got so fed up with that constantly repeating discussion about separating goods & services which they knew was impossible from the start.

It works though?! I've got all that US political nonsense added as mute/block words and follow a couple of notorious block lists and I rarely if ever see any of that content in my feed.

Well I can understand where they're coming from. The discussions have become so polarised and so nasty.

What is happening a lot here in Holland now that the hard-right crowd are constantly spamming topics about totally unrelated issues with stuff like "There are only 2 genders". I don't mind them having an opinion (even though I strongly disagree), I just don't want it shoved in my face constantly and inappropriately. It's like they are so preoccupied with what's happening in other people's pants that they can't talk about anything else.

So yeah that is something I don't want to see in social media anymore and I avoid platforms that allow it. Like Xitter.

interesting how the political tables have turned - Open source apps like lemmy were supported by the pro-trump camp back then.

It's still political but the armies of anonymous blue checks that dominate every reply section on Twitter with regurgitated memes and low-effort insults are missing.

are they really missing, or is the shoe just on the other foot? i've been trying Bluesky for a month or so and it indeed seems to just be regurgitated memes and low-effort insults. the only difference is it's from a liberal/Democrat POV. the place comes off as an echo chamber sorely lacking in diversity of opinion tbh. if you go against the grain you'll be added to blocklists, which people seem giddy to use as to curate their echo chamber. hell, for daring to criticize the Democratic party from the left i've found myself on numerous MAGA and far-right blocklists. maybe this will change in due time? that'd be swell.

I mean, the last comment thread I was involved with on Twitter ended with "You should lick my balls Commie".

It was a discussion about congestion pricing.

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