Bluesky now has 30 million users
bsky.app
bsky.app
The XBlock Screenshot Labeler moderation service has mostly kept the reposted screenshots to a minimum. When reporting a post you can choose which service to inform, so a screenshot would get reported to XBlock rather than the bsky.app mod team. https://bsky.app/profile/xblock.aendra.dev
I assume that more moderation services will get plugged in as the site grows. It's an interesting model/protocol/service.
2. Blocking someone prevents that person from even seeing your posts, which means that from the perspective of a lurker, it's best not to follow anyone, not to engage with anyone at all, not to make anyone aware of your existence, because 1% of people you follow will block you just because they're having a bad day
3. The Python client makes baby Jesus cry
2. Don’t almost all blocks behave that way? Twitter’s always did. Seems Elon, in his infinite social acuity, has confused “block” with “mute?” Vast majority of users want to be able to actually “block” people
3. Baby Jesus cries very easily, he’s a baby
No
> Baby Jesus cries very easily, he’s a baby
I've never seen official baby Jesus merch with him crying
You might have been distracted attending more immediate matters, Mr. Anal_Reactor.
That's how Twitter's block always worked before the advent of Naughty Old Mr Car. It's also how the block on every social media thing I can think of works.
We had a very brief window when the Twitter Exodus was happening and non-techies were giving Mastodon a try. But it wasn't good enough, as far as giving the Twitter refugees what they wanted to see, and so they simply moved on to the nearest Twitter-With-The-Numbers-Filed-Off platform and stayed there instead.
There's probably a good post-mortem study someone could do on this (someone more tuned in than me, since I never had a Twitter account to begin with), and the larger ramifications for why many of the FLOSS platforms fail to gain the adoption they think they will when the flagship proprietary platform becomes intolerable. cf: the failure of Windows 11 refugees to move to Linux, Chrome refugees to move to Firefox, etc.
Mastodon's biggest problem is the hyper-aggressive content moderation on the larger instances. Speaking about Mastodon's tech and UI, it's vastly superior to Bluesky. But they drive people away and then complain that people don't come.
Maybe my problem with Mastodon was choosing the server to join. My brain knows that it's federated and it really doesn't matter which server you choose. However it always felt like I was choosing the wrong server somehow. Just that little bit of friction was enough to drive me away.
Probably not _forever_; Bluesky is, at least for now, centralised enough that if Bluesky-the-entity screws up sufficiently badly, well, where else are people going to go?
But, honestly, Mastodon as _mainstream_ was always a long-shot. UX matters, and while Mastodon's is _fine_ once you're used to it, it's quite hostile to new users. Bluesky had the advantage that people already knew how to use it, because it's basically the same UX as Twitter.
Bluesky arrived at the right time, unlike Mastodon.
Bluesky does have some advantages like starter packs (and network effect now that it has so many accounts).
No he doesn't ask, you're wrong.
And there is no single one alternative server where we can register and interact with people on bsky.app
It's not very prominent, but the Android mobile app does have the option to change what server you register on.
You can tap on the bold "Bluesky Social" text to change it.
> And there is no single one alternative server where we can register and interact with people on bsky.app
You absolutely can host a PDS that interacts flawlessly with the rest of the network. I host my own. There's an entire section in the README about self-hosting: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#sel...
In any case, my previous comment is wrong indeed.
This is all totally going to change when OAuth rolls out, so hopefully we can find a better compromise then.
No, it does not.
Bluesky by default creates account on bsky.social, while there's barely noticeable button with icon that allows you to provide another server.
An ordinary user will head to what it'll find in the search results, fill out credentials and log in. It won't change the defaults if it actually notice there's a possibility to do that at all. Not mention a mass user needs to be aware in the first place that there are other instances/servers, and you can interoperate with these just like with email providers. Neither mastodon or bluesky explains that in a simple discoverable fashion - which IMO should be done long ago.
so the slick registration flow nets you less lock-in compared to if e.g. the mainstream Mastodon app were funnelling users onto one megainstance, since you can still get away afterwards without needing people to re-follow you
In fact Mastodon had a better chance than BlueSky ever had, but had a significantly worse onboarding experience.
Mastodon was there at the right time, (Nov 2022) but was extremely unprepared to onboard millions of users simultaneously and more people were left confused on how to use the platform or even how to create an account or "which instance" to sign up to.
This is the obvious reason why BlueSky succeeded and took off, as predicted. [0]
Mastodon needs to be more streamlined.
We in tech have not even made a 1-click port everything to somewhere else please button (need to build the somewhere else too).
There’s a lot of work to be done.
I mean, just now I went to Bluesky's web homepage and what I saw is "discover" pointing me to "influencers"...
Nostr is the way. It will take time but it's sufficiently decentralized. Doesn't require DNS. Users hold their own keys. Fairly easy to run a relay. It's also a trust network, with encryption out of the box, so I think it will become a usable successor for email+GPG.
> Email is horribly centralized
You’re seeing the downsides of decentralization not the result of centralization. There’s ~100’s of thousands of independently operated email servers, but nobody is directly forcing people to listen to everyone else. Instead they must stay reasonably open because the cloud didn’t win, work school and emails are still frequently independent.
This is an absolute killer for mainstream adoption. Normal people _absolutely do not want to manage keys_. And will lose them. Like, see Bitcoin; relatively enthusiast user base, and still people lose keys _all the time_.
I see no NIP for node incentives, perhaps this should be discussed further.
Yes, Bluesky is more centralized, but I feel like it is decentralized in the ways that matter for a Twitter/X Alternative use case :
- Self hosting of data, easy migration - Automatic verification via DNS - Custom feeds, Custom moderation, but you can still use the official ones
I'm sure a big reason for this the possibility for abuse, since "migrating" an account is a different action than simply "creating" a new one
[0]: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGR...
From moxie.org:
"Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. Again. People who will run servers for you, and iterate on the new functionality that emerges. Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan."
They also make this point:
"I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway."
For a variety of reasons, people have not felt that it is worthwhile to fight for decentralization.
The model of "identity backed by domain ownership" is a nice one, and deals with the Mastodon identity portability issue.
However AFAIK the use of the "AT protocol" seems to me to be a major difference https://bsky.social/about/faq.
I am really curious to know how I am wrong in that.
As a long time X user and now on bluesky i can tell that there is a huge difference in the content which makes it clear that the platform was pushing accounts with specific political views (or muting others)
I would imagine AT gets easier to use/setup given time too.
[0] Single user, admittedly, but if we're talking about protocol simplicity, that's the nub.
[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/02/activitypub-server-in-a-sin...
running an archival mirroring relay is storage-intensive (on the order of tens of TB iirc?) but only serves as an optimization (you can backfill full atproto repositories straight from the relay instead of needing to reach out to the relevant data server)
Threads use e ActivityPub but we know it's bullshit and that they will shut down the network as soon as possible. Bluesky is the same shit. AT protocol is just a honey pot.
From what I know :
- Right now you can self-host your PDS (Personal Data Server) that hosts your user account basically, and all of your user content (posts, images, etc...)
- The easiest way to register is to use bluesky's frontend, and specifying your PDS address, I didn't try to self-host it too but I would assume if you self-host the bluesky web app, or just do the api calls to your PDS by hand or in another application, registration would work too.
- From what I understood, when you post, it is completely stored on your PDS, and then there are kinds of "mega nodes", (I think they are called Firehoses ?) That aggregate from a bunch of PDS, (and the official bsky.social PDS) and present it to end users. I don't think you can self-host theses just yet.
So, in the end, I think you can absolutely interact on Bluesky without being registered, by installing your own PDS and only making calls to create an account on it and post on it, without having an account elsewhere. However, the "end user" part is still closed off for now, since the Blue Sky Frontend uses *official* aggregators that could theoretically refuse your posts.
Go here for more information:
I tried not long ago, mostly help me get acquaintanced with the ruby ecosystem and news, but even using starter packs and the like the best I got was following devs that mostly talked about non tech stuff (personal life, politics and the like).
Particularly annoying was the constant "we hate twitter" posts (I know, I'm here now, so why are we talking about them?). Also tons of anti AI clickbait.
Every now and then there's too much US politics, but it's hard to escape nowadays.
That's mostly what I want to avoid. Not that I'm not interested in humor, but I don't really care about the personal life of some random developer in the other side of the planet.
I was just trying to get a RSS like, relatively context dense feed to substitute reddit and other similar sites. But I'm not sure it's doable in any current social network.
Not doubting her experience, but I've never experienced this (accidentally).
https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/feed/hot-classic
That feed was defaulted for my account so for the longest time I assumed the community there was largely gay men (along with a surprising percentage of weird furry stuff). And good for them, but it just wasn't my kink to see dudes holding their dicks or sexy animal illustrations in my feed.
The discover feed seems to be absent this problem. But WHC should be either given a warning to user or at a minimum start doing some "guy holding his dick" AI inference and auto-tag those posts.
e.g. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dbipwza2663x6hfp2purbn7i/fe...
I think many people supporting bluesky assume the value is in attracting the plebeians. I don't see that being the case. There are already Facebook groups and reddit (among traditional forums) if you want to interact with your peers.
Is bluesky an alternative to twitter? In form, yes, in function, no.
At some point, it may become impossible for some of these groups - probably starting with journalists - to do their work and not be on bluesky. They will be on X and bluesky. Maybe. If it happens, then bluesky will eventually replace X. Because it will not be long before it will also be possible to leave X, probably the last to do so will also be journalists. Its more efficient that way. Then it will be just nazis and shitposters on X, and X will go the way of Digg and MySpace.
Alternatively, Twitter could also fragment completely and we'll never have an equivalent network again. There's no law stating we must have a single such network where are the celebs, news orgs and scientists hang out.
I mean, define 'successful'. Twitter was _culturally important_ for a long time before it was a must-use by celebrities, and it's never been particularly successful in terms of reach (it has a similar MAU to Pinterest, which apparently still exists) or in financial terms.
Like, for a lot of former Twitter users, Bluesky is _already_ successful; it is an adequate replacement for old-Twitter for their needs. That's all that most people are looking for, really.
(I wish the number of users who blocked an account would show up next to the number of followers)
I registered bluesky account for the second time last Friday and I've pick no interests during first login. Last year I had Discovery feed filled with drawn porn despite of my settings. And now on a fresh account it's mainly American politics - while setting are more liberal regarding adult content. I followed nearly 60 people but only few of them are active. The global stream overall seems to be much "slower" than public federated one on mastodon. My partner complains he gets furry porn in Discovery while having a zero interest in that - he follows only 11 accounts.
I haven't bumped on screenshots from twitter so far.
AFAIK the 'Discover' algorithm is based largely on _likes_, not who you follow. This can result in extremely weird results for people who never like posts, which I suspect is quite a large part of the user base.
This one in particular is a blessing; transphobes are a particularly _tedious_ (typically just parroting whatever Rowling or similar said this week) variety of bigot, and even before Musk Twitter was swarming with them.
That being said, the lights need to be kept on somehow... some model similar to what Signal or wikipedia does might be a solution. Content-moderation is probably the big challenge though that they do not have to deal with to the same extent, so not quite sure how that could fly either...
It's not federate.
They came back within a week after they couldn't build an audience.
100% user-centric moderation controls. Blockity block! Block lists are a godsend. This is what made Dorsey quit the board and abandon the platform. He actually believed the masses wanted a libertarian platform that forced you to listen to assholes. We don’t.
No opaque algorithms controlling your timeline.
Feeds to create topic centric timelines.
Decentralized. You can host your own data. Other hosts can offer refuge if Bluesky went rogue. Bluesky doesn’t own the data.
Many independent journalists have moved over so we’re getting significantly better news and not the false equivalence nonsense peddled by most of the major media outlets.
And kittens, birds, dogs, deer, raccoons, and other heartwarming animal posts.
We’re just slamming the door in the face of Nazis and fascists.
It’s my individual right to avoid assholes.
Not censorship.
Bluesky preventing users from replying to your posts on your say-so. Yup, there's a word for that.
> In theory, a bad actor could create their own rogue client or interface which ignores some of the blocking behaviors, since the content is posted to a public network. But showing content or notifications to the person who created the block won’t be possible, as that behavior is controlled by their own PDS and client.
>creation of reply posts, quote posts, embeds, and mentions are blocked;
This is the unmitigable censorship that can't be removed without decentralization.
AT proto seems like it would be perfect for a wikipedia-style fact check organization.
Ofc, it does not work because they are the same.
Bluesky I got in before it was opened up by adding my email to the waitlist. Simple. And now it's even easier because there is no waitlist.
I used it and found a decent one, managed by someone relatively local and active. Most of my followed accounts are on other servers but I haven't seen that as a big issue.
It makes for a bland circle jerk to be honest but they kind of succeeded at making also X worse as there's less balance to those racist tweets etc.
How many people are boycotting these US products which specifically includes not using iPhones, Macs, Android and Windows devices?
Out of that, how many are going to bother to choose to sign up to a Mastodon instance that is only hosted in Canada and use it for more than a year? My guess is a very small number of people.
Realistically they don't care and the boycott won't last and the majority are still more likely to sign up to either Threads or BlueSky than to even consider Mastodon.
This just reads as divisive, dismissive, or destructive.
Please note I'm not saying that you are those things, just that your comment reads like that.
Bots and duplicate accounts are certainly an issue, but that's also a concern for the platform operators who want to maximize advertising effectiveness. Fake numbers will never translate into real results.
Would it, for example, purport to keep us and our feelings safe by censoring those questioning an unproven and ultimately claim made by pharmaceutical corporations and politicians they donate money to, about the efficacy of their products?