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Comment by jer0me | Hacker News Reader

I believe this is possible because of how the AT Protocol works. Bluesky shows a warning[1] on these posts and displays both times, but sorts them by the backdated time.

[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/bluemigrate.com/post/3lc3r4fqen62l

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I think the reason it works that way is because they want strong guarantees for the future portability of your skeets. It's sort of a correction for Mastodon's reliance on server admins' goodwill.

>skeets

I’m cackling over here. How have I never heard this when people talk about blue sky?

To the windoooooooooooooooooooow....

Surely this is what he was talking about. Lil John was decades ahead of his time.

A Lil Jon reference on a HN thread about Bluesky was most definitely not on my 2025 bingo card. But I'll take it.

Talking of "Jon" and "Skeet", there is a fairly well known programmer called Jon Skeet. If you are a C# developer good chance he has answered you stack overflow question!

If you are a bit older, you'd remember the same guy fighting for Java in bloody flame wars against C and C++ on Usenet. When I first saw him as a C# devotee on Stack Overflow, I was surprised it's the same guy.

Some people got the idea it has something to do with some song because (not an actual dictionary) Urban Dictionary said so when the actual meaning is "sky tweet."

They need to come up with their own term or confirm they are OK that the name skeet is a sex act. You don't get to just pretend the term doesn't exist because you didn't listen to one of the most popular songs of that decade using an already well established term. It's also heavily used in one of the most popular comedy shows of that decade as well The meaning is well established

I mean, the CEO of bsky used skeet unironically in interviews so I'd say it's a-ok

> (not an actual dictionary) Urban Dictionary

<troll> The definition of dictionary is just "Words about words" (source: Urban Dictionary), so I'd say that Urban Dictionary qualifies. </troll>

UD has been quoted in court cases, it's absolutely a dictionary.

UD documents existing connotations of words and expressions. That you don't think it's an actual dictionary doesn't change the fact that those connotations exist.

"sky tweet" is also a stupid name since a tweet is already the name for a post on a very specific platform.

I'm not sure I get why "sky tweet" is a stupid name. "Tweet" was a pretty arbitrarily chosen name for a post on Twitter, but now that "tweet" is a pretty established word, it seems reasonable to use a portmanteau based on that word for a platform based on that platform.

Though in practice I think "skeet" was a bit of a fad to be provocative, and most people just call them tweets, even on bluesky.

The song didn’t create the word, it just popularized a word that was already in use when the song came out.

> not an actual dictionary

Go on, tell us what you think an "actual dictionary" is.

hah, good one

People certainly talk about this _on_ bluesky. No idea how much it's escaped outside.

I use bluesky all the time and have yet to use the term "skeet".

I don't think it's important. What is important is using a sane environment. X is completely crazy.

Oh I think it’s very important and it’s all we should talk about right now

Make a community on X and only let sane people in.

can we just come up with one common term to to refer to all of my these between sites

"post"

"tweet"

No. Let twitter burn and be forgotten.

You mean like "Xerox"?

To the window, to the wall! To my social media feed I crawl!

does anybody in this thread actually know what skeet means? i’m laughing as well at the idea of a bunch of people thinking they’re getting back at twitter by skeeting on the internet.

It'd be cool if they also verified the dates to get rid of the warning of honest backdated posts.

What constitutes an honest backdated post? How would they be able to verify it?

they could fetch the post reference on x.com with the real date, and store a zkProof of its existance, relying the verfiability-trust then to x not messing with them

Or use the Wayback Machine? You can trust its captures, courts do. Queue archiving jobs per handle, backfill from the archives after the initial archiving request has completed.

https://katharinabrunner.de/2024/02/archiving-websites-the-i...

https://x.com/paulmcgorrery/status/1178561480385421312 (Dyno Nobel Inc v Orica Explosives Technology Pty Ltd (no 2) [2019] FCA 1552)

https://www.michbar.org/journal/Details/Old-websites-seldom-...

https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/insights/legal/b/though...

Wouldn't that require a very expensive API contract that X would be quite uninterested in signing?

> they could fetch the post reference on x.com with the real date

Twitter posts are only available to authenticated users, and the API is really quite expensive now - that was one of the many reasons people have wanted to move off it!

Open a PR

You going to donate your CPU for that? Only about a billion or ten tweets.

You don't need to migrate everything, just getting the ones from users that migrated from twitter would help a lot seeding Bluesky profiles.

You can also link Twitter to Bluesky with either OAuth, or a Twitter post with a Bluesky challenge to prove you have control of the account.

That sounds like a lot of manual work, as I don’t expect Twitter to offer an API for departing users…

Not an API but if you're a departing user: https://www.theverge.com/23453703/twitter-archive-download-h.... Bottom line: it's possible to download all account history with tweets in JSON format with dates, and more.

Sure, but now you're back to trust. Unless it's signed, which it doesn't sound like it is, anyone could fabricate their Twitter post history.

nope. post here from 9/11 2001, no warning [0]. it's fine if they added a check recently to flag backdated posts, but there's no telling how many incorrectly-timed things went up before they added that ([0] is from about a year ago, fwiw). the whole early history of the platform is questionable, and it's just shoddy protocol design.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/lul4.bsky.social/post/3kgaesbxs7f25

(if you work for bsky please don't add a flag to that, it's my favorite party trick)

Looking at the JSON data in dev tools, it looks like there are separate `createdAt` and `indexedAt` fields, the latter of which was probably a later addition. For your—likely pre-migration—post, both are set to 9/11. On more recent posts, they're separate dates.

That post does indeed predate bluesky tracking index times, I remember seeing it before they announced that change. I believe it was motivated by other migration services becoming popular. Forward-dating was fixed even earlier, I think, since it might allow people to "pin" their posts to the top of reverse-chronological feeds.

Some of my favourite backdated posts are from the years 1776 and 1.

More specifically the reason we didn’t have an index time for that post was an architectural migration which lost our prior witness times. That was pretty early on. At this point we’d take pains to preserve those timestamps, and I’m fairly sure we will need to publish them for other folks to use at some point

Very nice.

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