Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawa14223 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an anti-feature. The appeal of Bluesky is exactly the lack of a Twitter like central authority.

You mean the kind of central authority that can censor accounts at the behest of a despotic government? Bluesky is not decentralized in any meaningful sense.

https://www.turkishminute.com/2025/04/17/bluesky-restrict-ac...

My understanding of that situation was that they could either remove that content from being accessible on Bluesky (the client) or have the site blocked entirely.

They landed on country-specific moderation, which is all publicly accessible and documented, allowing countries to label specific posts/contents and have them hidden in the country. Again, this is only on the Bluesky client; other clients can ignore the 'hide' label if they choose.

This is an article that details it pretty well and links to a few tools that allow you to view everything hidden by any country moderation team: https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-censorship-and-country-b...

What are these "other clients"?

You have pure clients like https://deck.blue/

And then "soft forks" like https://deer.social/

Am I supposed to type my bluesky password into some random website?

Why would there be no 2FA options, like when using https://element.io for a homeserver?

You make an "app password" which is basically an API token.

They've recently added OAuth, but since it's pretty new, a lot of older projects haven't moved over yet.

2FA exists but only for emails right now, more to come. https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/1071

Okay that makes sense, thanks! And yea, I meant OAuth, 2FA has really nothing to do.

So have the site blocked entirely. Let censorious despots build their own great firewalls.

I was misinformed about Bluesky. Thank you

The opposite. It’s Twitter before Twitter was turned into a campaign of degenerate malignancy, with several escape hatches built-in.

I suppose if what you don't like about twitter is the people there (or the moderation), bluesky would make a lot of sense. I can't help but feel like the combination of catering towards businesses (verification) and people who don't like conflict (moderation) is recreating the same problem with a different demographic.

Am I anti moderation? No, not really. But the attitude blue sky users have towards it feels very much like wanting to be validated for not liking twitter('s users) rather than a forum for adults who enjoy seeing content from people wildly unlike themselves, which is what drew me to twitter 15 years ago.

It’s quite difficult to see content on Twitter which is “unlike myself” and it’s not for grifting, from politicians, or parrots of these. Also, it’s quite boring that these people say the same thing for decades now. It’s quite simple nowadays to predict how these “unlike me” people will “think” on every single topic on social media. Usually, it’s not even their thoughts. Almost all of them are baseless parroting.

You won’t find real discussion on Twitter. It’s an attention market, and thus discussions are not incentivised at all. I found way more interesting “unlike me” thoughts in real life than on any social media in the past 7 years (and before that I was just lucky for a few years). It’s not that they don’t exist at all, but the cost of finding these is magnitudes higher nowadays on the internet than off from that. Also, who wants discussions left most of social media years ago. Most of the smarter people whom I followed left every platform as their usage became more costly. Not just Twitter.

> Also, it’s quite boring that these people say the same thing for decades now. It’s quite simple nowadays to predict how these “unlike me” people will “think” on every single topic on social media. Usually, it’s not even their thoughts. Almost all of them are baseless parroting.

You could say this about any forum on the internet, including this one. But the diversity of thought and interest here is quite small in comparison to twitter just by sheer numbers and the necessity of this forum circling the shared interest of VC culture.

Hey, I understand why people left twitter. I just don't see how bluesky improves on the actual culture of the site—the best posters never transitioned.

Twitter is now specifically and intentionally a machine for developing degenerate people and patterns working towards degenerate ends. It is no longer a system useful for finding "unlike" entities.

As it is also the personal mouthpiece (and semen receptacle) for the richest and most deoxygenated freak ever created by our species it represents an existential threat to the continuation of a livable planet.

So yeah I guess Bluesky users do have some "attitude" towards Twitter. It's a natural consequence of distancing yourself from abomination.

Twitter was awful before Musk and is awful in a different way now. Emulating old awful is not good just because new awful is different.

If you were one of the people making twitter awful before Musk, you'd prefer a service that was old awful, rather than new awful. They just want the Shah back.

> They just want the Shah back.

Is that a reference to something? Haven't heard that phrase before.

I'm guessing it's a reference to the last shah of Iran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Reza_Pahlavi

The appeal of Bluesky, initially, was that Twitter became a deranged platform. I doubt the average user is concerned with central authority insofar as intellectual and moral values inform the goings on. That, rather than centralization, is the problem with new Twitter, Truth Social, and the nihilist right-wing ecosystem more generally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com