Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

I’m curious, what country is this from? I’ve been living in NZ and Japan last 5 years and people love their phones here too. But the gatherings (even random meet ups!) almost never have people with phones in their hands.

> Even in a formal business meeting, screens are open, and attention is lost.

This would be considered incredibly rude and would lose businesses here

Given the choice between apps controlled by large corporations preying on attention vs decentralized protocols, I’d much rather have the latter.

I think having examples of apps that don’t demand one’s attention so fiercely, or provide better options for tailoring “the algorithm,” are an important step towards ending the mass social media addiction society is currently experiencing.

Suddenly, I've been having much more free time in the morning!

I dropped Facebook over 15 years ago, instagram maybe 7 or 8 years ago, Twitter just before Elon took over, Whatsapp and Strava I guess might be the only things I use considered “social” and I have all group notifications muted on WA at all times.

I’ve watched this parallel reality grow and evolve over the years and I hate it. Everyone everywhere seems to be permanently staring at a screen!

A month or so back, I watched my wife awake in the morning, she didn’t realise I was awake watching her (lovingly) - I got Black Mirror IRL - instantly upon awaking, without looking, she reached for her phone and the endless scrolling started, she was so engrossed, after 10 mins not noticing her husband awake, intently watching her, I had to say “Morning”. Later that morning, alone, I wept tears for myself, for her and all of humanity.

Two to three months ago, I had realised that while I wasn’t addicted to social media, I was absolutely addicted to news media/politics/etc. Like a key in a lock, it clicked one day, i’d wasted at least a decade, nearly two of adult life obsessively reading, commenting and talking about UK, global events & politics.

Worse than that, I realised how all the negativity from that world was directly feeding my own negativity and then into those around me. Then after another week or two where I blocked it out entirely at home, I felt “recovered”. My fingers were no longer blindly typing in web addresses in moments of boredom - I’d dip into a book chapter of technical paper for 5 minutes instead. Political podcasts were all dropped, replaced entirely with music and podcasts that don’t engage with political comment.

I was only granted this moment of clarity as I attended a technical conference for a week, where I was up at 7 every morning to hit the early sessions and not getting back to my hotel till nearly 10 or 11pm. Amazingly, the whole week, there was barely a whisper of anything about politics - I think I might have heard the word “Trump” once.

I was so full of energy and excitement about what i’d been learning and talking to people about all week, as soon as I returned to my normal reality, the world of international politics suddenly appeared to me exactly the same way a bottle of booze did after knocking alcohol addiction on the head. The mere mention of any of the MSM trigger words suddenly produced in me a deep feeling of revulsion.

I couldn’t imagine not knowing what was going on in the world 6 months ago, now I actively avoid any mention or conversation that might go that way. The sky hasn’t fallen in, foreign invaders haven’t taken my country, what has happened though is I’ve been devouring books and technical papers like a mad man, learning new instruments, creating art on the computer and finally facing my demons and creating art on paper!

My life has improved beyond all rational logic, probably moreso than quitting alcohol, which was also a horrible, slow growing, hugely negative addiction for me. My emotional state feels more balanced than ever as I’m finally feeling totally free from all the emotional manipulation these things ultimate come with. If something awful happens out in the big bad world painted by the media, I’ll deal with it when it happens as it happens in my actual reality. The best tools I can arm myself with are knowledge, gratitude and love. Sitting around arguing on political blogs has achieved the square root of fuck all and will continue to achieve that.

People seem shocked when they attempt to talk to me about politics and I just shrug my shoulders now. I shudder to think now about the energy I blindly invested into that world, never making one single bit of difference, just generating negativity inside of me, which then spirals out to those I most love around me. When you flip all that negative energy into positive energy, and honestly it really is that easy, you very quickly start getting the insight that maybe you aren’t just human, you’re superhuman.

Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.

I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media?

Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.

Every dorm/housing and school program has its own vibe and attitude. Your student ID gets you in to all of them, but you live in one dorm building in particular, let's call it Jones Tower. There might be some seeming overlap between buildings - maybe Dinkley Hall and the Rogers Building both have Engineering floors, but they're not the same at all. You can cross-list classes between the geology department and theater school and gerontology, that's cool. You can have friends that live in Dinkey Hall and the Blake Apartments, and they can all go anywhere they want.

Is it a mess? Not really. Is it as plain and one-size-fits-all as single-story high school like Facebook? Not at all. Does it take time to understand how to sign up for a cross-listed class? Sure. To some it's worth it to be there, and plenty drop out because it's not for them, and that's fine. IMO, the benefit is the barrier to entry. It's not for everyone and doesn't need to be.

Threads added federation, but only Mastodon servers are connected, and not all of them - this is like Threads is the private medical school across town that lets grad school students from the Fediverse Uni come over for specific classes.

The fact that they have different implementation details that is not so important to me, though personally I replicate all my posts for readers who prefer one place over another.

The others do not give you any choice you buy the service from them and accept their terms (and presumably, virality, which you came for)

Those are the trade offs

There was a time when tweets were just good ol' regular HTML pages. Today it's unbearable if you remember that you're just trying to read one small paragraph.

What instance is more wholesome? As written, your comment is like saying IRC is more wholesome. It is? On what server?

Also given that there's 36 million accounts in total, it seems hard to believe that 2 million of those accounts are following blacksky (5.6% of the bluesky user count) so something is off with the count here perhaps.

Bluesky and Mastodon are still the fringe of human community.

[0] https://youtu.be/8GQrVgHh6EU

So there's still full interop. You can use the blacksky feed and labeller from other bluesky apps and likewise for the reverse.

TLDR: They wrote their own implementation of the tooling in their language of choice (Rust instead of Go) and their version of the "app"/frontend sets the defaults for their community.

Assuming you absolutely trust Bluesky-the-company to behave itself now and in the future, it probably isn't necessary. If you don't, then this sort of step towards real decentralisation is important.

This largely makes Bluesky-the-broader-network immune to the Elon Musk factor, tho; even if some idiot buys and breaks Bluesky-the-company, you'd expect more Blacksky-like thing to bud off.

It's basically saying that the black population does have an impact on culture although there are no black CEOs of social media companies, just in a vaguely victimist black pride sort of way.

So at the very least, I recall hearing about it happening. It doesn't surprise me if people are claiming to have experienced it firsthand.

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/stream.place

The central services take a cut, but they also provide an audience through the recommendation systems. Which is why everyone tries to game the thumbnails, Shorts algorithm, etc.

It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app.

I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice.

All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.

Not necessarily. Just one famous example; BitTorrent is decentralized but for most people it's just "run this app, download files". "Decentralized" just means "doesn't rely on a centralized service to accomplish a goal". As long as the application isn't too complex to install and use, most folks won't care one way or the other whether it's decentralized or not, as long as it accomplishes the goal they're looking to accomplish.

1. Cross-platform engagement

Create content via one platform and engage with users on other platforms.

2. Moderation choice

Voluntarily opt into moderation policies that reflect the experience you want.

3. Data portability

Data portability and credible exit are built in (you can take your data and followers with you).

4. Advertising disincentive

Portability prevents lock-in or captive audiences, which disincentivizes advertising.

5. Algorithmic choice

Users can choose the feeds and algorithms that work for them.

It's not do it yourself, it's more having more control if you want too.

So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.

We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.

We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.

Limewire was installed on over one-third of computers world wide in 2007 [1]. That's because even grandma could press next->next->next on a window setup file and it just worked. There is no technical reason hosting your email isn't as easy as that.

Look at roof top solar panel. Literally hundreds of millions of households have roof top solar to generate decentralized power. The fundamental complexity in email hosting is hundred times less, but the software engineering community choose to not make it possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire

Here's a post on one of my Leaflet publications under my own domain: https://foxes.kyefox.com/3lx46ftzhhc27

This post is stored in Leaflet's own lexicon in its own collection right next to all my Bluesky data. I could move this to a different PDS if I wanted. I could come up with a script to turn the collection into static pages or convert them to another platform's import format.

Nobody cares about decentralization until they do[0] and AT seems to have the best answer for that eventuality.

[0] https://kyefox.com/nobody-cares-about-decentralization-until...

All while using the same client app everyone else is using, or even a custom 3rd party client.

The nature of the protocol is that everything is connected, but services of the protocol can be decentralized when a user chooses to use a 3rd party to do certain things for them.

Joining a community is a highly centralizing act. ;-p

While it's true that they have 'full' control over the protocol, they've stated that the goal is to hand it off to a more democratic organization once it's stable. This seems like a reasonable choice and I see no reason to distrust their motives here. Even if they did try something underhanded, it's not hard to fork the repositories and force the enshittified version to compete with the original.

What I like about the Bluesky setup is that you’ve got the potential for neighbor socialization while having central areas be accessible. What I’m not sure about is whether they’ll still have momentum when(if?) tech-averse users understand the model enough to use it. Because if there’s one thing that definitely isn’t social, it’s a lack of active users.

I think it’s far more likely to work than mastodon because there is that centralized hub for people who don’t give a shit about decentralization.

I still use a self hosted FreshRSS heavily and fortunately many sites still accidentally support it, but it could be so much easier for non tech people.