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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

At first, I thought that the fraction of people who want this kind of network of peers would be rather small. I thought that almost all people want extensive restrictions on user agents and controlling how the data is revealed to the user. But Bluesky actually does not restrict AI scraping and consumption of data. You're just yet another consumer, subject to rate-limiting etc. whether you are browser or headless agent. I have to say that I am somewhat (pleasantly) surprised that this approach is accepted by Bluesky considering the community is more anti-AI than most. The fact that you're allowed to consume the feed is amazing. Good stuff!

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I’ll give a pretty honest accounting of that.

We made it a pretty big goal from the start to clearly communicate to users that the network is extremely public, and that we believe open access to public content is an important part of preventing another round of walled gardens. This is generally understood and appreciated, but the community has a wide range of opinions about it. Some people see public as public and that they’re there to have their voice heard. Some people see it as a pretty uneasy arrangement at best, and would rather it wasn’t that way.

The atproto community has been spending a large portion of the year developing “atproto spaces,” which are essentially a way to cheaply mint mini-atprotos with access control. This is the answer to non public data. It will be added to the Bluesky app and the ecosystem, and it will remain accessible to apps based on the grants of the users, but the spaces will not broadcast their content on the firehose. I believe, based on the reception we’ve received from that work, that people appreciate that it’s being done, and that people eager for less exposure will pick it up.

This should, hopefully, resolve any tensions at play. We will continue to advocate for public speech and I think many people will continue to participate in it, but I am quite curious to see if the non public spaces gain more adoption overall. My guess, based on people’s general use of the internet, is that they naturally will. The public arenas serve a particular purpose and not everyone is always trying to be a part of them.

EDIT: did I really just say "let me give an honest accounting of that." I have been spending way too much time with llms.

> This is generally understood and appreciated

I don't think that's true. For example, nowhere on the blocking interface does it tell users that their blocks are public.

https://bsky.app/profile/edent.tel/post/3l4rjxx32br2j

Thank you for responding. Seems like a great choice overall.

> I am quite curious to see if the non public spaces gain more adoption overall. My guess, based on people’s general use of the internet, is that they naturally will. The public arenas serve a particular purpose and not everyone is always trying to be a part of them.

My guess, based on what happened in the past decade, is that it will definitely happen, a lot of people will be unhappy about it, but by then it'll be too late to stop it.

Private spaces have, by definition, a natural asymmetry to them: it's easy to find a plausible reason to turn a community private, an argument that resonates deeply with people, even if it's not applicable or completely bogus. It's hard to convince people to appreciate the fact that conversations in the open have value reaching beyond the participant. Public spaces are a gift to the world.

The way I see it: imagine WhatsApp, et al. came a decade earlier, and the Internet went dark in the early 2000s, suppressing the "blogging revolution". The idea of Internet as source of knowledge, a place where you can learn anything you're curious about, would've never happened earlier, as all knowledge would've gotten locked in private groups, out of reach of search engines. That's what happening right now - even in OSS, if not due to private groups then due to adoption of Discord and Slack as primary communication platforms. The public Internet is increasingly just commercial slop. But it never would've been anything else than slop if private groups came before blogs and social media.

Eh, I think this is overstating the case. Private groups did come before blogs and social media: remember Compuserve and AOL?

The underlying tension is the "dark forest". Opening yourself up gets a bigger audience. That feels like a good thing, until your reach expands to those hostile to you. Every community has always had to deal with abuse, but now there's much more coordinated, intentional attacks on communities, orchestrated (ironically) over social media.

Yes, also, the posts that are public appear to be all there is to people who don’t have access to private groups. Some people will copy that example and post in public too.

A way around that is to use a pseudonym, but it requires care to not post anything revealing.

There have been a couple attempts to "invade" or "takeover" Bluesky by various groups of haters, and theres two things that keep making it not go well for them:

A) since everything is public it's much easier to see what someone is about, what they are doing. Including the people coming to disrupt and inflame.

B) Bluesky's blocking actually gives folks the ability to deal with their haters, to block reposts for example. So folks can manage engagement they don't want.

It feels like there's almost no cases where communities are given the powers and capabilities to manage the problems. The attackers have been given all the benefits of dark forest advantages, with none of the downside. It feels like there is finally a bit more of a symmetry, and some systems for defense, which until now, no social network has allowed its users.

It's far from over, who knows how things go. But so far the antagonist world burners have not had nearly as good a chance setting fire to the scene as they have had everywhere else. I remain cautiously tentatively hopeful.

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