What is Bluesky?
[flagged]
I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
41–50 of 294 posts
Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
#42Bluesky is absurd in both its small village feel and the breadth of people who post there and you can interact with. It's the same vibe as very early clubhouse. Broke artists next to philanthropists.
All invite-only early-access things that get hot are like it; once they go to general availability they go to shit, it seems.
[deleted]
Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
#43I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist. It might go poorly, but I'm unwilling to write off weird attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in the wild. I've seen several posts lately that have made me feel like the HN sentiment towards Bluesky is negative. Throwing them under the bus for the domain validation mistake. Hatred at commercialization of a protocol. Qu…
> I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist. It might go poorly, but I'm unwilling to write off weird attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in the wild. Isn't it just a variation of mastodon?
no.
Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
#44So not even 10,000 posts a day. Is it really worth having topics about a barren social network reach the homepage every day?
Hackernews is also a social network - and it seems like this thing works with even less posts per day?
You don't need a huge following to have a functioning social group.
Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it's anti-Elon, or maybe it's anti-the-things-Elon-is-doing-to-Twitter. Just because the people who like Elon have joined a cult of personality doesn't mean the people who dislike what he's done to Twitter have done the same. For example, I still think Tesla's are cool cars and Space X is doing exciting things. For me, Twitter has become absolutely unusable. Every person on my FYP and in the replies is someone…
[flagged]
[flagged]
Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
#46Given that Bluesky makes it this easy to download data, it's quite alarming that the graph of who blocks & mutes who is fully public and easy to extract into a database: https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-graph#appbskygraphgetb...
On Twitter, blocking a toxic user does not notify them - while they can query the block status of one profile at a time, they can never get a full list of people who block them. But it would be trivial to create a Bluesky app view that provides this inverted index. And some people would be inclined to use the list of people who block them as a "target list" of people whose views differ from them, to share with their networks as prospects for targeted harassment that may even cross into real-life violence. (The fact that critics of the infamous Ki*f*ms forum have been swatted - and that I am even now reticent to type the full name - is just the tip of the iceberg of potential dangers here.)
I hope that Bluesky comes up with a better mechanism here - it's tough to do in a federated system, but research like https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1577.pdf may be helpful.
Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
#47some quick thoughts/notes (I am on the bluesky team, but this isn't an official policy statement):
- content on bluesky is public, but we have not set expectations/comms around that well yet, and this dump may be a surprise to some existing accounts. where exactly bluesky falls on the spectrum from "congressional register (immutable)" to "public web" to "public IRC or discord room" to "private signal group" is still being worked out, but probably closest to "public web"
- the protocol supports both "deletions" (retaining history), and "purge" (aka "rebase") to remove all not-current content. this isn't exposed via UI yet and accounts have not had the chance to purge old deletions
- the federation protocol and unified firehose should make it possible for third parties to maintain a live mirror of the entire corpus. importantly, it will be easy (or at least "easier") to respect intents w/r/t deletions when done this way, compared to dumps
- obviously neither "deletion" nor "purge" can perfectly remove content from 3rd party dumps and infra, or from hostile parties. but it does signal user intent clearly, and we expect as a norm that third parties will respect that intent. ADS-B, robots.txt, CC licensing are related to these norms, though all unique. right-to-be-forgotten, archiving, re-use licensing, use in ML training, commercial/non-profit reuse, search indexing, etc, are all on our radar
- blobs/images are not included in this corpus
- this specific corpus does not (I assume) include our important "label" moderation metadata. at least for our (Bluesky) core moderation decisions, that information will be public
- private/group content is not yet part of protocol. eg, no built-in mechanism for DMs or follower-only posts. we will probably do those eventually, but it will be basically a whole separate protocol, not a bolt-on to existing stuff. wildly different privacy/security concerns with non-public content
- there are some other cool projects, like https://bsky.jazco.dev/, working with the full social graph, pulled via public API
Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
#48Bluesky is absurd in both its small village feel and the breadth of people who post there and you can interact with. It's the same vibe as very early clubhouse. Broke artists next to philanthropists.
All invite-only early-access things that get hot are like it; once they go to general availability they go to shit, it seems.
There was a post here about a year ago that summarizes this pretty well[1]; I've honestly gone back to read it a few times for my own projects as it offers some good perspective and framing.
> My take is, if a community is constrained by quality (eg moderation, self-selecting invite-only etc) then the only way it grows is by lowering the threshold. Inevitably that means lower quality content. To some extent, more people can make up for it. Eg if I go from 10 excellent artists to 1000 good ones, chances are that the top 10% artwork created actually gets better.
> But eventually if you grow by lowering quality, then, well, quality drops.
> I suppose for very small societies, they may be limited by discoverability/cliquiness and not quality, so their growth doesn’t mesh with quality and so they could also get better with size.
> Note, “quality” doesn’t have to mean good/bad but also just “property”. When Facebook started, it was for kids from elite schools. It then gradually diluted that by lowering that particular bar. Then it was for kids from all schools. Then young people. Then their parents too. Clearly, it’s far from dying in absolute terms, but it’s certainly no longer what it initially was. To many initial users, it’s as good as dead though.
Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
#49Last time I saw bsky on HN a maintainer shared a skip-waitlist invitation code ('anyone on HN is probably better behaved than some of the trolls we've dealt with', or something to that effect) - which was unfortunately dead by the time I found it। Any chance of an encore? Or I am on the waitlist: something I don't recall at username dot com।
Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
#50The fact that someone can download all posts on a social network tells you how little usage it has attracted.
You can download all of the (public) posts and comments on Reddit. It's a ~2TB torrent.