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Bluesky signups are now open to the public

bsky.social

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Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use ActivityPub? Why should we trust Dorsey again? What is one good reason to use Bluesky over Mastodon?

1. "Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements." https://atproto.com/guides/faq 2. Jack Dorsey is on the board but has no day-to-day role in the company. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and is in control. The protocol is also designed not to require trus…

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Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#64
post #45

This is a big milestone for Bluesky! We've had the federation sandbox running for over six months but we're now able to commit to open federation on the production network this month as well. There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use. The technical challenges of setting up an (efficiently) scalable decent…

What's the thinking on BGSes? I haven't seen much talk of who's expected to run them or what they'll look like, but they seem to be the linchpin of reliable data portability.

A Relay (we used to call it the BGS) crawls all of the PDS hosts on the network and aggregates the data. This makes it possible for services to subscribe to all events on the network without putting load on PDS hosts directly.

Anyone can run a Relay. They're somewhat comparable to Linux distribution FTP/HTTP mirrors.

Bluesky will always run a Relay, but other organizations will hopefully as well. We expect these might be organizations doing other things in the ecosystem, universities, and possibly open consortiums.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#68

Slightly off-topic on this, but are there any apps that manage posting across BlueSky/Mastodon/Threads/Linkedin? With the fragmentation of social networks and different audiences being in different places, it's a bit annoying to have to manually post in different places (taking account of things like hashtag formats and post length limits), it'd be nice to have a site/app that helped with that.

Definitely. Hootsuite is the one I’m familiar with but it’s targeted more at agencies or larger content creators and is priced for that.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use ActivityPub? Why should we trust Dorsey again? What is one good reason to use Bluesky over Mastodon?

1. "Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements." https://atproto.com/guides/faq 2. Jack Dorsey is on the board but has no day-to-day role in the company. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and is in control. The protocol is also designed not to require trus…

I'm more worried about the financing of Bluesky. You have taken VC money, and we all know what that means - growth at all costs.

> The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil.

I feel like we have seen this movie play out a few times. There are always way to close things down the road. For example, I can imagine that even with federation there will be a power law of distribution, and there's a high chance that most users will end up on official Bluesky servers. This means that you could one they stop federating, and most users would be backed in a walled garden. Sure, the protocol would be out there in the open, but it wouldn't matter because overnight it would lose most of its users.

I trust that you and the initial team has genuine motivation not to do this. Forgive me for being cynical, but history does reapeat itself.

I think the only antidote against this is regulation, as we're seing now with the DMA in EU that forces WhatsApp and other gate keepers to open their platform to other clients.

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