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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

#81

Post by AJ007 »

jakebsky wrote: post #41
marxisttemp wrote: post #29

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…

The account portability is probably the biggest problem with the fediverse right now.

I finally signed up for Mastodon despite reading little to nothing positive about it on hn. It was easy to use, and the signal to noise ratio was vastly improved from my Twitter experience.

However, that lack of account portability means users can, have, and will continue to get cut off. Servers cost thousands of USD per months with no revenue and domain name ownership can magically vanish for many reasons. With no business model for server operators, these are significant issues.

That confusion for users may even be the primary force that drives them over to something like Facebook's Threads.

There are analogies to e-mail here for the server operator. If I said any numbers I would be making them up, but I'm assuming 1 Mastodon user costs a lot more, both in compute/bandwidth and support, than 1 e-mail user. Free servers are not going to scale.

Account portability doesn't solve this, but it means if something happens to one server operator, that user doesn't churn in to the ether and never return. I've been keeping an eye on https://fedidb.org/ (not my site.) While total users and servers keep going up over the past year, active users keep dropping. It could be something related to how they record usage, but it isn't a promising thing.

I'm less skeptical about long term adaptation. Most of the negative sentiment I've read on hn about Mastodon just was wrong. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft are all fully accelerating in to ad business models which will make much of their products less unappealing by the day. If history is any lesson, when a new competitor shows up without ads and a similar or better experience, the incumbent is in trouble.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#82

Post by lnxg33k1 »

zimpenfish wrote: post #42
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure, during the Twitter drama was in full swing Meta tried to launch an alternative, and how long did it last? A couple of weeks? I think social sector is filled, with boomers on facebook, cool people on instagram, kids on tiktok, woke on twitter, meme people on reddit?

> Meta tried to launch an alternative, and how long did it last? A couple of weeks? If you mean Threads, it's currently up to 130M monthly active users[0]. Estimates for Twitter late 2023-early 2024 are between 350-400M MAU. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/threads-now-reaches-more-1...

Ah okay, didn't know that, I've read some time after the launch that it was going desert, somewhere on an article linked here, I am not a social network person, so wasn't following it

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#83

Post by coldpie »

jakebsky wrote: post #73
coldpie wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious question is what your business model is. I know about your "we plan to sell domains" post from a bit ago[1], but that seems... optimistic, to me. Not sure I want to buy into yet another startup with no business model (e.g. Keybase). [1] https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan

Bluesky is in good financial shape for quite some time based on existing funding. And we're also working hard to be sustainable, which we believe is entirely feasible given our small team. But we're also ensuring that everything required to make the network sustainable over time is completely open.

That's not a very inspiring answer :( The consequences of taking VC money are going to come home to roost at some point.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#84

Post by MSFT_Edging »

RankingMember wrote: post #59
miroljub wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think any halfway popular social network won't be infested with bots and commercalizers?

My hope anyways is that there are more effective countermeasures. I remember Twitter not being nearly as bad before, but that was possibly just because verification actually meant something more than "have $10" and blue checks weren't turbo-boosted.

The fact that the verification system is paid, and that is abused by bots, means twitter no longer has any incentive to remove said bots.

Its basically the entire ad industry, there's little proof ads work, the metrics for ads are all inflated, yet its one of the biggest money makers out there. Same deal with the bots grinding views and likes for marginal payouts.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#85

Post by internetter »

hedora wrote: post #55
dev1ycan wrote: post #31

Musk has done a lot of questionable things, but does anyone remember how actually unusable twitter was before the sale? Musk Twitter has its own set of problems but Jack has proved he has no idea what he's doing

At this point, whenever I go to twitter, it shows status updates that are years out of date. For example, compare this: https://ubuntu.social/@launchpadstatus to this: https://twitter.com/launchpadstatus?lang=en

This is because you are logged out.

Please note that this is not me advocating for this practice. It has broken the web in immensely frustrating ways.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#86

Post by dumpsterlid »

jakebsky wrote: post #41
marxisttemp wrote: post #29

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…

[dead]

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#88

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

RobotToaster wrote: post #78
jakebsky wrote: post #15

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…

>There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use. Will people be able to opt out of your moderation services?

It sounds like you have to opt-in.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#89

Post by jakebsky »

RobotToaster wrote: post #78
jakebsky wrote: post #15

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…

>There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use. Will people be able to opt out of your moderation services?

Yes, every part of the Bluesky (atproto) network is composable, including moderation (labeling).

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#90

Post by meijer »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #80
anhner wrote: post #65

Requiring phone number is a straight no go from me, sorry.

And it rejects my german phone number. So, double fail. What's this obsession with using phone numbers. It's 2024! Any scammer can buy a burner phone. Owning a phone proves nothing other than that you own a phone.

Did you possibly enter the prefix +49 as part of the number?

It seems to expect a number without the country prefix, starting with a number like "174" or whatever your provider prefix is...

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