Requiring phone number is a straight no go from me, sorry.
It requires a phone number now? That's weird. The invites didn't require a phone number.
Bluesky signups are now open to the public
101–110 of 284 posts
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#102I've been on for a few months now. It feels like 2014 Twitter in that it doesn't have gifs or video, so you will see some very good jokes. A number of people I used to follow on Twitter are over there but seem to have broken out of the posting habit and are quieter now. When I look at the "discover" tab I don't usually see much stuff that's interesting to me. It's a lot of men posting thirst-traps, furries, bog stand…
> thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics
Maybe the biggest problem with Twitter never was its centralization.
It shouldn't be surprising that cloning Twitter mechanics just to decentralize it would result in the same signal-to-noise ratio as Twitter.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry, this is a non-answer. Is there a business model in mind or not?
We've announced one business model and do intend to iterate and add others, but that's all we've announced for now. The plan is definitely to be sustainable over the long-term.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
> There are always way to close things down the road.
If nothing else, Bitcoin is a successful existence proof. Maintaining control may be easier, but it's safe to say that Satoshi wouldn't be able to take control back now.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#105Reading testimonials from people who seemingly enjoy Bluesky, it sounds like the main perk is its exclusiveness and feeling like the good old days when Twitter was just for hardcore social media nerds? Is that that a recipe for success and wouldn't opening up undermine it? I don't see how any Twitter clone would avoid the pitfalls that make social media like Twitter fundamentally annoying. It's not about the technolo…
My dream of social media utopia is that that we see a nonprofit organization who makes no bones about their moderation policy and enforcement or their revenue and expenses. I think centralization is just the only way a network can grow to useful size or behave predictably. It's not really a social network, but my model for this is Wikimedia. They've built something incredibly durable, centralized, aggressively moderated and financially viable.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#106Note, it requires SMS verification
I wonder if that's true if you set up your own federated server.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#107Musk 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
> how actually unusable twitter was before the sale?
I do not know how usable it was but at least I was able to see the posts. Now I'm not. Well except for some lucky occasion when it shows the post just without replies.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You can migrate your account between instances and take your followers and follows with you. Server shutdowns are rare, since administrators tend to proactively limit registrations when activity starts to be a financial burden. Avoiding the growth-at-all-costs mindset means that instances can stay sustainable.
> You can migrate your account between instances and take tour followers and follows with you.
You can if the server is operational. If the server not operational and cooperative, you can't. And you can't migrate your posts, only your followers.
> Server shutdowns are rare
Not rare enough though.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#109Requiring phone number is a straight no go from me, sorry.
Understandable! We hope to relax this but we felt it was necessary to maintain the quality of the network for now.
Doesn't this go against the comic in the post that claims that it's easy to block what you don't want to see? Also that it's an open network? Why not just let everyone in if the moderation tools are good?
I definitely would never give my phone number to a social network.
Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public
#110Pretty ironic that when Twitter was imploding Meta launched a competitor that was fully compatible with ActivityPub/Mastodon while the team dedicated to building an open competitor (Bluesky) created a proprietary protocol that nobody uses.
Threads has been promising to integrate with ActivityPub since it launched. To date they've done very little and their timeline extends until the end of 2024. I'd personally be very happy if Threads gives up control over their users but it remains to be seen. ActivityPub also lacks the very strong account portability feature that made AT Protocol necessary. AT Protocol is completely open source and the Bluesky networ…
To be clear, strong account portability predates Bluesky by ~5 years. Peergos[0], as reviewed by Jay before Bluesky Inc was created, has had this for years: