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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

#121

Post by AJ007 »

shafyy wrote: post #69
jakebsky wrote: post #41

Earlier 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…

The big lesson to me has been for a platform to be open, there must be both third party clients and third party servers. A service that has only one backend server that no one else can run (looking at you Signal) isn't ok anymore. Even worse, Twitter or Reddit being "open" because they have an API: that's all bullshit, and you are setting yourself up to be rug pulled. We don't need to hear these lies anymore and it's time to move on from the services making either of those claims. I'm waiting for a little more progress and third party control to make a judgement on Bluesky.

Users should think of this in terms of buy in cost. If you use a particular platform for 10 years, and build a community on it, you can take advantage of that and you get a mostly free service. But at some point the bill comes, and you move on. However, I keep thinking that the reason why some of those open third party protocols - even including email - "suck" is because so much of the time and focus has been on these proprietary, commercial communications platforms.

I feel so old now I went from thinking email is a terrible way of communicating to, actually Facebook is far worse. Instead of seeing updates from my friends I'm looking at a firehose of noise of things I can't control and have zero interest in. Nearly 20 years later, I use e-mail every day and Facebook 0.

Veering off-topic, but seeing conversations running for many years over the standards implementation and feature parity of the clients and servers both for XMPP and Matrix (meaning each separately, not inter-operating XMPP and Matrix, but rather each protocol has many servers and many clients, all trying to keep up with a moving protocol spec without breaking backwards compatibility), I have to laugh that a piece of legislation can just magically open the doors a some potentially very convoluted and continuously changing communications platform to third parties.

It could be even more self defeating and monopoly re-enforcing if those platforms are relaying to users of third party apps the features they are missing along with warnings about non-existent encryption and everyone can read their messages.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#122

Post by timeon »

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…

Can you elaborate on point 3? What do you think are the differences or pain points of Mastodon that Bluesky fixes?

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#123

Post by Mistletoe »

miroljub wrote: post #43
Mistletoe wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because we need new ones badly. Reddit and Twitter are two sinking bot-infested enshittification ships and we need a new place to go. Network lock-in is proving to be a very difficult nut to crack in the dystopia we have created though. You need people to jump ship but no one wants to go where the millions of eyes aren’t.

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

Reddit wasn’t for a long time. Having leadership in place that actually cares about the users and doing something about bots would go a long way. Maybe when Reddit IPOs and it is a huge bust we can get some new sites going.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#124

Post by vidarh »

AJ007 wrote: post #81
jakebsky wrote: post #41

Earlier 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…

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…

That, to me, is an argument for improving the existing account portability of ActivityPub, not for starting from scratch.

To me, the Not Inventented Here feel to Bluesky makes me want to stay far away. People will bridge it to ActivityPub anyway.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#125

Post by [deleted] »

Kinrany wrote: post #104
shafyy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#126

Post by delecti »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #24

I'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…

Regarding your edit, much of bluesky's culture is developing in reaction to Twitter, or based on lessons learned from it. That block-first attitude is a response both to the kinds of bots that are endemic on Twitter, and to the kinds of engagement-bait that made it such a mess at times. New follower looks like it might be a bot? Block. See a skeet from someone who looks like an asshole? Block. Don't feed the trolls, just block and move on. Personally I tend to mute, rather than block, but I think lots of social media would be better if people didn't boost things they dislike for the purpose of dunking or disagreeing.

And to be clear, not all of bluesky's culture is a response to twitter, a lot of it is just the kind of lighthearted playfulness you can only get on a small and new social network.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#127

Post by thinkingtoilet »

tootie wrote: post #105
Sol- wrote: post #47

Reading 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 modera…

>we see a nonprofit organization who makes no bones about their moderation policy

The problem is that the rules will be made by humans and will be enforced by humans. This will never be even close to perfect, especially with bad actors which are inevitable when a platform gets popular enough.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#128

Post by jakebsky »

alexb_ wrote: post #118
jakebsky wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll see! The history of funded companies popularizing open protocols is not without precedent. I'm inspired by Netscape, which was the VC-backed company that made the web happen.

Maybe I'm just being a hater, but the inspiration being a web browser that failed after being acquired by AOL at dot-com level stupid high prices, doesn't inspire confidence at all. Sure, it helped pave the way for Firefox, but Netscape itself never actually did anything.

Netscape created the first highly usable web browser, which introduced most people to the web. They also created SSL (TLS), JavaScript, the first high performance web server, and much more that that made the web go.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#129

Post by delecti »

Aachen wrote: post #120

Are there mobile apps for Blueky? When I type bluesky or bsky into f-droid, it comes up blank, and I'm not seeing a custom repository or even just an apk download mentioned on the website either. I thought it was like Mastodon except invite-only (till now), so was expecting a similar client ecosystem, but apparently it's more like Twitter was: open ecosystem closed software? Or is it like Tildes whose goal is to have…

There's an official app on the play store. I don't know if it has been mirrored to any other app stores/repositories, but perhaps knowing the app ID will help find it elsewhere. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.blueskyweb...

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#130

Post by timeon »

WD-42 wrote: post #56
Sol- wrote: post #47

Reading 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…

This exactly. It’s not the platform, it’s the people. I think social networks work fine for small niche communities where conversion stays focused. The problem with all general social networks is that they eventually all devolve into political flame wars. Everyone is just over it.

Niche communities around some topic work well if people that are interested come and go.

But if the niche is artificially created by fact that community is gated, then such community is not sustainable. Cabin fever and general fatigue of users.

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