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Bluesky signups are now open to the public

bsky.social

191–200 of 284 posts

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#191

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

Dorsey isn't running Bluesky, he's just one member of the board.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#192
post #58
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…

I don't understand how people believe they just "end up" like that. You don't ever need to see celebrities and related junk online. Just follow your friends and don't follow anyone else.

The obvious answer is that people want it.

I follow a bunch of musicians. I love going to concerts, and it’s the easiest way to find out when they announce tours. The unfortunate reality is that scalpers make buying tickets a terrible experience, so unfortunately I have a strong interest in knowing exactly when tickets go on sale to improve my own chances of getting tickets.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#193
post #162
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> You can if the server is operational. And if Bluesky's servers stop being operational? Where is your data hosted?

Its not even that.

Look at Shitter and Reddit: they just turned off API access and introduced heavy rate limits to webpage loads. Good luck scraping your account details with that.

Enshittification is a thing with ALL commercial services. And eventually BlueSky will have their "The sky is falling! Crank the money extraction lever." And I'd move that timeframe up a LOT if they took VC money.

Feces, err, uhmm VCs want their hockeystick growth to be a hockeystick. They want their 30x , 50x, or 100x.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly this is fucking whacko to me. "We've incorporated a legal entity whose entire purpose is to make money, but we have no idea how that's going to happen." How is this even allowed?

Anyway the answer is ads. This just means it's going to be ads. It's always fucking ads. No one has ever gone into a capitalistic venture sans business plan and ended up doing anything besides selling fucking ads.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#195
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think the goal should ever be "perfect". The problem I see with any commercial endeavor (this is probably as sideways critique of capitalism) is that if you have profit as the superseding interest, it will always be in conflict with being fair or being inclusive. At the same time what someone like Elon Musk clearly doesn't understand is the fundamental conflict between having an environment that fosters fruitful conversation vs absolutist free speech. Just having a platform that has a clear number goal of "free sharing of information and idea" at the top says clearly that it will come before platforming troublemakers or letting advertisers put their finger on the scales.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#196
post #13
post #9

Can't choose your own handle (it's taken).

Your handle can be your personal domain or any domain also.

My domains are not my handle, and even so, I can't buy a domain with the handle I'd prefer (it's taken).

My point was subtle, that this shouldn't be an issue. It has been solved in various ways.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#197
I am over social media just like I was over trying to become a mayor of something on FourSquare, wasting time on useless virtual accolades.

There IS a way to use this to develop your online professional brand, but it is so hard not to get bogged down in the swamp full of below-average intelligence, bots, and now AI garbage.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#198
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They may have done all those things and more.

How did they actually make money? What's your equivalent?

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#200

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…

Y'all let the public in before finishing your wait-list. I joined the list on 2023-03-02. Y'all didn't email me that signups were going to be public. Y'all didn't email me when signups actually went public. I found out about it here. ...And, let's see.. Yep, my handle is taken.

Sorry about that. You definitely should have received a waitlist invite. We did invite everyone on the waitlist before launching. The deliverability of those emails was quite high but it's possible it went to the spam folder or something else went wrong.

Something like 1 million of the users that joined came from the waitlist.

Most users on HN are probably able to navigate using a domain handle, which is really the recommended and most decentralized option.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutor...

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