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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

#201

Post by andruby »

taco_emoji wrote: post #194
jakebsky wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really hope they do freemium.

If they can run it with a small enough team, then freemium could be feasible. Sell special tools and functions to the power users.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#202

Post by ldoughty »

annexrichmond wrote: post #179

I selected my interests as Cooking, Fitness, Nature, Video Games, and my feed has absolutely none of that. Just random politics, activism, and jabs at Twitter. Anyway, nope.

I found this confusing too

I think the interests section was to try get you to find people and feeds.. but after that, the feeds (or just the Discovery feed?) are influenced by who you follow.. so if you are offered a 'bad' (for you) starting group of people to follow, your feed will probably not be great until you find people you like (that are active) and follow them too.

Also was unsure what "Follow all +" button was.. why not "Follow Selected".. and a 'deselect all'.. I had no idea who all but 2 of the suggestions were. Not going to follow a random "Computer Scientist" the system picked for me sight/posts unseen.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#203

Post by Ruthalas »

rglullis wrote: post #153
rvnx wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit macro and optimistic view about sustainability (in general, not specific to Bluesky): If everything goes according to the prediction of economists for 2024, a light crisis should decrease consumer confidence in the US. One of the solution to re-energize the economy might be to lower interest rates. Which means that if interest rates go down in 2024, companies are going to be able to borrow at extremely low cost…

Speaking as someone who has been stubbornly offering paid-for-access Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix (and now Funkwhale) accounts at communick.com for 5+ years, I learned already that very few individuals are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Everyone loves to complain about the exploits of the tech companies, but no one really cares about paying for a service unless it gives some sense of exclusivity. What is g…

This sounds interesting to me, but visiting communick.com I can't figure out how much the service costs, nor see any way to find out. I see a sign up page, but it also has no pricing info.

Can you direct me to that in info?

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#204

Post by jakebsky »

skybrian wrote: post #142
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…

Any plans to improve the search engine?

Yes, it's always a bit of an after thought (unfortunately) but we have improved it already a couple of times.

And like most things with atproto, there will likely be protocol support for pluggable search engines, so users can choose their search provider(s).

It's already entirely possible for others to operate atproto search engines since all the data is public and available.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#205

Post by vidarh »

andybak wrote: post #159
vidarh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying they "made the web happen" is just nonsense. They had one of several popular browsers, and one of several popular web servers. As much as I stayed up late to download new Netscape betas, had they never existed the web would still be just fine, and the customers of the ISP I ran at the time would have just used another browser.

Hmmmm. I would argue the web would have been significanty different. There was a fairly big gap between Mosaic and Internet Explorer that Netscape filled and it was the period that largely defined the web as it came to be. Since IE was developed specifically to counter the threat of Netscape - it was also defined by Netscape. What other browsers of note were around in that period?

Netscape 0.9 was released in October '94. IE was released in August '95 and the first version was just a licensed rebrand of Spyglass Mosaic (which despite the licensed Mosaic name was not a version of Mosaic).

There was a number of browsers coming up at that time, and Mosaic was if anything what drove much of that early boom, as the most successful option that led to both Netscape, Spyglass, and by extension IE.

Remember that Mosaic was readily licensed (and source available, though not under an open source license) - there were a number of other Mosaic offshoots (e.g. AMosaic for Amiga was released in December '93, with datatypes support)

Other browsers than Netscape around that era, excluding the text based ones, included:

* 1992: ViolaWWW (Unix; pioneered embedded objects, stylesheets, tables, client-side scripting); Erwise (Unix); MidasWWW (Unix)

* 1993: Spyglass (licensed the Mosaic name, but written from scratch; also the origin of IE), AMosaic (Amiga), Cello (Windows), any number of Mosaic licensees, Arena (Unix, Linux, NeXT; pre-release in '93; full public release '94; Arena was co-written by the later Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie, and pioneered layout extensions that turned into work on stylesheets and eventually CSS)

* 1994: Argo (Bert Bos - co-creator of CSS; Unix; testbed for style sheets alongside Arena, and one of the first heavily plugin based browsers, with most functionality provided by plugins), IBM WebExplorer (Mosaic licensee); Slipknot (Windows; a really weird one which dealt with lack of SLIP/PPP connections by "hijacking" a Unix terminal connection, running lynx to retrieve the HTML, and then using zmodem to transfer both the HTML and images...)

* 1995: IE (licensed version of Spyglass); Grail (Python; supported client side execution of Python...); OmniWeb (Mac)

* 1996: Amaya (Unix, Windows, Linux, OS X), IBrowse (Amiga), Aweb (Amiga); Opera (Windows initially); Cyberdog; Arachne (DOS, Linux including framebuffer...; still updated as of two years ago...)

Netscape took a lot of users from various Mosaic licensees, like Spyglass, and browsers like Cello; had it not existed, sure, things would have looked different, but timeline-wise the gap was narrow. Many of the browser - like Opera - that launched after Netscape had started development before Netscape launched, and others were abandoned in some cases directly because of Netscape. Some were probably no big loss, but Netscape's brief dominance contributed to the near monoculture we had for many years.

There is no doubt it had improvements over Mosaic - I remember vividly the day the release with background image support spread across campus and every webpage looked garish for the next several years - but it was an advantage measured in months, and with competition heating up until Netscape stunted it for quite some time by becoming as dominant as they did until IE started catching up.

A lot of the things Netscape is sometimes remembered for were not Netscape firsts either, or areas where they necessary had a lead. E.g. client-side scripting, style sheets, etc existed before Netscape; work on CSS was ongoing at CERN around the time Netscape launched etc. At most things would have looked different, and maybe some things might have taken a bit more time without Netscape scaring Microsoft. But I also remember a lot of ire at how Netscape pre-empted a lot of standards at the time by just throwing stuff at the wall, and untangling the mess they left took years.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#206

Post by tristan957 »

computer23 wrote: post #173

I've had some concerns about the namespacing issue. Bluesky accounts should be permitted to have both a bsky.social username and one with a custom domain. If I am a company and want to use @myname.com as my username, I would not want someone @myname.bsky.social to fall into the hands of anyone else. So it sort of necessitates signing up for 2 accounts, if only to reserve your name so nobody takes it.

Mastodon solves this through verified accounts.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#207

Post by DoItToMe81 »

packetlost wrote: post #79
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…

Yeah, I've tried to seek out and post technical stuff but it's mostly people virtue signalling, rage baiting, and complaining about other sites.

Most "Twitter alternatives" don't deal with the fundamental, sensation-seeking oriented flaws in the medium and just turn out to be Twitter with more perpetually upset losers.

It's disappointing, because a lot of work has gone into these. Especially Mastodon and Pleroma.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#208

Post by vidarh »

alexb_ wrote: post #137
jakebsky wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah, I'm not denying that Netscape pioneered a lot of stuff. They also would have went out of business had they not been bought by AOL at a stupid, dot-com inflated price. You can do something that creates a lot of changes in the world, but if your business model involves giving people things for less than it takes to produce then I don't see how that's a business. What are VCs expecting to get a return on their…

They pioneered very little. Viola pioneered client side scripting, stylesheets and more. Netscape popularized a number of things, thanks to heaps of cash that let them market heavily, and in the process overtaking a bunch of competitors, and snuffing out many of them. They did have a great browser that was best for a period of a few years, but it's not like there weren't plenty of alternatives either out or right around the corner when they launched.

Fully agree with you they would not have survived long if the AOL sale hadn't happened.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#209

Post by coldpie »

taco_emoji wrote: post #194
jakebsky wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ads are the most frequent answer, but it's not the only one. There's also the team getting acqui-hired, or getting bought by a competitor & shut down, or just plain old going out of business and sold for parts. None of those are good for users, obviously, but they are all viable paths for repaying VCs in absence of a business model.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#210

Post by kivle »

jakebsky wrote: post #157
jillesvangurp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried all sorts of variations of my number. It just won't take it. I expect their validation is wonky/buggy. I used to work for Nokia and remember talking to people responsible for parsing phone numbers. This is not a trivial problem. Anyway, it hard rejects +49176..., 0049176..., 0176..., 176...; it correctly normalizes each of those to +49176... and then rejects the number. My number is fine. Their validation isn…

Sorry about this. We've just made some changes to make this less likely of an issue going forward.

Same problem with my Norwegian phone number just now.
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