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Bluesky signups are now open to the public

bsky.social

211–220 of 284 posts

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#211
post #60

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…

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

On the other hand, Jack Dorsey has proven himself as someone who can be very successful founding a large microblogging social network with no business model.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#213
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.

This is an exaggeration. Yes, people flocked to Netscape.

Because, yes, it was marginally better than what was available, especially on Windows. But the main feature improvements that drove that initial rapid adoption was Netscape ignoring any attempt at agreement over standards and adding new "trinkets" like background images etc. in each release.

And yes, they created Javascript, in a rush, but there already were other client-side scripting options.

They were important, but their importance is inflated by looking back at a timeline where they won. We'd have lacked none of these things without them. They were one of many, and they were ahead in terms of features, but not by much, and the pressure they were under also left a wake of chaos.

E.g., sure, they invented SSL, rushed it out with massive security flaws (that was a fun time... one of the gaping holes was that if someone ran Netscape on the same host they ran their e-mail on, which was not unusual, you could get a whole lot of the bits needed to cut down on the cost of bruteforcing the SSL key by triggering an e-mail bounce to help you narrow down current process ids), but there were prototypes of encrypted socket layers around for two years already by then e.g. see Simon S Lam's work on SNP [1].

"Nobody" used Netscape's web server - which wasn't developed by Netscape anyway (it was acquired from Kiva, unless Netscape had a pre-Kiva web-server I've forgotten) - it was way too expensive. It was a market leader, yes, but in a crowded tiny niche of commercial servers. I ran an ISP around that time. I sold packages to businesses, and we'd have loved to convince customers to pay for Netscape server software, but most people stuck with NSCA HTTPD, and quickly switched to Apache 1995 onwards.

[1] https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/simon-s-lam/

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#215

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.

They may have done all those things and more. How did they actually make money? What's your equivalent?

They sold the browser until that market was yanked out from under them, and they leveraged control of the homepage into sales of their serverside packages, and then they sold out to AOL before their longevity was ever tested.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#216

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,…

What is a "skeet"?

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#217

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.

Same here, I was on the waitlist for a few months, during that time I saw no evidence that anyone joined Bluesky via the waitlist. Eventually I got lucky and found someone who was giving out invites on Twitter, but by then all of my friends are no longer interested in joining yet another social network.

I hope Bluesky prospers since it has some features that Mastodon and Twitter lacks, but it has a lot of catching up to do.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, I guess I meant for long-lived products.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#220
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

On the other hand, Jack Dorsey has proven himself as someone who can be very successful founding a large microblogging social network with no business model.

I think Elon Musk proved Jack Dorsey to be that someone.
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