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Bluesky signups are now open to the public

bsky.social

231–240 of 284 posts

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#231
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was a rhetorical question.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#232

[dead]

If you are outside US, joining Farcaster via Warpcast will cost $5.

I joined, and the UX does feel quite slick. Mostly it is just crypto users on this network.

Note that Farcaster is not decentralized, but "sufficiently decentralized" https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To date they've done very little Not true. You can now follow Adam Mosseri's Threads account from Mastodon. And like you said they are committed to fully rolling it out this year.

Limited functionality for a specified subset of users counts as "very little" to my mind given that they launched 6 months ago and have a team of hundreds working on it. But like I said, I sincerely do hope Threads follows through on their plan to federate. But it's just not correct to claim that they already have.

Maybe you I and understand the software development process differently.

Supporting one user end to end is a huge milestone and the first step in rolling it out to the other hundreds of millions of users. Especially when Threads isn't a standalone platform but is built on top of Instagram which means we could see it integrated with ActivityPub as well.

The fact that Meta cares about ActivityPub at all is a huge win for open, interoperable standards.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#235
post #108
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The handful of moderately large instances that have shut down rhat I'm aware of gave long notices, in a couple of cases over a year, before actually going offline.

The only notable counterexample I remember was BitcoinHackers.org shutting down suddenly with a note saying "haha look at how easy it is for mastodon instances to shut down go use nostr", making it a self-fulfilling prophecy in that case. If you have other examples I would like to know about them.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

The unofficial name for a post on bluesky. It comes from a combination of "sky" and "tweet". The people running the site don't like that name, which of course only made people embrace it even more.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#237
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've mostly been able to curate my Twitter feed to not include that stuff. Similarly for Mastodon. The problem is BlueSky tries to add algorithmic feeds while not doing it well enough to learn that I don't want to see it.

I think the future has to be feed ingestion that is 100% controlled by the user. To some extent we were there with RSS readers. I'm still able to retrieve Twitter feeds with an RSS reader. Everything comes together in one place, in order. If this is done on device and everything is archived, it starts getting really powerful. For example, after the 737 MAX door incident, I searched "Boeing" in my RSS reader and insta…

Look man, I'm a regular HN reader and even I don't buy into this. Are ads really the problem they are made out to be here? I'm asking because I don't mind and haven't mind about seeing an ad in years. In fact, I think they are perfectly good compromise when it comes to monetizing a website. Even HN has ads for gods sake. I even was okay with those old porn ads in The Pirate Bay or in 4chan, etc. Sure, if it's too much of that it can get annoying but whatever. On the other hand, the vast majority of people don't even know what RSS is and haven't even noticed a change in Twitter in the last few years. I'm sure most of them, believe it or not, aren't even aware of the transition to Elon Musk.

I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but perhaps you and the tech industry in general are vastly overestimating a extremely niche opinion and a "nothingburger". For example, cookies. Now we have extremely annoying cookie banners everywhere, when they didn't matter at all. Why? Because if I'm using an icognito browser, what are they going to track? Do you think I REALLY care? What are they going to do with that? Track me and offer me catered ads? I don't think "they" can, but even if they do, big fucking deal.

I'm a lot more worried about Know Your Customer policies on everything, or social media platforms (or even hosting platforms) deplatforming you if they don't like your opinion, or the FBI planting child porn on your site if they want to take it down. Do you think I'll worry about an AD out of all things?

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#238
post #137

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…

Perhaps Jake is saying that it is more important to make the world better right now than to have 100 year business plan. It sounds like Jake is willing to lead the charge for now and risk death later if it means that the concept succeeds under any flag.

Or maybe I'm just putting words in their mouth.

What if the founders of MySpace are totally ok with its place in history and happy that social media under any name carries on their vision? Maybe they don't consider that a failure.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#239
post #235
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.

The handful of moderately large instances that have shut down rhat I'm aware of gave long notices, in a couple of cases over a year, before actually going offline. The only notable counterexample I remember was BitcoinHackers.org shutting down suddenly with a note saying "haha look at how easy it is for mastodon instances to shut down go use nostr", making it a self-fulfilling prophecy in that case. If you have other…

I've personally had to migrate instances twice. The first time because the instance suddenly became nonfunctional, and the administrator went AWOL. The second time, I discovered that the incompetent admin had silently enabled auto-deletion of data including posts and direct messages.

Now I'm finally on mastodon.social, which wasn't open for new users the first two times that I needed an instance.

Re: Bluesky signups are now open to the public

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, I am in the process of simplifying the offering and split down the site for managed hosting and the "standard" service. https://communick.com/packages/access should you give a link to the package: $29/year for Mastodon/Matrix/Lemmy/Funkwhale.
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