Bluesky now has 30 million users • Hacker News Board

Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users

#81

Post by paulgb » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 12:52 PM UTC

FreeTrade wrote: post #54

ChicagoDave wrote: post #41

No Ads. 100% user-centric moderation controls. Blockity block! Block lists are a godsend. This is what made Dorsey quit the board and abandon the platform. He actually believed the masses wanted a libertarian platform that forced you to listen to assholes. We don’t. No opaque algorithms controlling your timeline. Feeds to create topic centric timelines. Decentralized. You can host your own data. Other hosts can offer…

Muting is fine, blocking is censorship. You'll know it is decentralized when someone can run an instance and remove the blocking and censorship. (Never, I predict)

You already could have a client that treats a block as a mute. Easier to just open an incognito tab though.

> In theory, a bad actor could create their own rogue client or interface which ignores some of the blocking behaviors, since the content is posted to a public network. But showing content or notifications to the person who created the block won’t be possible, as that behavior is controlled by their own PDS and client.

https://docs.bsky.app/blog/block-implementation

Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users

#82

Post by synthetic-echo » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 12:54 PM UTC

donohoe wrote: post #53

Pufferbo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be left out of the conversation when comparing Bluesky with the wider fediverse. The AT protocol relies on a bespoke setup and is complicated to implement. ActivityPub is comparatively simple, and can be implemented on pretty every thing with just a few endpoints.

If ActivityPub is “simple” then that’s a recent’ish development. It used to be a mess. I would imagine AT gets easier to use/setup given time too.

They said comparatively simple. As in, simple compared to AT

Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users

#83

Post by aaron695 » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 12:54 PM UTC

upofadown wrote: post #60

Bluesky is less attractive right now to Canadians who are participating in the boycott of US products. So Mastodon seems a better fit. There is even a collector page for Canadian Mastodon servers: * https://mastodonserver.ca/

[dead]

Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users

#84

Post by waysa » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 12:55 PM UTC

retskrad wrote: post #50

Monthly active users in a vacuum docent mean anything. Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users but has zero relevance. Bluesky and Threads have no cultural foot print compared to X.

Zero relevance to what/who? There are a lot of "older" people on Facebook who are on no other platform. Super useful for targeted advertising. X users are more likely to also use other social media like Instagram and TikTok. This is why companies can afford stop advertising on X without much issue.

Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users

#85

Post by pndy » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 12:56 PM UTC

firecall wrote: post #21

Bluesky - the Social Network where everybody posts screenshots of the awful things people post on other social networks!

Can I share my experience?

I registered bluesky account for the second time last Friday and I've pick no interests during first login. Last year I had Discovery feed filled with drawn porn despite of my settings. And now on a fresh account it's mainly American politics - while setting are more liberal regarding adult content. I followed nearly 60 people but only few of them are active. The global stream overall seems to be much "slower" than public federated one on mastodon. My partner complains he gets furry porn in Discovery while having a zero interest in that - he follows only 11 accounts.

I haven't bumped on screenshots from twitter so far.

Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users

#86

Post by LelouBil » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 12:56 PM UTC

apichat wrote: post #24

nspattak wrote: post #13

half the comments so far talk about bluesky being similar to x ie private companies. However AFAIK the use of the "AT protocol" seems to me to be a major difference https://bsky.social/about/faq . I am really curious to know how I am wrong in that. As a long time X user and now on bluesky i can tell that there is a huge difference in the content which makes it clear that the platform was pushing accounts with specifi…

Can you prove to us that it is possible to interact with someone on Bluesky without being registered on Bluesky? Threads use e ActivityPub but we know it's bullshit and that they will shut down the network as soon as possible. Bluesky is the same shit. AT protocol is just a honey pot.

I did not use Bluesky a lot, and just set it up to try self-hosting.

From what I know :

- Right now you can self-host your PDS (Personal Data Server) that hosts your user account basically, and all of your user content (posts, images, etc...)

- The easiest way to register is to use bluesky's frontend, and specifying your PDS address, I didn't try to self-host it too but I would assume if you self-host the bluesky web app, or just do the api calls to your PDS by hand or in another application, registration would work too.

- From what I understood, when you post, it is completely stored on your PDS, and then there are kinds of "mega nodes", (I think they are called Firehoses ?) That aggregate from a bunch of PDS, (and the official bsky.social PDS) and present it to end users. I don't think you can self-host theses just yet.

So, in the end, I think you can absolutely interact on Bluesky without being registered, by installing your own PDS and only making calls to create an account on it and post on it, without having an account elsewhere. However, the "end user" part is still closed off for now, since the Blue Sky Frontend uses *official* aggregators that could theoretically refuse your posts.

Go here for more information:

https://atproto.com/

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/atproto

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/firehose

Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users

#87

Post by rvz » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 12:58 PM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #7

homebrewer wrote: post #3

You would think people would learn from their mistakes and not move onto another centralized platform backed by VC money, but here we are.

People don’t really care about decentralisation. Bluesky arrived at the right time, unlike Mastodon.

> Bluesky arrived at the right time, unlike Mastodon.

In fact Mastodon had a better chance than BlueSky ever had, but had a significantly worse onboarding experience.

Mastodon was there at the right time, (Nov 2022) but was extremely unprepared to onboard millions of users simultaneously and more people were left confused on how to use the platform or even how to create an account or "which instance" to sign up to.

This is the obvious reason why BlueSky succeeded and took off, as predicted. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185

Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users

#88

Post by linuxftw » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 1:00 PM UTC

The reason Twitter was successful is they paid celebrities and corporations to join their network. That usage seems to have waned in favor of Instagram, but Twitter is still the #1 place for breaking news, especially in the sports world.

I think many people supporting bluesky assume the value is in attracting the plebeians. I don't see that being the case. There are already Facebook groups and reddit (among traditional forums) if you want to interact with your peers.

Is bluesky an alternative to twitter? In form, yes, in function, no.

Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users

#89

Post by LelouBil » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 1:01 PM UTC

homebrewer wrote: post #3

You would think people would learn from their mistakes and not move onto another centralized platform backed by VC money, but here we are.

What put me off from mastodon is the fact that you can't migrate your account easily.

Yes, Bluesky is more centralized, but I feel like it is decentralized in the ways that matter for a Twitter/X Alternative use case :

- Self hosting of data, easy migration - Automatic verification via DNS - Custom feeds, Custom moderation, but you can still use the official ones

Re: Bluesky now has 30 million users

#90

Post by gwervc » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 1:02 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #39

mytailorisrich wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter/X has shown to be no more than a self-promotion and PR platform as soon as it became popular. Just disposable snippets (pretty much the definition of a 'twit') to drive views. The same will apply to Bluesky. It does not matter whether it is centralized or not, VC money or not, as long as it serves that purpose. In fact a centralized system probably serves this purpose better as it is easier for the users and…

The fundamental difference is that X is focussed on its "For You" feed while Bluesky focusses on "Following". They are similar tools, but the different approach means one is far closer to "self-promotion and PR" than the other, and I don't think it's inevitable that Bluesky will descend to X's depths.

The fundamental difference is in the public: extreme-left for bluesky, trumpist for truth social and twitter for whoever isn't making a platform choice part of its identity.