Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

bsky.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 421 posts

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#161

Post by verdverm »

mjr00 wrote: post #77
multisport wrote: post #4

Just to say the obvious: the new CEO is a VC partner and former CEO of Automattic. That seems very bad, no matter how "committed" they are to the vision of Bluesky.

Ultimately the goal "build a nice community where people can enjoy social interactions" is fully incompatible with "build the next Everything For Everyone Social Website like twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/etc so that we can get 5 billion users and start pushing ads at people". Unfortunately once you take VC funding, you no longer have the option of doing the former. From an actual content perspective Blue…

That user number is not reproducible last time I tried (~8 months ago). I was looking at the code the other day and saw what I believe is one of the reasons, but I still couldn't find several million accounts (>10%), which is pretty hard to lose. (8+ bsky run pds equivalents)

This also does not account for (1) people with multiple accounts (labellers, feeds, bots, intent) or actual activity (significant % are likely churned, didn't delete)

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#162

Post by PaulHoule »

archagon wrote: post #89
fritzo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy

If a social network stays comparatively small but still active, I see that as a huge win. Half the people I follow are happily on Mastodon. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

I am on a bunch of socials but as time goes by I like my cohort on Mastodon better and better.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#163

Post by jrm4 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #154
lukev wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky is very intentionally about public posting. It's a bit weird to say people "don't care about privacy" when speaking of a platform designed to amplify and distribute posts as widely and effectively as possible.

There is a lot of weirdness around Mastodon, particularly some people can’t seem to make up their minds if they want the stuff they post to be visible or not.

Exactly. And I'm willing to be that Bluesky folk might be somewhat similar because they haven't figured it out yet.

Except that the design of Bluesky severely increases the possibility of your data getting out of your control. And I can hear the immediate responses of "oh if you didn't want it public, don't post it," but as should be frightfully obvious -- not everyone thinks like that.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#164

Post by verdverm »

rekmarks wrote: post #126
lich_king wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky is not just a shadow, it's on a pretty steady decline. Their DAU numbers are dropping every month. Which probably tells you something about the unspoken reason for this change.

No they’re not? https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Jaz's stats are sus, use this instead: https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/index.html

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#165

Post by Levitz »

mossTechnician wrote: post #125
parl_match wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like Jesse Singal's work or his political positions (he fucking sucks!), but this is hardly antagonistic except to maybe a small group of terminally online posters who take posting too seriously. Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism. Also, it is a very ironic demonstration of the pancakes/waffles meme. Interjecting into an…

The central complaint doesn't seem to be distaste, but rather the fact that he is uniquely privileged over other users, despite violating Bluesky's terms of service.[0] [0]: https://www.change.org/p/bluesky-must-enforce-its-community-...

The central complaint isn't "distaste" because you can't call for someone to be banned because of a "distaste".

"Jesse Singal has distributed private medical information on Bluesky without the consent of the patient" translates to publishing a quote from a patient included in a therapist's letter of support for hormones.

The problem in this situation is that the complaint itself as well as the whole drama surrounding the person is an exercise of harassment towards Singal. In this context, I don't think that saying "waffles" is out of order. I'm not sure of what else can be done about crybullying, since by its very nature innocent bystanders would be surely affected if action was taken against those complaining.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#166

Post by verdverm »

archagon wrote: post #89
fritzo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy

If a social network stays comparatively small but still active, I see that as a huge win. Half the people I follow are happily on Mastodon. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Many a Discord server would agree

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#167

Post by jrm4 »

fritzo wrote: post #61
jrm4 wrote: post #32

Doomed from the start. It took me a while to figure this out, but ATProto is generally a bad idea; maybe even worse than Twitter. Which is to say, it provides a more robust model for your (true) information and data to be exploited by others than even the Twitter model. The Mastodon-slash-email model that relies on individual servers is better because decentralization is safer -- Those models bear more genuine "abili…

The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy

I mostly don't like this take because it presumes a precise definition of privacy that we all agree on. And it's not even remotely close to that, which is why I think the Bluesky model is perhaps insidious.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#168

Post by verdverm »

ghaff wrote: post #140
Zak wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can save all of anything someone makes public with ATProto, ActivityPub, or RSS. You can do that with anything someone puts on a web page too, but those protocols simplify automation. I understand why people want to be able to delete things from the internet, but it doesn't work that way. It has never worked that way. It can't work that way unless every computer is locked down to running remotely attested governm…

Once you hit publish, it's public and anyone and everyone can save a copy and distribute it. If you don't like that, don't hit publish.

ATProto won't be this way for much longer. Permissioned data is coming and will not be broadcast or accessible without grants. This will sit next to the public data, but separate.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#169

Post by PaulHoule »

lich_king wrote: post #40
embedding-shape wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon already won, by being used by people. Bluesky also won, by also being used by people. Not sure if this is a "winner takes it all" scenario? As long as you can host it yourself, I don't really mind where people are, both seem to work and have "won" for what they set out to do.

It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are. Mastodon ended up losing its user base to Bluesky during the early Twitter exodus because many influencers and journalists wanted to have an "elite" status and a special relationship with the platform, so they preferred a platform owned by Dorsey to some hippie open-source thing. Bluesky, in turn, ended up losing back to Twit…

Sometimes I think more the toxic people who wrote about politics and identity on Mastodon moved on to Bluesky when Trump got elected.

I don’t see why it is “zero” sum, nothing stops you from posting to more than one social. I mean, I have relatives on Facebook and no prospect for getting them to change so I cut-n-paste what I posted on Mastodon to Facebook, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and all sorts of places.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#170

Post by jrm4 »

Zak wrote: post #86
jrm4 wrote: post #32

Doomed from the start. It took me a while to figure this out, but ATProto is generally a bad idea; maybe even worse than Twitter. Which is to say, it provides a more robust model for your (true) information and data to be exploited by others than even the Twitter model. The Mastodon-slash-email model that relies on individual servers is better because decentralization is safer -- Those models bear more genuine "abili…

The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete. Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it. Additionally, a user cannot generate delete requests if they get banned from their server or the server shuts down. Users and server admins can't control whether another server permits archiving of their content. Mastodon and other fediverse software allows following public p…

Actually, yes, it does.

Or more precisely, it might. We now have a better idea of how people actually behave and it's not in accordance with "the internet is forever," and I have no interest in blaming them for 'human nature' in that way.

And it's all still dangerous. Again, I know the internet is forever, but someone else posting about ME might not.

This isn't an individual thing. It's "ecological."

And I have no interest in making Big Brother THAT MUCH EASIER to build.

Post reply on HN