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

A Look at Bluesky

juliette.page

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 143 posts

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#121

Post by skybrian »

Sunspark wrote: post #116
emptysongglass wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to want to make this into something it isn't. Bluesky isn't beholden to Jack's wishes and has repeatedly and publicly affirmed the same. I don't care about Jack and neither should you. Bluesky is Bluesky run by the Bluesky team. The team and what they're building should be your only concern.

If Jack is the majority shareholder (I don't know if he is, just using this as an example), they have to do what he says. Twitter has a CEO now, but the majority shareholder is Musk. She cannot do anything without his permission. Were I CEO I would remove that childish poop emoji auto-responder but I don't think she has that kind of authority. Facebook has a board of directors, but Zuck is the majority shareholder, s…

You’re right that governance structure matters. However, people speculating about ownership instead of researching it doesn’t help much. Each organization is different and analogies aren’t facts.

Looks like Dorsey had a seat on the board as of 2022. I don’t know if there’s a good way to find out if that changed? The closest thing there is to an official web page is the FAQ and blog articles that it links to.

https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-7-2022-overview

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#122

Post by oldandboring »

klabb3 wrote: post #43
tsimionescu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think more and more people are getting fed up with centralized platforms / not owning their data. Given the meteoric rise of TikTok, I don't think there is any sign of this being true outside a small techy bubble. At least, not as a percentage (that is, the growth in the number of people who are fed up with centralized platforms is dwarfed by the growth in the number of people who are fine with centralized platfo…

Well we may learn the hard way. Lots and lots of good old regular people have quit Facebook and stay off Twitter and many other engagement-optimized platforms. These companies have a poor reputation, for good reason. It’s just not 2010 anymore, and the cracks are starting to show. If a new platform such as bluesky, activitypub or Nostr becomes dominant, people will certainly point to this era in particular as a precu…

People, largely, aren't staying off Twitter and Facebook because they're fed up with engagement-optimized platforms or because those companies have poor reputations or because they want decentralization. They left (or never joined) because their peer group left (or never joined). Take a casual poll of the teenagers and early-twentysomethings in your orbit, if you can: they're all probably on certain platforms and not on others. If you asked them why they aren't on Facebook they'd probably look confused and tell you that none of their friends are.

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#123

Post by Closi »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #101
Closi wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they opened the floodgates with a not-ready product and also fell over, that's a much worse look. Besides, 'limited' account creation to form communities is a pretty well-established scaling strategy. They have scaled from 0 users to 200k users in 5 months - Facebook originally took a year to scale to 1m users so it's not unrealistic that Bsky are growing/scaling at approx the same pace at this stage in the curve.…

It's 2023 and Jack is on the board, someone needs to be throwing money at them to solve their scaling problems-this ain't 2005.

They will have a different set of scaling problems to what Facebook had in 2005 - their decentralised architecture will throw out new challenges that will need time to be worked through.

Has anyone else created a decentralised social network at this scale? Arguably matrix but they also grew slower, potentially have a simpler product, and had scaling challenges along the way.

Remember scaling doesn’t just mean technical for a social network - it also means support and moderation.

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#124

Post by julietteeb »

Zetice wrote: post #112
julietteeb wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, I don’t use ChatGPT to write any of my posts.

I give you this feedback with respect and to help you become a better writer, because I believe you are capable of substantially more: This was not a high quality piece of writing. It doesn’t appear as if you spent any time at all learning about the topic, and you did not express yourself well, even when trying to articulate your ignorant points. If English is not your first language, I totally understand and applaud…

Hi! Yeah I agree that it could’ve been better. Thank you for your feedback, I’m going to try to improve on my writing. And yes, I’m a teenager, so I’m not insulted by that. Thank you for the feedback, I’m going to work on getting better at writing. Thanks for reading and your feedback helps a lot!

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#125

Post by Hamuko »

vidarh wrote: post #35
Hamuko wrote: post #28

I still don't understand the point of ActivityPub. Everyone one wants every social media, blog, news site to implement it. Why? RSS already exists to aggregate all of those into a single place. And having interacted with infosec.exchange, I came to the conclusion that long-form content doesn't mix well with microblogging and that Mastodon is a shit interface for it. I have a completely different software for my RSS f…

RSS is one way, ActivityPub two. If your blog makes articles available to ActivityPub, then people can e.g. comment directly on the blog post without having to post a link to it, and others can follow those posts. If you don't like Mastodon, there's Pleroma, Misskey, Calkey and others, as well as apps, or you can find RSS feeds from them if you just want to read, or you can use one of the alternate web frontends.

Mastodon RSS feeds are also crap. None of the posts have any kind of a header, so it's not possible to see what the post is about without opening the post. Real blogs will actually have titles that describe their contents.

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#126

Post by ttepasse »

mg wrote: post #8

With the current Twitter debacle, I think self-hosting my "notes about interesting things" (aka tweets) in a way it is accessible via the web, activitypub, bluesky and RSS might be the best way. Is anybody already doing this? It shouldn't too be hard. Just throw all the notes into a directory and add some code which replies to the different types of requests. I guess the best way to get ones tweets out of Twitter is…

There is an ActivityPub Plugin for Wordpress; I believe the author has recently been hired by Auttomatic.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

The Indieweb Crew of course did this first. The principle POSSE – Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere – was coined by them and is the guiding principle behind the Indieweb movement and it is exactly what you’re trying to do. You should click around a little bit in their wiki:

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Most of the time the Indieweblings are doing their own “protocol“ by receiving and reacting to webmentions with rich data structures in Microformats syntax in their HTML. Some parts of Indieweb a rather opinionated about technologies. But a lot of them also interact with different federation services, for example see:

https://indieweb.org/ActivityPub

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#127

Post by ttepasse »

Hamuko wrote: post #28

I still don't understand the point of ActivityPub. Everyone one wants every social media, blog, news site to implement it. Why? RSS already exists to aggregate all of those into a single place. And having interacted with infosec.exchange, I came to the conclusion that long-form content doesn't mix well with microblogging and that Mastodon is a shit interface for it. I have a completely different software for my RSS f…

ActivityPub has its deep origins in the feeds world.

Originally people were extending feeds with the Atom ActivityStreams Extensions, in XML, for richer data structures which contain the social activities of persons. The protocol PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) was used for some realtime updating of feed subscribers (Push-then-pull, instead of Pull). Mapping persons or rather their accounts to resources like feeds was the impetus for WebFinger. And for notifying comments or reactions to upstream feed producers there was the Salmon protocol. Together those formats and protocols morphed into the OStatus protocol.

With the rise of JSON and with lessons learned from OStatus and pump.io those specs morphed into ActivityPub today. The underlying ActivityStreams vocabulary is still the same, I think, but the mechanism for following and responding now uses dedicated out- and inboxes.

I think microblogging and other social network stuff and long-form blog posts are different content, best consumed differently. There is some overlap, of course, but articles do not need shoehorned in. Sometimes people simply undervalue the simple link from a microblog post to the longform article.

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#128

Post by vidarh »

Hamuko wrote: post #125
vidarh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS is one way, ActivityPub two. If your blog makes articles available to ActivityPub, then people can e.g. comment directly on the blog post without having to post a link to it, and others can follow those posts. If you don't like Mastodon, there's Pleroma, Misskey, Calkey and others, as well as apps, or you can find RSS feeds from them if you just want to read, or you can use one of the alternate web frontends.

Mastodon RSS feeds are also crap. None of the posts have any kind of a header, so it's not possible to see what the post is about without opening the post. Real blogs will actually have titles that describe their contents.

Mastodon isn't a blog platform, so that is unsurprising.

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#129

Post by ttepasse »

eviks wrote: post #15
bullen wrote: post #12

Isn't RSS better than all other federation protocols? You have four properties of feeds: category, tree-comment, real-time and persistent. Reddit was the winner on all those except real-time. Decentralization is now the most important feature, and taking responsibility of your own data is the best version of that. The only missing part is decentralized RSS servers and clients. Think backup for your posts and RSS read…

How do you like and reply within RSS?

There was once the Salmon protocol for enabling replies and comments swimming upstream. Salmon was part of the OStatus protocol which evolved into ActivityPub today.

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#130

Post by klabb3 »

oldandboring wrote: post #122
klabb3 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we may learn the hard way. Lots and lots of good old regular people have quit Facebook and stay off Twitter and many other engagement-optimized platforms. These companies have a poor reputation, for good reason. It’s just not 2010 anymore, and the cracks are starting to show. If a new platform such as bluesky, activitypub or Nostr becomes dominant, people will certainly point to this era in particular as a precu…

People, largely, aren't staying off Twitter and Facebook because they're fed up with engagement-optimized platforms or because those companies have poor reputations or because they want decentralization. They left (or never joined) because their peer group left (or never joined). Take a casual poll of the teenagers and early-twentysomethings in your orbit, if you can: they're all probably on certain platforms and not…

I never said that. But it’s an important point nonetheless, which I believe you are right about. If a transition happens, it will be in the layers where these things matter.

For instance, a fire department may switch from Twitter because it’s rate limited. A community for visually impaired may move from Reddit because it’s dragging its feet with accessibility. Journalists and media houses may switch because they get censored by a billionaire who’s on a quid pro quo relationship with entities they investigate. Regular “content creators” may switch when they get copyright strikes or demonetized by an automated system. In all of these cases, the small minority of “providers” take a large amount of “consumers” with them. Cumulative resentment looks just like apathy, until suddenly it doesn’t.

Most people are followers. Other liberties like freedom of the press are inapplicable to most people, directly. But the indirect effects, usually shepherded by “vocal minorities” has been shown again and again to add up and transform society rapidly, in something like S-shaped curves. If you accept the rapid growth phase of network effects you need to also acknowledging the rapid death phase on the other side of things.

Post reply on HN