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Bluesky adds direct messages

bsky.social

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Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#161

Post by MyFedora »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #46
stebalien wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a stop-gap because people want DMs and implementing them correctly (decentralized, e2e encrypted, etc.) is non-trivial. Rushing e2e encryption is not a good idea (and no, you can't just slap on matrix/signal and call it a day). The alternatives are to: 1. Wait a bit longer for something half-baked that appears to meet the goals (i.e., something you're going to regret but will be unable to replace). 2. Wait even…

> By making the protocol centralized and stupid-simple, it's also stupid-simple to replace in when everyone is done painting the perfect bikeshed. But we all know that the more temporary the fix, the more permanent it becomes.

There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#162

Post by kelnos »

andybak wrote: post #17
edent wrote: post #4

It is so far behind Mastodon. Both in terms of features and in terms of communities on there. The people I interact with on BlueSky are nice, and the website is serviceable. But like Pebble / T2, I just don't see the momentum there.

I have up on Mastodon when I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins. Plus realising that global search was something that many admins were fundamentally opposed to. Oh and the array of UX issues that made me suspect that many demographics would never adopt it.

> I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins

That seems like a positive, not a negative. If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph.

I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition: Twitter is still by and large where the people are, even if the owner is an insufferable jerk.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#163

Post by kelnos »

jandrese wrote: post #22
edent wrote: post #4

It is so far behind Mastodon. Both in terms of features and in terms of communities on there. The people I interact with on BlueSky are nice, and the website is serviceable. But like Pebble / T2, I just don't see the momentum there.

Having tried both BlueSky and Mastadon I found Bluesky pretty easy to use and Mastadon bewildering. There were so many Mastadon servers I didn't know where to start. I guess maybe it doesn't matter what server something is on because the app can connect to all of them, but then discussion topics would be repeated in multiple places and it all seemed so disjoint. Like the chaos of old IRC networks but amplified. All i…

> One thing I like about Bluesky is when a thread starter mutes one of the posters, it mutes them for everybody in the thread, not just the original poster.

Oh interesting. This is a really cool feature. It kinda nudges it in the direction of being a private, self-run micro-blogging platform, where replies are essentially comments that you can moderate.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#164

Post by Nextgrid »

edent wrote: post #4

It is so far behind Mastodon. Both in terms of features and in terms of communities on there. The people I interact with on BlueSky are nice, and the website is serviceable. But like Pebble / T2, I just don't see the momentum there.

Disagreed - Mastodon has a major problem. The whole concept of server/instance is unnecessary and introduces extra complexity and hard problems.

Nostr has it right where servers/instances are completely interchangeable and all the hard work is done by the client.

I get why Mastodon had servers at the beginning - because browsers can't speak any other protocol than HTTP towards a single origin domain name. But this limitation fundamentally constrained the entire product into a corner that's very hard/impossible to back out of.

Mastodon should've been Nostr in the first place, with "instances" just being read-only views into the network (to satisfy browser's "demand" for an HTTP endpoint), but otherwise would be disposable and interchangeable - all write actions would be made by a client that doesn't have the constraints of a browser and can interact with the decentralized network over an appropriate protocol (and do the necessary cryptographic magic to ensure those peers are trustless and interchangeable).

The concept of "instances" not only introduces many user experience problems that makes it a non-starter for non-technical people (or even technical people who just don't have the time/willingness to deal with BS) but also open the door for politically-motivated feuds between instance admins to which the users are held hostage (instead of moderation being done on the client where the user is the only one in control of which "moderation feeds" they subscribe to, similar to an ad blocker list).

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#165

Post by dhosek »

com2kid wrote: post #76
legutierr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I often wish GitHub had a messaging capability, for these same reasons.

GitHub used to have DMs, they removed them, presumably due to spam and harassment.

The thing is that a closed system like DMs on a platform can be more effectively monitored for spam than something like email (or phone calls or texts) because everything is under single control.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#166

Post by dhosek »

kelnos wrote: post #163
jandrese wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having tried both BlueSky and Mastadon I found Bluesky pretty easy to use and Mastadon bewildering. There were so many Mastadon servers I didn't know where to start. I guess maybe it doesn't matter what server something is on because the app can connect to all of them, but then discussion topics would be repeated in multiple places and it all seemed so disjoint. Like the chaos of old IRC networks but amplified. All i…

> One thing I like about Bluesky is when a thread starter mutes one of the posters, it mutes them for everybody in the thread, not just the original poster. Oh interesting. This is a really cool feature. It kinda nudges it in the direction of being a private, self-run micro-blogging platform, where replies are essentially comments that you can moderate.

It does so much to lower the temperature of discussions there. BlueSky is by far my preferred social media platform.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#167

Post by Nextgrid »

kelnos wrote: post #162
andybak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have up on Mastodon when I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins. Plus realising that global search was something that many admins were fundamentally opposed to. Oh and the array of UX issues that made me suspect that many demographics would never adopt it.

> I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins That seems like a positive, not a negative. If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph. I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition: Twitter is still by and large where the people are, even if the own…

> I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition

Twitter and mainstream social media is still doing well because they have a large network of people that are either non-technical and can't use the fediverse or just can't be bothered.

The Musk acquisition is a storm in a teacup, for the vast majority of people (especially outside the tech circles) nothing changed. Yes it's still a cesspool, there's spam, Nazis and harassment, but that's not a significant difference from what it was before (every high profile tweet was immediately replied to by crypto scam bots even pre-Musk), and the format of the platform has always encouraged polarization, hostility and harassment, so Musk didn't change much there either. Yes it's a cesspool, but it's the same one that people know and (seemingly) love.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#168

Post by dhosek »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #82

Wake me up when the non tech people are using it.

It’s where a significant chunk of the writing community has ended up. I think people who feel the need to reach out to the public may still be more active on Twitter, but it’s definitely the online writers’ bar now.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#169

Post by Nextgrid »

krapp wrote: post #111
ramesh31 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bluesky it’s a major point, but not the entire point. And I'd say that was the right tradeoff to make. Mastodon is only marginally more useful than IRC at this point, and is completely useless to the average person. I as a developer have yet to even figure out how it's supposed to work. And no, I'm not going to spend hours digging through docs.

>Mastodon is only marginally more useful than IRC at this point, and is completely useless to the average person. I as a developer have yet to even figure out how it's supposed to work. I don't know how you define "average person" but plenty of people who aren't developers are on Mastodon. This argument that Mastodon is "too complicated" is perennial, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary in the growth of its…

> plenty of people who aren't developers are on Mastodon

How many of them are gonna stick around once their instance goes offline, or the admin does something crazy (which isn't impossible considering how many of these are ran as personal/fun projects by geeks rather than actual businesses), or their instance gets into a feud with the others and results in defederation?

All of this is overhead. It's overhead that can be managed, or you can pay someone to manage it for you, but it's still overhead and extra problems that just don't exist when you can instead sign up for Instagram or Twitter and call it a day.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#170

Post by Nextgrid »

bishbosh wrote: post #61
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it still a mostly cesspool of american politics-obsessed twitter refugees? 99% of social media on the English-speaking web is basically American politics obsessed, if you don't want that you need to branch out to other languages.

Are they politics obsessed in other politics, or is that particular to Americans?

Unfortunately the garbage is spreading.

It's less due to politics and more due to the rotten business models of all mainstream social media - it encourages engagement (algorithmically, so it doesn't even need human intention/decisions), it just turns out that political content is great at generating engagement and thus it floats to the top.

Various actors take advantage of this for various reasons (including political motivations) but the underlying problem is that the platform itself will promote any content as long as it generates engagement.

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