Bluesky adds direct messages • Hacker News Board

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#171

Post by wraptile » Thu, May 23, 2024, 3:39 AM UTC

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.

It's super american-centric too. For a "decentralized" platform that basically covers 2 small areas of the world is not a good sign. I feel like Bluesky had done nothing to address discoverability and sharing issues. Most engagement is centralized with 1% of shitposters.

From listening to a podcast with the founder it seems that's their goal too as they want to integrate bluesky with e-commerce which obviously doesn't work well globally.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#172

Post by jimbobthrowawy » Thu, May 23, 2024, 3:53 AM UTC

jwildeboer wrote: post #81

I’ll stick to Signal for private communications and publish my public takes with ActivityPub based Mastodon. No need for proprietary stuff anymore.

All of bluesky is MIT licensed (unless there's a subset I'm missing), and developed pretty openly. Heck, you could use DMs much earlier if you logged into main.bsky.dev (with an app password, ideally) rather than bsky.app.

They don't have E2EE yet, and use a different system than posting does on the site. (ergo, I think they're not in the firehose)

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#173

Post by KerrAvon » Thu, May 23, 2024, 4:29 AM UTC

evbogue wrote: post #154

facialwipe wrote: post #29

Jack Dorsey out, plaintext DMs in. Slow clap for Bluesky.

My offer still stands to help the Bluesky folks implement these types of things if they can't figure it out. Call me!

I don’t think they want a plan to get Dorsey back — he seems to be an idiot.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#174

Post by KerrAvon » Thu, May 23, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC

retox wrote: post #158

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline is that it's not a shithole ridden with ads, spam, influencers, scams, etc. That's the important part of replacing Twitter.

Neither was Twitter at the equivalent point in time.

There are a lot of people who would disagree with that. BlueSky already has better mod tools than Twitter circa 2014 did.

Musk’s transformation may have made it exponentially worse, but for some people it was already very bad.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#175

Post by KerrAvon » Thu, May 23, 2024, 4:36 AM UTC

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #110

pipeline_peak wrote: post #82

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

I went to Bluesky because some of my personal favorite non-tech Twitter personalties ended up there. I'm a fan of @Popehat, who has a lot of informed political legal commentary. There are also a number of fiction writers and artists I like there. Surprisingly full of the people I happen to want to subscribe to. And surprisingly large gardening and astronomy communities. Less my thing, but if your interests include tr…

Mastodon has fixed their onboarding process (a bit late) to be much more user friendly.

> if your interests include trans rights, furry porn, or romance authors, Bluesky's definitely the place for you.

Same could be said for Mastodon, plus retrocomputing and a lot of tech people who don’t want to be on Musk’s Nazi bar anymore. Compiler folks and John Mashey hang out on Mastodon.

If you follow US politics, you do want to be on BS, though. Mastodon is better for international politics and stuff like Eurovision.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#176

Post by Karrot_Kream » Thu, May 23, 2024, 4:46 AM UTC

wraptile wrote: post #171

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.

It's super american-centric too. For a "decentralized" platform that basically covers 2 small areas of the world is not a good sign. I feel like Bluesky had done nothing to address discoverability and sharing issues. Most engagement is centralized with 1% of shitposters. From listening to a podcast with the founder it seems that's their goal too as they want to integrate bluesky with e-commerce which obviously doesn'…

The 3 main communities seem to be English speaking, Japanese, and Portuguese. The community is way smaller than Xitter for sure but are the percentages that off?

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#177

Post by neiman » Thu, May 23, 2024, 6:15 AM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #75

neiman wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By making the protocol centralized and stupid-simple, it's also stupid-simple to replace in when everyone is done painting the perfect bikeshed. Can you recall any example of anyone replacing a centralized protocol with a decentralized one?

Didn’t Bluesky ship centralized, and then later replaced the centralized protocol with the decentralized at proto?

Did they? Heh, I didn't know that. But I thought they launched with the AT protocol already, no?

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#178

Post by jwildeboer » Thu, May 23, 2024, 7:05 AM UTC

jimbobthrowawy wrote: post #172

jwildeboer wrote: post #81

I’ll stick to Signal for private communications and publish my public takes with ActivityPub based Mastodon. No need for proprietary stuff anymore.

All of bluesky is MIT licensed (unless there's a subset I'm missing), and developed pretty openly. Heck, you could use DMs much earlier if you logged into main.bsky.dev (with an app password, ideally) rather than bsky.app. They don't have E2EE yet, and use a different system than posting does on the site. (ergo, I think they're not in the firehose)

I consider ATProto, the protocol BlueSky uses, to be a proprietary thing as it is owned and maintained by BlueSky. ActivityPub is an Open Standard.

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#179

Post by eviks » Thu, May 23, 2024, 7:11 AM UTC

DataDive wrote: post #11

Zawinski's Law: > Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. I think nowadays we can substitute email with chat/DM.

The original law fails for too many programs to be useful in its own, but why do you need some law to replace the obvious expectation that a social media program is going to do messages?

Re: Bluesky adds direct messages

#180

Post by numpad0 » Thu, May 23, 2024, 8:13 AM UTC

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…

Mastodon core devs avoid discussion of server choices because it inevitably reveals that 1/3 to 1/2 of Twitter/Bluesky/Mastodon by volume and/or users are Japanese image posters incompatible with Western, especially European, languages/memes/values.

2/3 of top 3 and half of top 10-20 Mastodon instances(not including Misskey ActivityPub servers) are Japanese. They really don't like that.