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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

bsky.social

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Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#191

Post by lich_king »

carefree-bob wrote: post #189
lich_king wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Curious, how many people do you need on a social network before you can find someone to talk to or before it is engaging enough for you? I certainly don't need a billion users. I think I'd be happy with 100,000 users -- what is your number? I think this is related to the question of how big of a city do you need to live in before you can find something to do and are not bored living there. I'm fine with a city of, sa…

> Curious, how many people do you need on a social network before you can find someone to talk to or before it is engaging enough for you?

I don't think that's a meaningful parameter to think about? I'd say that on any social network, I have meaningful, ongoing relationship with maybe 20 people. I suspect that's the norm. But that doesn't mean you can join a social network with 20 users and get that. I mean, if it's a mailing list for friends and family, sure. But not if it's 20 randomly-selected strangers from around the world.

So the critical mass to make the "random stranger" type of a social network work is much, much higher than the number of daily interactions you need to keep coming back.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#192

Post by easterncalculus »

parl_match wrote: post #97
CactusBlue wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you feel about the recent communication failures from the team to the userbase? As another builder of an open-source social platform, we must all understand that it is paramount for any company to not antagonize its customers, doubly so for a SOCIAL platform. I do understand that Bluesky and ATProto has to deal with a lot of baggage from both the old userbase and the new influx from the X/Twitter exodus, but e…

> user-antagonistic communication could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it

There aren't really any, the user you're replying to is just disappointed the campaign to ban users for no (on platform, or really any) reason was not successful.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#193

Post by BeetleB »

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…

> It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are.

Bluesky and Mastodon users can interact with each other (provided both parties opt in). I'm on Mastodon, but I see my friend's messages (he's on BlueSky) and vice versa. My replies show on up on BlueSky and vice versa.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#194

Post by inquirerGeneral »

CactusBlue wrote: post #117
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…

I don't even think having Jesse Singal on the platform is the problem (like it or not, I believe that all beings must have the right to communicate); the problem here was the communication failure when communicating this decision to the userbase. They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, a…

The offended people are the type I least respect on the internet and remember how much better it was before they existed

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#195

Post by easterncalculus »

CactusBlue wrote: post #117
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…

I don't even think having Jesse Singal on the platform is the problem (like it or not, I believe that all beings must have the right to communicate); the problem here was the communication failure when communicating this decision to the userbase. They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, a…

> instead, they chose to mock their userbase

It's a CEO's personal account. CEOs do this on Twitter all the time without it becoming a techcrunch article.

Let's just be honest about what happened - the CEO of Bluesky gave a (still not proportionally as) absurd response to an extremely absurd harassment campaign. That's what this and the article intentionally obscure.

Again, this is never how the web was supposed to work, and it (BARELY) holding on to that is the real story.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#196

Post by ascorbic »

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…

Bluesky won over Mastodon because the fedi model is fundamentally flawed in its UX. For a flood of people wamting "Twitter without Nazis", Bluesky was a good match. I don't think Dorsey had anything to do with it, because the influx happened after he'd already severed all ties.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#197

Post by carefree-bob »

lich_king wrote: post #191
carefree-bob wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, how many people do you need on a social network before you can find someone to talk to or before it is engaging enough for you? I certainly don't need a billion users. I think I'd be happy with 100,000 users -- what is your number? I think this is related to the question of how big of a city do you need to live in before you can find something to do and are not bored living there. I'm fine with a city of, sa…

> Curious, how many people do you need on a social network before you can find someone to talk to or before it is engaging enough for you? I don't think that's a meaningful parameter to think about? I'd say that on any social network, I have meaningful, ongoing relationship with maybe 20 people. I suspect that's the norm. But that doesn't mean you can join a social network with 20 users and get that. I mean, if it's…

Yes, all you use is 20, but as the number increases the odds of you finding your 20 goes up. I'm saying in 100,000 roughly randomly selected people, I have basically a 100% chance of finding my 20. 50,000 is probably enough.

By the way, if your number is not the same as mine, I am not intimating that this makes you deficient in some way. Everyone has their own number.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#198

Post by mjr00 »

verdverm wrote: post #161
mjr00 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even if the stats are off by a factor of 10 it wouldn't matter. You could remove the numbers from the user axis entirely and it would paint the same story: there were massive user influxes after the 2024 US election and the inauguration in January, but user retention has been on a steep decline for the year+ since.

Again, this is not a reflection of anything bad about Bluesky as a user. IMO a smaller and more focused is a good thing for the actual community, hence why I read/post on HN and not Reddit or Twitter. However as an investor there's basically no way to interpret those statistics as anything but bad.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#199

Post by big_toast »

danabramov wrote: post #116
Dracophoenix wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're now focusing on the AT protocol, will E2EE/OTR become a priority?

There's a recent post by Daniel (who works on atproto) on why E2EE is not a current focus: https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3meluqcwky22a

Is there any discussion somewhere about adding in the data that makes the x.com/twitter recommend/ranker so functional?

The "Grok-based Transformer"[0] that uses P(click/dwell/not_interested/photo_expand/video_view) seems pretty important and I can't tell how atproto is capturing it. I use @spacecowboy17.bsky.social‬'s For You and from what I understand that feed wouldn't get that data?

[0]:https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm?tab=readme-ov-file#sc... (this isn't an endorsement of grok/x, it's more that the transformer recommender has been very steerable via those signals in my experience)

(I also struggle with the omni-purpose likes - endorsement, approval, discover-algorithm-input. Maybe a more prominent more/less button addresses this, but then provides less network signal.)

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#200

Post by BeetleB »

rvz wrote: post #41
DiabloD3 wrote: post #13

Huh, I guess betting on Mastodon winning was the right bet.

What did Mastodon win exactly? Threads being the biggest Mastodon instance and federating with mastodon.social (Meta signed contracts with instance maintainers to do so) and the other 3 largest instances (Pawoo, baragg (d_o_t) net, and mstdn (d-o-t) jp) taking up more that >70% of the total users using it? That doesn't sound good. The CEO sold all of us out and was the only one that made real money on Mastodon.

I won't doubt your statistics. In practice, my experience is that it really is distributed.

I just went to my feed (only people I follow), and although mastodon.social showed up a few times, the majority of users I interact with are on distinct servers. So out of 20 people, I see 17 different servers.

My feed will not be impacted much if mastodon.social dies.

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