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Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

bsky.app

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Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#211

Post by orenlindsey »

duxup wrote: post #91

I've tried a few twitter alternatives (including Bluesky) as someone who hardly ever uses twitter anyway. I was a little disappointed how it just felt like ... more twitter. I'm browsing around finding mostly memes or outrage that doesn't have context to me. I fairly quickly get exhausted trying to find / curate content. I guess I should have expected it, but I hoped that somewhere a different network would have a di…

The only way to truly have a "good" social media experience is to have a small site (a few hundred active people, maybe less who join slowly over a somewhat long period of time) where everyone has at least slightly overlapping interests.

I'm lucky enough to have found a site like this and it's epic. Better than any social media I've ever experienced. People actually care about each other. We have a community.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#212

Post by alangibson »

blurrybird wrote: post #140
rconti wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel much the same way. Facebook tried to sell me on threads by showing me an ad with 2.5 threads visible: one of them was clearly a racist post that I didn't want to see the conclusion of, the other was clearly a liberal outrage thread about how much money Jeff Bezos makes that I ALSO didn't want to see the end of, and the third was a mostly-obscured post by a ceramic artisan I follow. They don't seem to have any…

This experience always shocks me because it’s not aligned with my own. Even on Twitter I never saw that junk. I followed almost exclusively tech folk, AWS community heros, NodeJS developers, Architects and Platform Engineers. I’m not even a developer, but I followed them to be exposed more to that topic. As a result, my feed was 99.9% technical content and product management content. I got the same result in under an…

> just mute every. Single. Thing.

'just' is working hard there. After the 20th attempt at avoiding crap posts most people just give up.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#213

Post by jakebsky »

malermeister wrote: post #105
brundolf wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky is an open protocol

But why isn't the whole thing just an activitypub client? It seems like it's an open protocol in the same way OOXML was an open format.

This is a very reasonable and common question (I asked it myself before joining the team)

Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data.

Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).

https://atproto.com/guides/faq

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#214

Post by u320 »

blurrybird wrote: post #140
rconti wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel much the same way. Facebook tried to sell me on threads by showing me an ad with 2.5 threads visible: one of them was clearly a racist post that I didn't want to see the conclusion of, the other was clearly a liberal outrage thread about how much money Jeff Bezos makes that I ALSO didn't want to see the end of, and the third was a mostly-obscured post by a ceramic artisan I follow. They don't seem to have any…

This experience always shocks me because it’s not aligned with my own. Even on Twitter I never saw that junk. I followed almost exclusively tech folk, AWS community heros, NodeJS developers, Architects and Platform Engineers. I’m not even a developer, but I followed them to be exposed more to that topic. As a result, my feed was 99.9% technical content and product management content. I got the same result in under an…

I was in the process of doing that when I came up with an simpler and a lot more reliable method: Deleting the Threads profile.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#215

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #115
brundolf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The options this creates are super accessible to non-technical people. You can go on the app store right now and take your pick of bsky clients, and you can browse/search different algos from within the app and keep a list of your favorites and swap between them, it's all very user-friendly Most of the biggest complaints people have about twitter are client-side problems. So just having an ecosystem of clients (and t…

Choice is only good if the options are differentiated and easy to understand. A bunch of algo and client options sound good for someone who is already a committed user, but for a new user it just complicated the onboarding experience. Not to mention, it’s unclear what the incentive to put real resources behind any of these clients is.

Also, good.

An idealistic, technical user might put up with the typical quality of early "alternative solution" apps, but seeing enough errors, crashes, unintuitive UX, and other hurdles, several times across several apps, will get most users to give up on the platform.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#216

Post by notnullorvoid »

pests wrote: post #198
notnullorvoid wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine with a new protocol, what I dislike is they marketed it as a main feature and still haven't shipped what was promised. So far Bluesky is just as centralized as Twitter. ActivityPub has some big flaws. We need something better, but I don't think I trust the Bluesky team to deliver that anymore.

They did recently just federate the core servers. It's no longer a centralized service but blue sky itself is now a proxy for a federation of smaller servers. Users get assigned one at random(?) upon signup and the blue sky api url continues to work and towards to the underlying server. One step at a time.

Is BlueSky the one running those servers? If so that's still centralized, but yes at least it's a step.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#217

Post by jrflowers »

hobo_mark wrote: post #137
caslon wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what action on your part caused the death threats?

Complaining about porn (mostly gay/trans/furry stuff, although even the straight kind is NOT something I want on my phone when idly scrolling on a bus or a train in public, or ever really) routinely ending in the default timeline, which is apparently a capital offense threatening the livelihood of sex workers and furry "artists".

I hate it when I manually opt in to adult content and then adult content shows up on my timeline. The fact that only way to avoid it is to just use the app as it is out of the box is a design flaw

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#218

Post by mjr00 »

npunt wrote: post #116
duxup wrote: post #91

I've tried a few twitter alternatives (including Bluesky) as someone who hardly ever uses twitter anyway. I was a little disappointed how it just felt like ... more twitter. I'm browsing around finding mostly memes or outrage that doesn't have context to me. I fairly quickly get exhausted trying to find / curate content. I guess I should have expected it, but I hoped that somewhere a different network would have a di…

Twitter clones thus far have all been cover bands with a different (speaker) stack. Focus seems to be entirely on the backend protocol side - important for decentralization but fixing only part of the problem. I haven't seen much in the way of innovation on the UX itself, which is what I'm really interested in. I guess its a mix of a) why mess with success, twitter-like design is proven to work, b) a lack of experime…

Yeah, the problem with the wave of Twitter clones is exactly that: they're clones. You don't make a successful social media site by being the same as an existing site but with different people. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Discord, TikTok, Reddit are all very different in how they function and what types of content is shared. Google+ tried to clone Facebook and was a colossal failure despite hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions of dollars being poured into it.

Fundamentally the issue with Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. is that they don't offer anything different to most users. Yes, they run off decentralized protocols, but most people don't care. Yes, there's no Elon, but most people don't care.

So I'd put it firmly in (c). Bluesky and Threads both tried to recapture the lightning in the bottle which is 2008 Twitter by copying it (Bluesky going so far as to copy the early 00s invite-only model!). Both are either failures or marginally successful, depending on who you ask. Certainly neither are a home run.

If you want to get people off Twitter, don't build Twitter-but-different. Build something better.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#219

Post by u320 »

kahnclusions wrote: post #204
blurrybird wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This experience always shocks me because it’s not aligned with my own. Even on Twitter I never saw that junk. I followed almost exclusively tech folk, AWS community heros, NodeJS developers, Architects and Platform Engineers. I’m not even a developer, but I followed them to be exposed more to that topic. As a result, my feed was 99.9% technical content and product management content. I got the same result in under an…

Even if you mainly follow tech folks, there are many who get very political…

Yeah I follow some music profiles on Instagram and all Threads gave me was their music stuff replaced with their takes on Israel/Gaza.

Re: Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login

#220

Post by jakebsky »

notnullorvoid wrote: post #147

Until I see what Bluesky's AT protocol federation looks like in practice, I'm not interested. Without federation it's basically Twitter with less users. And even after federation it might be Mastodon/ActivityPub with less users. Very disappointed in the direction they took to launch. Exclusive beta, no focus on decentralization despite that being the major selling point.

The Bluesky federation sandbox network is up and running as of months ago, which works exactly how the production network will work. The production network is also federated internally (i.e. Bluesky already runs 10 Personal Data Servers) to prove that it operates as expected.

Quite a bit of the app itself is also federated: custom algorithms (feeds) are being operated by many third-party devs on their own servers, domain handles have been in use for a long time, and the API is completely open (all posts/likes, etc can be streamed from `wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos` in a permissionless way, see atproto.com[1] for details)

It's possible to run a PDS (Personal Data Server)[2] in the dev sandbox. Federation for the production network is planned for early 2024. ASAP.

1. https://atproto.com

2. https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/SANDBOX.md

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