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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

#281

Post by npunt »

AgentME wrote: post #185
nomilk wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Via heavy use of the ”Hide|Show Less|Not Interested” button I’ve managed to get youtube recommendations surprisingly relevant, and a big surprise was facebook reels, which started as complete junk, and is now an astonishing mix of science (startalk, Tom Scott, Physics Girl, colour theory) and nature videos. It’s arguably the most relevant “tv” I’ve ever seen. I suspect curation on Twitter is solvable, but neither Twi…

One really interesting innovation that Bluesky supports right now is custom timelines. You can paste a URL into the app of any webserver hosting a custom timeline and have it available as a tab. This lets people make and share custom timelines using different recommendation and personalization strategies. I'm hoping some easily-supported competition for timeline algorithms helps people figure out how to make ones tha…

Yeah custom TLs have a lot of promise and might be the most interesting feature among all the clones. It's a big ask to (new) users to curate our experience and having turnkey options could really make it easy to get the specific type of value we want right away. I hope they lean into it a lot more in the design.

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

#283

Post by AnonC »

al_borland wrote: post #158
mminer237 wrote: post #48

It still doesn't seem to have a public feed though, so you can only view individual posts. I will say as someone has an invite: you're not missing out on anything. It definitely has far less activity than either Twitter or Threads, but somehow it also just has worse content. You would think they were invite-only to keep the quality high, but everything is either furry porn or hate-filled rage bait, neither of which I…

Being able to view individual posts, even if there is no public feed, is really important if people are going to post things that may get picked up by other media channels. As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think…

> As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that.

This has been a real irritant since Elon Musk took it over and started making a lot of terrible decisions. Depending on what platform you’re on, you could rewrite the Twitter link to nitter.net (just replace, manually or through an extension, twitter.com with nitter.net) and you’ll not only avoid those signup/login prompts but also be able to see the complete thread instead of just a single tweet.

I was never into Twitter because of the noise and extreme levels of anger, but this has allowed me to view the minority of tweets and tweet threads that could be interesting and/or useful.

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

#284

Post by AnonC »

I got an invite for Bluesky from a kind person on HN, but as someone who didn’t use Twitter, I didn’t have a sense of whom to follow. I discovered some nice artists and comics. Any suggestions on people who post nice stuff or comics or fun stuff would be welcome (I really don’t want to deal with political discussions or arguments that are meant to trigger outrage on a regular basis).

Meanwhile, here are some invite codes (I’ll update this list if they’re used within HN’s edit window):

bsky-social-xueut-35ahm

bsky-social-25tsd-crmqc

~~~bsky-social-xxxxx-xxxxx~~~ (used)

~~~bsky-social-xxxxx-xxxxx~~~ (used)

Edit: This is my first time handing out invites. I don’t like how the invite system shows me which account on Bluesky was created using my invite code. I’d rather this be hidden from the person sending the invite or at least provide an option to the person signing up if they want their account to be disclosed to the person who invited them. In real life there are usually personal or professional connections with such events, but online these could be (and are) totally random strangers.

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

#285

Post by rglullis »

npunt wrote: post #279
rglullis wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> designing new feature ideas for twitter and twitter-like products Which is not the same as "innovating with UX" in any way that is incompatible with the status quo. Going by your blog post, do you agree that it is not something that (by itself) a feature so innovative that would make people drop twitter to favor a new social network that implemented it?

No this feature by itself isn't something to attract people to a brand new social network, I hope I didn't represent it that way. My perspective on the problem is that the way twitter's medium is designed doesn't produce a wonderful signal:noise ratio. Some people might revel in the noise, and some amount of noise certainly generates MAUs and ad dollars, but ultimately it's not living up to its potential as a medium…

> If you accept that premise

Personally, I don't. I think the flaw in this reasoning is to think that people join social networks with the sole purpose of exchanging information effectively, but I could probably make a list of 50 reasons that make people participate more than that.

There is also the aspect that SNR is frankly a bad metric. We are quite able to filter things ourselves, which means that in the end we will flock to the places where the total signal is what matters, regardless of how much noise comes along with it.

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

#286

Post by AnonC »

jakebsky wrote: post #252
franze wrote: post #205

Tried to sign up for bs. With valid invitation code. Got an error message after the final stage. Again and again and again. Social Media Companies that can't get their sign-up funnel in order have already failed.

Sent you an email, in case you're willing to give some info we can use to investigate this. We're always willing to look into any issues like this. Thanks!

This is off topic on this point, but I wanted to point out a privacy issue with invites (as these codes are given out on forums like these to random strangers). The invite codes show which account was created with those to the person sending invites. I’d rather this be completely hidden (just saying that the code was used is enough) or give an option to the person signing up if they want to reveal their account to the person who invited them.

Would it be possible for you to highlight this to the right people in the team?

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

#287

Post by jakebsky »

AnonC wrote: post #286
jakebsky wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sent you an email, in case you're willing to give some info we can use to investigate this. We're always willing to look into any issues like this. Thanks!

This is off topic on this point, but I wanted to point out a privacy issue with invites (as these codes are given out on forums like these to random strangers). The invite codes show which account was created with those to the person sending invites. I’d rather this be completely hidden (just saying that the code was used is enough) or give an option to the person signing up if they want to reveal their account to th…

Typically invites are used by people who are inviting people they know, in which case it's advantageous for them to be able to find each other.

But you're right that there's an argument that it could work differently. We're planning to get rid of invites shortly, otherwise we might consider enhancements to the invite system to e.g. make this optional.

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

#288

Post by jakebsky »

e12e wrote: post #272
jakebsky wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, you could. Although connecting your own PDS hosts to the Bluesky production network won't be possible for a little while longer. Creating custom algorithms (feeds) is already possible, as it participating in the developer sandbox network, including PDS hosting. The architecture is explained briefly here: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture Code/docs are here: 1. AT Protocol (atproto) is…

Thanks. Would it be possible to set up a real self-hosted, federated instance today, so I could set up a community and let others run their own pds'?

You definitely could but it's pretty technically involved and not as easy as it will be in the future. And it would have to be siloed off from the production Bluesky/atproto network at the moment.

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

#289

Post by Dalewyn »

orenlindsey wrote: post #211
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.

You managed to describe the many forums of ye olde days.

I miss those days. Has it really been at least 20 years? I'm getting too old for this...

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

#290

Post by scruple »

brundolf wrote: post #20

It's lost the initial momentum but it's not dead yet. I'm still holding my breath that the critical mass makes the leap eventually; "it's just twitter but you can write and use custom clients and feed algorithms" is a compelling proposition For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for. A few never came back to twitter, but most did mostly for social reasons. But twitter as a pla…

> For me and a lot of others, it's the only twitter alternative we ever signed up for.

Okay, but I never even signed up for Twitter.

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