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A Look at Bluesky

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Re: A Look at Bluesky

#91

Post by madeofpalk »

cycomanic wrote: post #64
iptq wrote: post #11

> A benefit of atproto users is that they are transferable without needing an active server This is not exactly true, it just means the server that holds ur data (traditionally instance or home server) doesn't need to be involved in the transfer process. However, this has centralized identity resolution, which is not a good long term solution. > For example, someone was able to get the AWS S3 domain as their handle!…

How did hubzilla do it? They support activity pub, but their central theme is "nomadic" identities which can be brought anywhere and are independent of a server.

My understanding is that ActivityPub doesn’t have much to say about identity. ActivityPub is mostly just “less simple RSS”

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#92

Post by madeofpalk »

reflexco wrote: post #13

One thing I don't understand is how can Bluesky pretend to be more open than Twitter when it's been months and it's still an invite-only closed garden?

It doesn’t. Bluesky is not “launched”. It’s nowhere near done.

It has the potential to be, once it’s finished. But it’s not finished yet.

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#93

Post by julietteeb »

nathancahill wrote: post #85
Zetice wrote: post #9

I'm not sure what to make of this actual submission; > A problem with the system of having a domain as a username is that people can claim it who don’t have access to that username. That was a bug, and is not generally speaking, the case. You must have the ability to alter the DNS records for the domain you wish to claim. > However, that means interactions, such as user likes, blocks, follows, etc are all public. Wit…

Curious if it was (partially) written using ChatGPT. It definitely has that tone.

Author here, I don’t use ChatGPT to write any of my posts.

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#94

Post by Closi »

CountGeek wrote: post #46
devttyeu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The service seems to be under massive load from the influx of users over the weekend, and they've passed 200k users, posting activity is a few times higher vs "the normal" So they probably could get even more users, but I'm guessing it's already sufficiently crazy for the team right now

They (Bluesky) blew it. They had one job and that was to be ready for this moment and what did they do? Continue with the invite system (which is from Gmail era) and then disable account creations...

If they opened the floodgates with a not-ready product and also fell over, that's a much worse look.

Besides, 'limited' account creation to form communities is a pretty well-established scaling strategy. They have scaled from 0 users to 200k users in 5 months - Facebook originally took a year to scale to 1m users so it's not unrealistic that Bsky are growing/scaling at approx the same pace at this stage in the curve. Worth noting that Facebook also just couldn't have handled scaling to 1 billion users on Y1, and that required years of engineering effort (and lots of money/resources).

Considering they can only have limited users at their current stage, invites to form close communities is a strategy to ensure that a social graph is created early. Having 20k users that all have a few friends with accounts is more important than having 20k users where nobody knows each other.

Remember Facebook also originally scaled campus by campus - which was a process that let it 'scale' in a way that encourages social graph creation (i.e. 10k signups in 1 university is probably WAY better for a social network than 10k signups in 100 universities).

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#95

Post by devttyeu »

spiderice wrote: post #81
devttyeu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can download and keep your data and keep a backup, it's all content-addressed (like git repos), and just upload to another instance Like moving from GitHub to GitLab. Each instance then has its own moderation policies, again, kind of like GitHub. But your identity is still your identity, and you can keep a copy of your data.

> You can download and keep your data and keep a backup > and you can keep a copy of your data Is this really a selling point / concern for anyone? I’ve never heard anyone express that the problem with tradition social media is that they can’t download and keep a backup of their data. Its about a central corporation being able to decide what is allowed to be said.

That specifically is not the selling point, but it is how one of the selling points works.

You can just take your data to another instance whenever you don’t agree with the policies of your current one. And all your connections/interactions/data should stay intact.

If it works as well as it seems to in the federation sandbox, you shouldn’t even be able to tell that you’re using a different service, the app just sends requests to a different server, and the web url may be different, and your default feeds are generated somewhere else.

Now, you may say that users won’t care about backing up their data, but that can be solved with some open (or paid) archival services.

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#96

Post by galleywest200 »

Hamuko wrote: post #78
devttyeu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, it's not the first time Twitter is horribly broken and/or makes an unpopular decision, and it probably won't be the last one.

Would've been easier to capture all of the Twitter refugees now. I already saw a bunch of people opt for Mastodon or Misclick because Bluesky just wasn't an option.

> Would've been easier to capture all of the Twitter refugees now

With which backend? Scaling from 200k users to possibly hundreds of millions that quickly?

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#97

Post by olah_1 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #23
mbStavola wrote: post #3

I'm not 100% sold on ATProto, but the fact that my identity and content can live separately from an instance is an insanely huge advantage over ActivityPub. I do not want to run my own Mastodon server (though I do) but I also don't want to use someone else's server and put my account at the mercy of the operator. It's maddening to think about how I could build a following or amass a ton of quality posts, only for the…

> I think more and more people are getting fed up with centralized platforms / not owning their data. Given the meteoric rise of TikTok, I don't think there is any sign of this being true outside a small techy bubble. At least, not as a percentage (that is, the growth in the number of people who are fed up with centralized platforms is dwarfed by the growth in the number of people who are fine with centralized platfo…

> I don't think there is any sign of this being true outside a small techy bubble.

This is another advantage for Bluesky. Because as of now, a user of BlueSky would have no clue that it is "decentralized" at all. In comparison, Nostr shoves it in your face that it is totally unlike anything you're used to.

Bluesky just appears as a Twitter alternative. And I think that is very smart of them. Because realistically, only very serious people/companies should consider running alternative relay servers. Relays come and go on Nostr because people underestimate the amount of work / money involved in running them.

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#99

Post by rchaud »

klabb3 wrote: post #43
tsimionescu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think more and more people are getting fed up with centralized platforms / not owning their data. Given the meteoric rise of TikTok, I don't think there is any sign of this being true outside a small techy bubble. At least, not as a percentage (that is, the growth in the number of people who are fed up with centralized platforms is dwarfed by the growth in the number of people who are fine with centralized platfo…

Well we may learn the hard way. Lots and lots of good old regular people have quit Facebook and stay off Twitter and many other engagement-optimized platforms. These companies have a poor reputation, for good reason. It’s just not 2010 anymore, and the cracks are starting to show. If a new platform such as bluesky, activitypub or Nostr becomes dominant, people will certainly point to this era in particular as a precu…

But seeing as it is no longer 2010, what is the public's appetite for yet another twitter-like app?

Re: A Look at Bluesky

#100

Post by devjab »

tsimionescu wrote: post #23
mbStavola wrote: post #3

I'm not 100% sold on ATProto, but the fact that my identity and content can live separately from an instance is an insanely huge advantage over ActivityPub. I do not want to run my own Mastodon server (though I do) but I also don't want to use someone else's server and put my account at the mercy of the operator. It's maddening to think about how I could build a following or amass a ton of quality posts, only for the…

> I think more and more people are getting fed up with centralized platforms / not owning their data. Given the meteoric rise of TikTok, I don't think there is any sign of this being true outside a small techy bubble. At least, not as a percentage (that is, the growth in the number of people who are fed up with centralized platforms is dwarfed by the growth in the number of people who are fine with centralized platfo…

I think there are two sides to this. One one hand I agree with you that this isn't an issue for the "general" public. On the other hand I wouldn't be surprised to see centralized platforms like TikTok getting banned, or perhaps simply unprofitable, within the next decade as legislation slowly grinds its way into limit the impact of these platforms. Because aside from anyone wanting to take more control over their own content, the political and social elites (at least in Europe) are currently very aware and focused on the negative impacts digitalisation has had on our society.

In Denmark we're in the process of banning devices like iPads and smartphones from schools and other institutions. We're also likely going to see an age limit on Social Media like TikTok that's around the same age as buying Alcohol (yes, that's a good combination) and a range of other things. In the wider EU, you have privacy and competition stepping in, both banning and taxing these platforms in ways that might make it hard to operate a profitable platform if you're allowed to have one.

It's still a little too uncertain to say anything concrete, but it's certainly not looking like the explosive growth of centralized "free-to-use" platforms will face the same profitable and non-regulated market the coming 20 years that they did the previous.

Someone is going to be well positioned to take advantage of this as people move on from the previous generation of social media platforms.

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