Bluesky signups are now open to the public

This is a big milestone for Bluesky!

We've had the federation sandbox running for over six months but we're now able to commit to open federation on the production network this month as well. There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use.

The technical challenges of setting up an (efficiently) scalable decentralized social network were quite interesting. The infrastructure itself is quite decentralized, with standalone PDS instances and two small shared-nothing datacenter PoPs. We're using SQLite with millions of individual databases for each user's repository and ScyllaDB for the global indexing service (AppView).

https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architect...

If anyone has questions, technical or otherwise, some of the team should be around today to answer them.

Edit: HN'ers might also appreciate this paper written primarily by Martin Kleppman about Bluesky and AT Protocol

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239.pdf

The obvious question is what your business model is. I know about your "we plan to sell domains" post from a bit ago[1], but that seems... optimistic, to me. Not sure I want to buy into yet another startup with no business model (e.g. Keybase).

[1] https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan

Bluesky is in good financial shape for quite some time based on existing funding. And we're also working hard to be sustainable, which we believe is entirely feasible given our small team. But we're also ensuring that everything required to make the network sustainable over time is completely open.

That's not a very inspiring answer :( The consequences of taking VC money are going to come home to roost at some point.

We'll see! The history of funded companies popularizing open protocols is not without precedent. I'm inspired by Netscape, which was the VC-backed company that made the web happen.

Maybe I'm just being a hater, but the inspiration being a web browser that failed after being acquired by AOL at dot-com level stupid high prices, doesn't inspire confidence at all. Sure, it helped pave the way for Firefox, but Netscape itself never actually did anything.

Netscape created the first highly usable web browser, which introduced most people to the web. They also created SSL (TLS), JavaScript, the first high performance web server, and much more that that made the web go.

Oh yeah, I'm not denying that Netscape pioneered a lot of stuff. They also would have went out of business had they not been bought by AOL at a stupid, dot-com inflated price.

You can do something that creates a lot of changes in the world, but if your business model involves giving people things for less than it takes to produce then I don't see how that's a business. What are VCs expecting to get a return on their capital? What's the plan to actually make a profit? Is the plan just to get bought out at a stupidly inflated price, similar to your inspiration of Netscape?

They pioneered very little. Viola pioneered client side scripting, stylesheets and more. Netscape popularized a number of things, thanks to heaps of cash that let them market heavily, and in the process overtaking a bunch of competitors, and snuffing out many of them. They did have a great browser that was best for a period of a few years, but it's not like there weren't plenty of alternatives either out or right around the corner when they launched.

Fully agree with you they would not have survived long if the AOL sale hadn't happened.

Perhaps Jake is saying that it is more important to make the world better right now than to have 100 year business plan. It sounds like Jake is willing to lead the charge for now and risk death later if it means that the concept succeeds under any flag.

Or maybe I'm just putting words in their mouth.

What if the founders of MySpace are totally ok with its place in history and happy that social media under any name carries on their vision? Maybe they don't consider that a failure.

They may have done all those things and more.

How did they actually make money? What's your equivalent?

They sold the browser until that market was yanked out from under them, and they leveraged control of the homepage into sales of their serverside packages, and then they sold out to AOL before their longevity was ever tested.

It was a rhetorical question.

This is an exaggeration. Yes, people flocked to Netscape.

Because, yes, it was marginally better than what was available, especially on Windows. But the main feature improvements that drove that initial rapid adoption was Netscape ignoring any attempt at agreement over standards and adding new "trinkets" like background images etc. in each release.

And yes, they created Javascript, in a rush, but there already were other client-side scripting options.

They were important, but their importance is inflated by looking back at a timeline where they won. We'd have lacked none of these things without them. They were one of many, and they were ahead in terms of features, but not by much, and the pressure they were under also left a wake of chaos.

E.g., sure, they invented SSL, rushed it out with massive security flaws (that was a fun time... one of the gaping holes was that if someone ran Netscape on the same host they ran their e-mail on, which was not unusual, you could get a whole lot of the bits needed to cut down on the cost of bruteforcing the SSL key by triggering an e-mail bounce to help you narrow down current process ids), but there were prototypes of encrypted socket layers around for two years already by then e.g. see Simon S Lam's work on SNP [1].

"Nobody" used Netscape's web server - which wasn't developed by Netscape anyway (it was acquired from Kiva, unless Netscape had a pre-Kiva web-server I've forgotten) - it was way too expensive. It was a market leader, yes, but in a crowded tiny niche of commercial servers. I ran an ISP around that time. I sold packages to businesses, and we'd have loved to convince customers to pay for Netscape server software, but most people stuck with NSCA HTTPD, and quickly switched to Apache 1995 onwards.

[1] https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/simon-s-lam/

Highly *used.

Saying they "made the web happen" is just nonsense. They had one of several popular browsers, and one of several popular web servers. As much as I stayed up late to download new Netscape betas, had they never existed the web would still be just fine, and the customers of the ISP I ran at the time would have just used another browser.

Hmmmm. I would argue the web would have been significanty different. There was a fairly big gap between Mosaic and Internet Explorer that Netscape filled and it was the period that largely defined the web as it came to be.

Since IE was developed specifically to counter the threat of Netscape - it was also defined by Netscape.

What other browsers of note were around in that period?

Netscape 0.9 was released in October '94. IE was released in August '95 and the first version was just a licensed rebrand of Spyglass Mosaic (which despite the licensed Mosaic name was not a version of Mosaic).

There was a number of browsers coming up at that time, and Mosaic was if anything what drove much of that early boom, as the most successful option that led to both Netscape, Spyglass, and by extension IE.

Remember that Mosaic was readily licensed (and source available, though not under an open source license) - there were a number of other Mosaic offshoots (e.g. AMosaic for Amiga was released in December '93, with datatypes support)

Other browsers than Netscape around that era, excluding the text based ones, included:

* 1992: ViolaWWW (Unix; pioneered embedded objects, stylesheets, tables, client-side scripting); Erwise (Unix); MidasWWW (Unix)

* 1993: Spyglass (licensed the Mosaic name, but written from scratch; also the origin of IE), AMosaic (Amiga), Cello (Windows), any number of Mosaic licensees, Arena (Unix, Linux, NeXT; pre-release in '93; full public release '94; Arena was co-written by the later Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie, and pioneered layout extensions that turned into work on stylesheets and eventually CSS)

* 1994: Argo (Bert Bos - co-creator of CSS; Unix; testbed for style sheets alongside Arena, and one of the first heavily plugin based browsers, with most functionality provided by plugins), IBM WebExplorer (Mosaic licensee); Slipknot (Windows; a really weird one which dealt with lack of SLIP/PPP connections by "hijacking" a Unix terminal connection, running lynx to retrieve the HTML, and then using zmodem to transfer both the HTML and images...)

* 1995: IE (licensed version of Spyglass); Grail (Python; supported client side execution of Python...); OmniWeb (Mac)

* 1996: Amaya (Unix, Windows, Linux, OS X), IBrowse (Amiga), Aweb (Amiga); Opera (Windows initially); Cyberdog; Arachne (DOS, Linux including framebuffer...; still updated as of two years ago...)

Netscape took a lot of users from various Mosaic licensees, like Spyglass, and browsers like Cello; had it not existed, sure, things would have looked different, but timeline-wise the gap was narrow. Many of the browser - like Opera - that launched after Netscape had started development before Netscape launched, and others were abandoned in some cases directly because of Netscape. Some were probably no big loss, but Netscape's brief dominance contributed to the near monoculture we had for many years.

There is no doubt it had improvements over Mosaic - I remember vividly the day the release with background image support spread across campus and every webpage looked garish for the next several years - but it was an advantage measured in months, and with competition heating up until Netscape stunted it for quite some time by becoming as dominant as they did until IE started catching up.

A lot of the things Netscape is sometimes remembered for were not Netscape firsts either, or areas where they necessary had a lead. E.g. client-side scripting, style sheets, etc existed before Netscape; work on CSS was ongoing at CERN around the time Netscape launched etc. At most things would have looked different, and maybe some things might have taken a bit more time without Netscape scaring Microsoft. But I also remember a lot of ire at how Netscape pre-empted a lot of standards at the time by just throwing stuff at the wall, and untangling the mess they left took years.

I remember that time and I too appreciate what the different browsers contributed feature-wise, but you’re missing the big picture.

In late 1995, Netscape released a browser that provided investors a comprehensive proof-of-concept online platform that was billed as the operating system for the Internet and they were being offered an opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

JavaScript and CSS didn’t matter. Investors were looking at SSL for eCommerce, Java applets, plugins, VRML, RealAudio, etc.

Netscape stood out because nobody else was selling a comprehensive online platform with a compelling and plausible vision.

The World Wide Web became something because a crap load of money was invested into developing browsers.

It wouldn’t have happened on its own to this degree and none of those browsers were on their way to becoming a household name.

In late 1995 the market was even more crowded than when they launched in '94.

IE was already out. Opera was around the corner. Netscape was already close to its peak market share.

Plenty of people were selling alternatives, plenty of developers had funding. A lot of money had started flowing into browsers before Netscape. Had Netscape not soaked up the funding it did, more of that would just have flowed elsewhere.

The argument is not that Netscape were irrelevant, but they were one - big, sure, - player among many racing to commercialise features that already existed before Netscape.

Hmmmm. I would argue the web would have been significanty different.

One can imagine a world without JavaScript...

Netscape didn't invent the web, its open protocol, or even the first browsers. They did not make the web happen.

Netscape had a business model (charge people for browser software.)

Netscape also went bankrupt. It was a colossal failure as a business.

Wow, all those VC's must have walked away very rich, considering how popular the web turned out to be!!!

Netscape did not start out an open source company -- quite the opposite. It was a saving throw once Explorer took away their dominance. And I wouldn't say it was a successful move.

A notable difference is that Netscape had a business model, namely, selling Navigator. Anyway, enjoy the ride.

Sorry, this is a non-answer. Is there a business model in mind or not?

We've announced one business model and do intend to iterate and add others, but that's all we've announced for now. The plan is definitely to be sustainable over the long-term.

Honestly this is fucking whacko to me. "We've incorporated a legal entity whose entire purpose is to make money, but we have no idea how that's going to happen." How is this even allowed?

Anyway the answer is ads. This just means it's going to be ads. It's always fucking ads. No one has ever gone into a capitalistic venture sans business plan and ended up doing anything besides selling fucking ads.

Ads are the most frequent answer, but it's not the only one. There's also the team getting acqui-hired, or getting bought by a competitor & shut down, or just plain old going out of business and sold for parts. None of those are good for users, obviously, but they are all viable paths for repaying VCs in absence of a business model.

Sure, I guess I meant for long-lived products.

Relax bro, you're just looking at it upside-down.

The ads let you know what services are not worth your time, or only worth consuming with sufficient adblocking.

They're really doing you a great service by advertising that you're the product.

Also, hope is not lost for ad-free capitalism. For the first time ever I'm actually paying for subscription services that don't have ads (yet). Mostly to do with search and AI.

"We've incorporated a legal entity whose entire purpose is to make money, but we have no idea how that's going to happen."

That's quite the reach. The actual information you got, is them not telling you publicly. Either because they can't, or don't want to.

I mean, I do sympathize with your frustration, tho. Every time I read this lobotomized "Rampart-AMA" PR shit, a few of my own brain cells commit suicide. It's insulting.

Look, those underpants aren't going to collect themselves, are they.

And don't worry about Phase Two. Phase Three is when the profit will happen.

I really hope they do freemium.

If they can run it with a small enough team, then freemium could be feasible. Sell special tools and functions to the power users.

A bit macro and optimistic view about sustainability (in general, not specific to Bluesky):

If everything goes according to the prediction of economists for 2024, a light crisis should decrease consumer confidence in the US.

One of the solution to re-energize the economy might be to lower interest rates.

Which means that if interest rates go down in 2024, companies are going to be able to borrow at extremely low cost.

In such environment, does the question of business model even matter ?

If your task is to raise debt, what you need is to sell a dream, not have a way to generate money.

Back to Bluesky:

The bigger danger for the company now is most likely its own users.

"Open ecosystem"/"Freedom"/"Free-speech" users tend to be greedy and consider everything should be free, and at the same time are very active when it's about criticizing.

The "normies" of Twitter / Instagram, are likely higher spender because of the importance that vanity / self-promotion has in their life.

One key could be for Bluesky to focus more on content, than on technology.

Even on Telegram, people join groups and people, they don't really care if the source-code is here or not, or who controls what (because no matter how, this can change in the future).

Speaking as someone who has been stubbornly offering paid-for-access Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix (and now Funkwhale) accounts at communick.com for 5+ years, I learned already that very few individuals are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Everyone loves to complain about the exploits of the tech companies, but no one really cares about paying for a service unless it gives some sense of exclusivity.

What is going to make or break the alternative social media networks is the institutions. If/When newspapers (not journalists) start setting up their own instances, if companies put up support accounts on their own domain, if influencers start mirroring their social accounts on their own sites to try to their push their own brand... then I'll start believing that we have a chance.

This sounds interesting to me, but visiting communick.com I can't figure out how much the service costs, nor see any way to find out. I see a sign up page, but it also has no pricing info.

Can you direct me to that in info?

Yeah, I am in the process of simplifying the offering and split down the site for managed hosting and the "standard" service. https://communick.com/packages/access should you give a link to the package: $29/year for Mastodon/Matrix/Lemmy/Funkwhale.

It's difficult, we compare two different views, one from tech-perspective, and one from user-perspective.

I understand your arguments about the technology, they are absolutely correct, but they attract a typology of niche users, which are extremely demanding and very difficult to convert to paying users.

Twitter, the platform is very glitchy, the owners are who they are, the developer access is horrible, but still, I am using it, because there is exclusive and fresh content.

Bluesky is an interesting project, but I can strongly suggest leaning toward content/user-focus than pure-tech, in order to secure a stronger business-model (and eventually, as a consequence, a sustainable + open ecosystem).

Focus on onboarding great content first, and then walk back to the tech, not the other way around.

For example, to support more extensively those newspapers or institutions to onboard the platform, and most of all, all these unofficial content creators.

There are also some things which feel very strange, like the main description of Bluesky when you search for it on Google: "Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is".

we're also working hard to be sustainable

When people ask you what your business model is, they are asking you how you are going to do this.

On the other hand, Jack Dorsey has proven himself as someone who can be very successful founding a large microblogging social network with no business model.

I think Elon Musk proved Jack Dorsey to be that someone.

Twitter was always going to show ads, whether that would suffice or not was the question. Memberships were also an obvious move. There is no obvious move for Bluesky, an open federated network.

Why not use ActivityPub?

Why should we trust Dorsey again?

What is one good reason to use Bluesky over Mastodon?

1. "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."

https://atproto.com/guides/faq

2. Jack Dorsey is on the board but has no day-to-day role in the company. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and is in control. The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil.

3. Bluesky has a different approach in many ways. One of the biggest differences is that Bluesky is (IMHO) the first decentralized social network that is highly usable by regular non-technical users.

The account portability is probably the biggest problem with the fediverse right now.

I finally signed up for Mastodon despite reading little to nothing positive about it on hn. It was easy to use, and the signal to noise ratio was vastly improved from my Twitter experience.

However, that lack of account portability means users can, have, and will continue to get cut off. Servers cost thousands of USD per months with no revenue and domain name ownership can magically vanish for many reasons. With no business model for server operators, these are significant issues.

That confusion for users may even be the primary force that drives them over to something like Facebook's Threads.

There are analogies to e-mail here for the server operator. If I said any numbers I would be making them up, but I'm assuming 1 Mastodon user costs a lot more, both in compute/bandwidth and support, than 1 e-mail user. Free servers are not going to scale.

Account portability doesn't solve this, but it means if something happens to one server operator, that user doesn't churn in to the ether and never return. I've been keeping an eye on https://fedidb.org/ (not my site.) While total users and servers keep going up over the past year, active users keep dropping. It could be something related to how they record usage, but it isn't a promising thing.

I'm less skeptical about long term adaptation. Most of the negative sentiment I've read on hn about Mastodon just was wrong. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft are all fully accelerating in to ad business models which will make much of their products less unappealing by the day. If history is any lesson, when a new competitor shows up without ads and a similar or better experience, the incumbent is in trouble.

You can migrate your account between instances and take your followers and follows with you. Server shutdowns are rare, since administrators tend to proactively limit registrations when activity starts to be a financial burden. Avoiding the growth-at-all-costs mindset means that instances can stay sustainable.

You can migrate your account between instances and take tour followers and follows with you.

You can if the server is operational. If the server not operational and cooperative, you can't. And you can't migrate your posts, only your followers.

Server shutdowns are rare

Not rare enough though.

> You can if the server is operational.

And if Bluesky's servers stop being operational? Where is your data hosted?

If you or someone else has an archive of your data, then you can seamlessly port your account somewhere else. With Mastodon, I'm not sure there's an established flow for downloading your full account data, and you have to have your old server cooperate and redirect your user page to your page on your new server.

Yes there is an established flow for exporting your full account data. It comes as an easy export zip and CSVs.

Its not even that.

Look at Shitter and Reddit: they just turned off API access and introduced heavy rate limits to webpage loads. Good luck scraping your account details with that.

Enshittification is a thing with ALL commercial services. And eventually BlueSky will have their "The sky is falling! Crank the money extraction lever." And I'd move that timeframe up a LOT if they took VC money.

Feces, err, uhmm VCs want their hockeystick growth to be a hockeystick. They want their 30x , 50x, or 100x.

The handful of moderately large instances that have shut down rhat I'm aware of gave long notices, in a couple of cases over a year, before actually going offline.

The only notable counterexample I remember was BitcoinHackers.org shutting down suddenly with a note saying "haha look at how easy it is for mastodon instances to shut down go use nostr", making it a self-fulfilling prophecy in that case. If you have other examples I would like to know about them.

I've personally had to migrate instances twice. The first time because the instance suddenly became nonfunctional, and the administrator went AWOL. The second time, I discovered that the incompetent admin had silently enabled auto-deletion of data including posts and direct messages.

Now I'm finally on mastodon.social, which wasn't open for new users the first two times that I needed an instance.

That, to me, is an argument for improving the existing account portability of ActivityPub, not for starting from scratch.

To me, the Not Inventented Here feel to Bluesky makes me want to stay far away. People will bridge it to ActivityPub anyway.

Nostr solves the account portability, albeit poorly. (Your identity is your public key, so if the key gets compromised your identity is as well)

I am more excited about Takahe, which decouples the servers running the federation from the domains holding the actor ids. This means that a hosting provider like mine won't need to allocate one whole instance for each user that wants to have their own domain.

There is also a FEP from the developer of Mitra which aims to flip the ownership of the account keys, which would prevent cases of servers going under and stopping users from recovering their identity.

I'm more worried about the financing of Bluesky. You have taken VC money, and we all know what that means - growth at all costs.

The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil.

I feel like we have seen this movie play out a few times. There are always way to close things down the road. For example, I can imagine that even with federation there will be a power law of distribution, and there's a high chance that most users will end up on official Bluesky servers. This means that you could one they stop federating, and most users would be backed in a walled garden. Sure, the protocol would be out there in the open, but it wouldn't matter because overnight it would lose most of its users.

I trust that you and the initial team has genuine motivation not to do this. Forgive me for being cynical, but history does reapeat itself.

I think the only antidote against this is regulation, as we're seing now with the DMA in EU that forces WhatsApp and other gate keepers to open their platform to other clients.

There are always way to close things down the road.

If nothing else, Bitcoin is a successful existence proof. Maintaining control may be easier, but it's safe to say that Satoshi wouldn't be able to take control back now.

Bluesky is not structured the way Bitcoin was structured. It's nonsensical to make prescriptive statements based on that comparison.

The big lesson to me has been for a platform to be open, there must be both third party clients and third party servers. A service that has only one backend server that no one else can run (looking at you Signal) isn't ok anymore. Even worse, Twitter or Reddit being "open" because they have an API: that's all bullshit, and you are setting yourself up to be rug pulled. We don't need to hear these lies anymore and it's time to move on from the services making either of those claims. I'm waiting for a little more progress and third party control to make a judgement on Bluesky.

Users should think of this in terms of buy in cost. If you use a particular platform for 10 years, and build a community on it, you can take advantage of that and you get a mostly free service. But at some point the bill comes, and you move on. However, I keep thinking that the reason why some of those open third party protocols - even including email - "suck" is because so much of the time and focus has been on these proprietary, commercial communications platforms.

I feel so old now I went from thinking email is a terrible way of communicating to, actually Facebook is far worse. Instead of seeing updates from my friends I'm looking at a firehose of noise of things I can't control and have zero interest in. Nearly 20 years later, I use e-mail every day and Facebook 0.

Veering off-topic, but seeing conversations running for many years over the standards implementation and feature parity of the clients and servers both for XMPP and Matrix (meaning each separately, not inter-operating XMPP and Matrix, but rather each protocol has many servers and many clients, all trying to keep up with a moving protocol spec without breaking backwards compatibility), I have to laugh that a piece of legislation can just magically open the doors a some potentially very convoluted and continuously changing communications platform to third parties.

It could be even more self defeating and monopoly re-enforcing if those platforms are relaying to users of third party apps the features they are missing along with warnings about non-existent encryption and everyone can read their messages.

Point number three is critically important and no matter how many nerds complain it is not activity pub or some crypto thing, the company focus on delivering a product which is viable to use by normies is awesome.

Can you elaborate on point 3? What do you think are the differences or pain points of Mastodon that Bluesky fixes?

We'll see whether you release portability before Mastodon. Right now, bsky.social seems to be the only place anyone can get an account, subject to your verification requirements (and there are people in the comments here that can't sign up), so you're multiple steps away from porting anything.

Questions 1 and 3 are answered in the paper.

Dorsey isn’t even involved. He kicked it off but hasn’t had a hand in it for a very long time.

There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use.

Very excited for this - IMO, this is federated social media's biggest promise.

"We tag trolls so you don't have to."

I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, so I'll explain further.

Currently, if you want to be part of a social network, your options are to opt-in to Zuckerberg's moderation or Musk's moderation.

It would be great if these were _actually_ opt-in (as in, you can be part of a social network without opting in to their moderation polices) and if you can use anyone's "moderation list."

I think ultimately this would allow for freer expression than exists on current social networks.

It's interesting that 10 years ago there was a media driven panic about "filter bubbles", and now we are at a point where the abilitiy to choose your own filter bubble is considered a feature.

You missed the middle: the collective realization that socializing is not a public activity, it's bubbles all the way down. No one wants vitriolic arguments outside of debate club...

Ultimately is what you end up with is being held under some instance operator's even more capricious, arbitrary and biases moderation "policy." Although I think calling it a policy might be a bit generous.

This is exactly why I love the promise of moderation lists (as opposed to "choosing an instance.")

Y'all let the public in before finishing your wait-list. I joined the list on 2023-03-02.

Y'all didn't email me that signups were going to be public.

Y'all didn't email me when signups actually went public. I found out about it here.

...And, let's see.. Yep, my handle is taken.

Well, join Mastodon! Find a community (server) that fits your liking and get your username! You can talk with anybody on other servers, but the one you choose is your homebase!

https://joinmastodon.org/servers

At least you're not succumbing to a commercial interest who will inevitably enshittify for eventual profit extraction.

Same here, I was on the waitlist for a few months, during that time I saw no evidence that anyone joined Bluesky via the waitlist. Eventually I got lucky and found someone who was giving out invites on Twitter, but by then all of my friends are no longer interested in joining yet another social network.

I hope Bluesky prospers since it has some features that Mastodon and Twitter lacks, but it has a lot of catching up to do.

Sorry about that. You definitely should have received a waitlist invite. We did invite everyone on the waitlist before launching. The deliverability of those emails was quite high but it's possible it went to the spam folder or something else went wrong.

Something like 1 million of the users that joined came from the waitlist.

Most users on HN are probably able to navigate using a domain handle, which is really the recommended and most decentralized option.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutor...

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.

On the other hand, the benefit of decentralized services is that your handle being taken shouldn't (eventually) matter, because you can just find another server.

There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use.

Will people be able to opt out of your moderation services?

This is my big question as well. As long as I'm able to block at an individual, or even org level, I'm generally okay seeing a feed of those I follow.

Most social media moderation in my experience tends to be heavy handed. Most jokes could be offensive to someone and likely are. I'd prefer to preserve the collective works if George Carlin and Richard Pryor over heavily filtered systems.

Edit: appears to be completely opt in and based on tagging... Wonder about positive filtering by tag now...

It sounds like you have to opt-in.

Yes, every part of the Bluesky (atproto) network is composable, including moderation (labeling).

Any plans to improve the search engine?

Yes, it's always a bit of an after thought (unfortunately) but we have improved it already a couple of times.

And like most things with atproto, there will likely be protocol support for pluggable search engines, so users can choose their search provider(s).

It's already entirely possible for others to operate atproto search engines since all the data is public and available.

Thanks for all your hard work!

Twitter is an obvious influence on Bluesky.

Was the team able to benefit from the experience of working on Twitter, or were most of the big problems novel?

None of us worked at Twitter actually, but we chatted with a lot of folks who did.

Is it completely infeasible for BlueSky to federate with ActivityPub while maintaining the pros of its architecture?

If Threads, BlueSky, and ActivityPub all interconnected it really would be a great opportunity to compete on the software / UX front

There has been some work by others already on this front: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed

What's the thinking on BGSes? I haven't seen much talk of who's expected to run them or what they'll look like, but they seem to be the linchpin of reliable data portability.

A Relay (we used to call it the BGS) crawls all of the PDS hosts on the network and aggregates the data. This makes it possible for services to subscribe to all events on the network without putting load on PDS hosts directly.

Anyone can run a Relay. They're somewhat comparable to Linux distribution FTP/HTTP mirrors.

Bluesky will always run a Relay, but other organizations will hopefully as well. We expect these might be organizations doing other things in the ecosystem, universities, and possibly open consortiums.

we're now able to commit to open federation on the production network this month as well

Aha, this is good to now. Looking forward to standing up my own PDS.

I tried to sign up and it requires a phone number to verify trough SMS.

Question. The phone will be attached to my account or is for one-time verification? If the latter, it is removed from blue sky database at some point?

Thanks.

I've been on for a few months now. It feels like 2014 Twitter in that it doesn't have gifs or video, so you will see some very good jokes.

A number of people I used to follow on Twitter are over there but seem to have broken out of the posting habit and are quieter now.

When I look at the "discover" tab I don't usually see much stuff that's interesting to me. It's a lot of men posting thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics, and discussion about what's going on on Twitter

Edit to add: people really like to advise blocking. It's to the point that new users are often advised to add a profile photo and an intro post before following people, because you might get blocked just for not having those. I don't know what this is about - possibly because there's no private/locked accounts? It seems really strange to me.

Yeah, I've tried to seek out and post technical stuff but it's mostly people virtue signalling, rage baiting, and complaining about other sites.

I think a lot of that is on mastodon fwiw, and some hasn't left Twitter

I've mostly been able to curate my Twitter feed to not include that stuff. Similarly for Mastodon. The problem is BlueSky tries to add algorithmic feeds while not doing it well enough to learn that I don't want to see it.

I think the future has to be feed ingestion that is 100% controlled by the user. To some extent we were there with RSS readers. I'm still able to retrieve Twitter feeds with an RSS reader. Everything comes together in one place, in order.

If this is done on device and everything is archived, it starts getting really powerful. For example, after the 737 MAX door incident, I searched "Boeing" in my RSS reader and instantly had a list of news stories going back over the past year. (The number of 737 incidents that has been happening around the world is a lot more than what sits in the top of the news, but that's another discussion.) A local LLM could even summarize large amounts of stored headlines and tweets going back over years, and that's tech that works today.

I don't want third party ad platforms (which now consists of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and more) measuring, running tests, re-ordering, and deleting on my communications. The LLMs and machine learning advancements are going to just make this more invasive, ugly, and manipulative.

Sure, hn is largely about VC backed startups going on to try to have a multi-billion dollar IPO. It's also about disrupting incumbents. I can't think of a better path to disruption than coming up with business models that choke off their user-bases and end ad monetized surveillance. I for one have no interest in a future where I wear an Apple/Facebook/Google controlled AR/VR headset that has cameras to make sure my eyes are looking at all of the ads which are targeted based on the other pixels it knows I looked at. (I feel like a paranoid schizophrenic writing that, but that is what they are making.)

Look man, I'm a regular HN reader and even I don't buy into this. Are ads really the problem they are made out to be here? I'm asking because I don't mind and haven't mind about seeing an ad in years. In fact, I think they are perfectly good compromise when it comes to monetizing a website. Even HN has ads for gods sake. I even was okay with those old porn ads in The Pirate Bay or in 4chan, etc. Sure, if it's too much of that it can get annoying but whatever. On the other hand, the vast majority of people don't even know what RSS is and haven't even noticed a change in Twitter in the last few years. I'm sure most of them, believe it or not, aren't even aware of the transition to Elon Musk.

I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but perhaps you and the tech industry in general are vastly overestimating a extremely niche opinion and a "nothingburger". For example, cookies. Now we have extremely annoying cookie banners everywhere, when they didn't matter at all. Why? Because if I'm using an icognito browser, what are they going to track? Do you think I REALLY care? What are they going to do with that? Track me and offer me catered ads? I don't think "they" can, but even if they do, big fucking deal.

I'm a lot more worried about Know Your Customer policies on everything, or social media platforms (or even hosting platforms) deplatforming you if they don't like your opinion, or the FBI planting child porn on your site if they want to take it down. Do you think I'll worry about an AD out of all things?

I tried to create a curated feed on Bluesky. It didn't go well. It interpreted my unambiguous keyword in the technology space as applying to content in the uh personal massage space. Much, much prefer Mastodon's direct hashtag following.

BlueSky lets people add their own algorithmic feeds, and customize which feeds they subscribe to. Currently I have "Following" (strictly reverse chronological feed of the people I follow), "What's Hot Classic" (reverse chronological feed of posts that are "hot", by some unclear metric, but not tailored to me), and "Discover" (described as "Trending content from your personal network"). I can remove any of those feeds, and use any others I want, including curated feeds of: scientists, furries, black users, cats, authors, people you follow who follow you back, people who follow you that you don't follow back, or just create your own feed.

If you want to only ever see a strictly reverse chronological feed of the people you follow, then remove all feeds other than "Following", done. If you don't want to see reposts, then turn off seeing reposts. If you don't want to see replies, then turn off seeing those too. I'm not sure what you experienced which isn't easily solvable. The only QoL feature I can think of that isn't yet supported is the ability to selectively turn off reposts from individual people you follow.

IMO the biggest problem with Mastodon is that for a while decentralization was the biggest selling point. It led to the place being full of a lot of pedantic dorks. The situation did improve as Twitter exploded and various communities migrated in herds though.

Most "Twitter alternatives" don't deal with the fundamental, sensation-seeking oriented flaws in the medium and just turn out to be Twitter with more perpetually upset losers.

It's disappointing, because a lot of work has gone into these. Especially Mastodon and Pleroma.

I somewhat like Mastodon's model where you can have mostly focus on members within a community that maintains/owns the instance. Federation completely optional, though connecting communities more explicitly would be really cool!

This is sadly a bit of a problem with most Twitter alternatives right now; many more niche communities haven't moved over (or have only chosen to go to one of them), so there's a good chance you won't find content you're interested in. Mastodon seems to have more of the tech crowd from what I can tell, but even then it's maybe 1% of the audience you might have had on Twitter.

They aren't going to move over; the reddit/twitter model of 'crosspollination' is fundamentally flawed - if trolls can just stroll over from their little trollzone at any time they will do so and every conversation will get derailed with politics/gender/whatever gets the most engagement; character assassination will be the dominant paradigm.

Silos are the answer. Open to all but topic focussed and with no cross-referencable userhistory. Or 100% anonymity with no userhistory i.e. futaba type message boards.

I made an account to check it out and was surprised to see it was just recommending nothing but US politics outrage bait, just like Twitter.

it's very 'scoldy' too

Regarding your edit, much of bluesky's culture is developing in reaction to Twitter, or based on lessons learned from it. That block-first attitude is a response both to the kinds of bots that are endemic on Twitter, and to the kinds of engagement-bait that made it such a mess at times. New follower looks like it might be a bot? Block. See a skeet from someone who looks like an asshole? Block. Don't feed the trolls, just block and move on. Personally I tend to mute, rather than block, but I think lots of social media would be better if people didn't boost things they dislike for the purpose of dunking or disagreeing.

And to be clear, not all of bluesky's culture is a response to twitter, a lot of it is just the kind of lighthearted playfulness you can only get on a small and new social network.

What is a "skeet"?

The unofficial name for a post on bluesky. It comes from a combination of "sky" and "tweet". The people running the site don't like that name, which of course only made people embrace it even more.

It's also slang for ejaculation, so there's that.

As Lil Jon might say,

  To the window, to the wall!
  Til the sweat drop down my balls
  Til all these bitches crawl
  Til all skeet skeet motherfuckers, all skeet skeet god damn!
  Til all skeet skeet motherfuckers, all skeet skeet god damn!

Incidentally that's also a big part of why the people running the site don't like the name, and why the users do.

I don't know what's worse, this or toots.

Can't we admit Twitter had the perfect name for it, and now that twitter is gone, we can all just call them tweets?

Its almost absurd. Like if phone companies decided to brand text messages and someone got to "Texts" first so companies came up with "Blurts" and "Yells" or "Phonomails" and now we use a different verb based on which walled-garden we are in.

edit:

In thinking on this more, I do think this might impact the image of the communty. The hot lists and other feeds are dominated by the furry community, which is fine, but not everyone's cup of tea. Now naming posts / the verb be an euphemism of ejaculation... it just feels immature and is everyone going to feel welcome?

I really think "tweeting" worked to make it seem more normal and less serious than "posting", which is the brandless term X and Bluesky (the companies, not the communities) both prefer. Posting is for forums and forums are for nerds.

I harbor some hope that Elon will firesale off the trademark on "tweet" and someone can put it to good use

Posting is for forums and forums are for nerds.

But at the end of the day it is still just post on the internet forum.

Tweet is the only one that has made any sense IMO being the sound the bird mascot made, thematically with "short chirps", and birds "tweeting" at each other.

I want to live in a world where "Twitter" is a category name, and X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads etc. are simply examples of twitters. And you can tweet on all of them.

I mute annoying posters (the frequent users who already have >5k posts tend to be uninteresting to me and obviously show up more often in feeds), that makes sense to me.

How goes my experience improve if I block a bot that follows me? Follower bots is a platform problem

I think it's mostly the same motivation as blocking assholes, partly "I don't want to be part of your attempt to game the algorithm" and partly "I don't want to see this".

Yeah, I strongly dislike this blocking culture there, because blocking also affects the other person's experience on the site - they won't be able to follow threads where you're involved. There's no reason to not use muting instead if you just want to get someone out of your view, except if you do it out of spite.

> thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics

Maybe the biggest problem with Twitter never was its centralization.

It shouldn't be surprising that cloning Twitter mechanics just to decentralize it would result in the same signal-to-noise ratio as Twitter.

Just echo chambers doing echo chamber things.

Maybe this will give it critical mass -- with more people able to join, perhaps more will stop visiting twitter and We Can Have Nice Things Again.

It will be interesting to see how the fragmentation in the post-Twitter landscape eventually consolidates. To your broader point, I think it's an interesting time where there's trepidation over just becoming Twitter 2.0 versus making some improvements that improve the experience of the platform. Even before Elon, Twitter definitely had some pain points, such as repetitive gif-replies and toxic political stuff, as you alluded to.

The network effect is very strong.

Requiring phone number is a straight no go from me, sorry.

Understandable! We hope to relax this but we felt it was necessary to maintain the quality of the network for now.

Doesn't this go against the comic in the post that claims that it's easy to block what you don't want to see? Also that it's an open network? Why not just let everyone in if the moderation tools are good?

I definitely would never give my phone number to a social network.

Having good tools to increase the quality of your network doesn't mean you should willingly let the whole network decline in quality.

You assume that requiring a phone number increases quality instead of decreases it. I see it as a filter to keep thoughtful people off the platform.

Let's say you just eliminate the requirement altogether. What percentage of non-phone number signups are going to be "thoughtful people" compared to bots?

Sure you'll get people who refuse to sign up with a real phone number, that's a given. Some percentage of those people will be "thoughtful." You'll also eliminate a huge number of bots, automated signups, etc.

It's hard to argue letting all those bots on will not decrease system quality.

do you have an example of a platform that does not require a phone number for sms verification and is filled with bots? we have many that use sms verification and are infested with abusive content and bots.

The SMS verification requirement is only for the Bluesky operated PDS host. Soon (this month) it will be possible for others to self-host their own PDS hosts that do not have this requirement.

how will the bluesky PDS deal with the flood of spammers on malicious PDSs, like, why is the phone number a useful gatekeeping tool if you're just going to fling open the gates at the end of the month?

We do have an anti-abuse tool to help flag abuse. It is obviously important that PDS operators not allow themselves to become overrun with abusive users.

Anyone technical can run their own single-user or low-user-count PDS and probably not have to worry about any problems.

Can people bypass the phone number requirement with invites? I still have a few invites left and I am wondering if they have value going forward.

Long time user here, this is definitely not the way to go.

I thought that is why you might have required it, but on the other hand for malicious actors it's trivial to get a phone number unrelated to them, while legitimate users are giving up their only phone number, possibly exposing it to scammers and robocalls (in case of a breach), or having something linking to their real identity.

Anyway, hoping you revisit this one day and that's also when I will try your app again. Wishing you luck!

I think we'd all rather not be flooded by bots so no reason to change

And it rejects my german phone number. So, double fail. What's this obsession with using phone numbers. It's 2024! Any scammer can buy a burner phone. Owning a phone proves nothing other than that you own a phone.

Did you possibly enter the prefix +49 as part of the number?

It seems to expect a number without the country prefix, starting with a number like "174" or whatever your provider prefix is...

I tried all sorts of variations of my number. It just won't take it. I expect their validation is wonky/buggy. I used to work for Nokia and remember talking to people responsible for parsing phone numbers. This is not a trivial problem.

Anyway, it hard rejects +49176..., 0049176..., 0176..., 176...; it correctly normalizes each of those to +49176... and then rejects the number. My number is fine. Their validation isn't.

Anyway, for a new social network to repeat the security/privacy mistake of its predecessors (wrongly assuming phone operators are trustworthy and users never change their number) is just madness. Doesn't instill a lot of confidence that a lot of thought went into the whole thing.

IMHO, phone numbers as a thing should just go away completely. Weird legacy identifiers from the last century. Absolutely no redeeming features. Hard to remember, easy to spoof. Etc. Why build your new network on the crumbling remains of an old one and give a lot of control to the typical abusers of the phone system (spammers, scammers, oppressive regimes, etc.)?

Sorry about this. We've just made some changes to make this less likely of an issue going forward.

Same problem with my Norwegian phone number just now.

I hate tying phone numbers to identity but it is a way to slow down the ability to create massive heaps of bot accounts. There really isn't a better way. (Insert "better ways" that aren't actually better ways below)

It requires a phone number now? That's weird. The invites didn't require a phone number.

Because the numbers were limited before and now they've thrown open the doors to massive botnetting.

Likely a means of reducing bot accounts..

How can phone validation work in a supposedly open federated ecosystem?

Reading testimonials from people who seemingly enjoy Bluesky, it sounds like the main perk is its exclusiveness and feeling like the good old days when Twitter was just for hardcore social media nerds? Is that that a recipe for success and wouldn't opening up undermine it?

I don't see how any Twitter clone would avoid the pitfalls that make social media like Twitter fundamentally annoying. It's not about the technology or being federated or not, but about such internet-scale communities just not working well. You'll always end up with online drama about the silliest things and terminally online power users.

Everybody hates Discord, but I think more communities should strive towards isolating themselves from the broader net to keep conversations civil.

I don't understand how people believe they just "end up" like that. You don't ever need to see celebrities and related junk online. Just follow your friends and don't follow anyone else.

Stuff like that is automatically shoved into your feed.

On what platform? It's not true on bsky or twitter.

It's true on Twitter.

Only if you read the algorithmic "For You" feed instead of the chronological "Following" feed.

The obvious answer is that people want it.

I follow a bunch of musicians. I love going to concerts, and it’s the easiest way to find out when they announce tours. The unfortunate reality is that scalpers make buying tickets a terrible experience, so unfortunately I have a strong interest in knowing exactly when tickets go on sale to improve my own chances of getting tickets.

My dream of social media utopia is that that we see a nonprofit organization who makes no bones about their moderation policy and enforcement or their revenue and expenses. I think centralization is just the only way a network can grow to useful size or behave predictably. It's not really a social network, but my model for this is Wikimedia. They've built something incredibly durable, centralized, aggressively moderated and financially viable.

we see a nonprofit organization who makes no bones about their moderation policy

The problem is that the rules will be made by humans and will be enforced by humans. This will never be even close to perfect, especially with bad actors which are inevitable when a platform gets popular enough.

I don't think the goal should ever be "perfect". The problem I see with any commercial endeavor (this is probably as sideways critique of capitalism) is that if you have profit as the superseding interest, it will always be in conflict with being fair or being inclusive. At the same time what someone like Elon Musk clearly doesn't understand is the fundamental conflict between having an environment that fosters fruitful conversation vs absolutist free speech. Just having a platform that has a clear number goal of "free sharing of information and idea" at the top says clearly that it will come before platforming troublemakers or letting advertisers put their finger on the scales.

This exactly. It’s not the platform, it’s the people. I think social networks work fine for small niche communities where conversion stays focused. The problem with all general social networks is that they eventually all devolve into political flame wars. Everyone is just over it.

Niche communities around some topic work well if people that are interested come and go.

But if the niche is artificially created by fact that community is gated, then such community is not sustainable. Cabin fever and general fatigue of users.

Reddit almost solved it because they figured out a way to make a large collection of small communities, but then that slumped into the melt as it was likely to do.

I keep thinking something closer to BBS networks... There are local boards you can chat on, but also the network boards. Usually by topic or interest.

It's not instant, like social media, but lends to longer communication.

More like a self hosted, distributed Facebook group, less life Twitter.

I agree that internet-scale communities are pretty bad for many (maybe most) topics. But Discord goes too far in the other direction with terrible discoverability. Most posters who would be good contributers to a given group never learn of its existence.

The old school forum model does the best job of threading that needle that I have seen so far. Forums are easy enough to stumble across when searching a relevant topic, while the narrow focus makes them less of a magnet for stupid trolls and attention seekers.

Reddit solved the hosting and setup problems of a forum, but that company is so far into the enshittification spiral that it hardly seems like a worthwhile place to invest much focus.

I wish that all of the neo-Twitter resources where going towards making better forum-like platforms that actually encourage thoughtful discussion while also leaving space for more lighthearted posting.

internet-scale communities just not working well

I think you have to dig into that, and figure out why internet-scale communities don't work well, and then whether or not bluesky addresses it.

First of all, what does internet-scale really mean? I think it has to be that, to some degree, everyone is talking at everyone else.

For twitter and some other social networks this is because users don't fully control their feed -- they see what an algorithm decides they should see... and the algorithm is designed to increase engagement... because ads are how the social network makes its money. So you have content creators competing to make the most engaging posts and twitter doing its best to deliver those posts.

So I think it's probably twitter's ad driven business model, combined with the sad fact that it's a lot easier to engage people with anger and outrage than with civil, thoughtful content, that leads to a social media wasteland more than whether you need an invite to join.

I don't know if it will work, but if bluesky stays away from an ad-driven business model, they can let people control their own feeds and creators aren't incentivized only for engagement and it might stay a nice place to visit and hang out.

My experience on Bluesky was:

1. A direct port of the ragescrolling, today's-main-character culture of twitter 2. Complaining about mastodon and linux on a premise I haven't been able to tease out but appears to relate to open projects being inherently untrustworthy and private projects that receive funding being trustworthy. 3. Hyping Bluesky's ease of use (it is identical to Mastodon in every meaningful respect, except where Mastodon offers some additional functionality like private posts).

I got out. I love a lot of the people that moved there, but the rage culture alone was what I originally left twitter to avoid. It's kind of a cultural AOL in the post-twitter-social space, with all that entails.

Musk has done a lot of questionable things, but does anyone remember how actually unusable twitter was before the sale? Musk Twitter has its own set of problems but Jack has proved he has no idea what he's doing

At this point, whenever I go to twitter, it shows status updates that are years out of date. For example, compare this:

https://ubuntu.social/@launchpadstatus

to this:

https://twitter.com/launchpadstatus?lang=en

This is because you are logged out.

Please note that this is not me advocating for this practice. It has broken the web in immensely frustrating ways.

Given that it appears to be completely broken (last tweet for that account was 6 hours ago, and it's showing a 6 month old cached version), why would I bother creating an account?

I agree. It's ridiculous. I was simply explaining why this behaviour happened.

When you're not logged in, the profile view shows you the most liked posts from that account, not the most recent. Not sure why.

how actually unusable twitter was before the sale?

I do not know how usable it was but at least I was able to see the posts. Now I'm not. Well except for some lucky occasion when it shows the post just without replies.

… no? It was very usable before, it's much less usable now.

I remember that before the whole fiasco of a sale Twitter was a place where I could follow interesting tech people. These days those people have left for Mastodon etc. (or stopped posting entirely) and were replaced with hoards of $8 spammers whose only interest is to push inflammatory content to generate the most views and get paid for it.

Dorsey isn't running Bluesky, he's just one member of the board.

I feel like this would have been a lot more impactful a year ago, when the Twitter drama was in full swing.

Feedback: the homepage looks more like a tech product pitch site, and the announcement post also doesn't look very polished. I guess the target for Bluesky isn't so much the "regular Facebook/Twitter/IG user", more the nerd.

Side question: what's the interop story between Bluesky and Mastodon now?

I am not sure, during the Twitter drama was in full swing Meta tried to launch an alternative, and how long did it last? A couple of weeks? I think social sector is filled, with boomers on facebook, cool people on instagram, kids on tiktok, woke on twitter, meme people on reddit?

Meta tried to launch an alternative, and how long did it last? A couple of weeks?

If you mean Threads, it's currently up to 130M monthly active users[0]. Estimates for Twitter late 2023-early 2024 are between 350-400M MAU.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/threads-now-reaches-more-1...

Who are these users? I haven't heard a single person talking about actually using Threads.

Ah okay, didn't know that, I've read some time after the launch that it was going desert, somewhere on an article linked here, I am not a social network person, so wasn't following it

Well to be fair it was very half baked and it was really anti Twitter, it was just Instagram in text, which exactly what twitter users don't want.

There is some work by others to make this possible:

https://docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed

Afaik no interop - they use different protocols.

I guess the target for Bluesky isn't so much the "regular Facebook user", more the nerd.

I think it's more "regular Twitter user". It has implementation details that interest nerds, but my read is that the target audience really is regular users.

Pretty ironic that when Twitter was imploding Meta launched a competitor that was fully compatible with ActivityPub/Mastodon while the team dedicated to building an open competitor (Bluesky) created a proprietary protocol that nobody uses.

Threads has been promising to integrate with ActivityPub since it launched. To date they've done very little and their timeline extends until the end of 2024.

I'd personally be very happy if Threads gives up control over their users but it remains to be seen. ActivityPub also lacks the very strong account portability feature that made AT Protocol necessary.

AT Protocol is completely open source and the Bluesky network is completely open. The Bluesky network has had an open API for a year with full access to all public data (no auth required):

    websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos

More info on: https://atproto.com

To date they've done very little

Not true. You can now follow Adam Mosseri's Threads account from Mastodon.

And like you said they are committed to fully rolling it out this year.

Limited functionality for a specified subset of users counts as "very little" to my mind given that they launched 6 months ago and have a team of hundreds working on it.

But like I said, I sincerely do hope Threads follows through on their plan to federate. But it's just not correct to claim that they already have.

Maybe you I and understand the software development process differently.

Supporting one user end to end is a huge milestone and the first step in rolling it out to the other hundreds of millions of users. Especially when Threads isn't a standalone platform but is built on top of Instagram which means we could see it integrated with ActivityPub as well.

The fact that Meta cares about ActivityPub at all is a huge win for open, interoperable standards.

I don't know... the whole Threads + ActivityPub thing just seems like Meta trying to keep the regulators at bay rather than them actually embracing the ethos of becoming a major federated social media player.

So launch in July 2023, handful of accounts have AP support in November-ish 2023, full AP support end of 2024? I guess it's not nothing, they did have to bolt something entirely new on top of IG's infrastructure. But for a team that big, feels like we'd be seeing more if it was a true priority for them. Plus Threads leaning towards opt-in AP support which will only inhibit uptake (that was the last I heard, anyway).

I'd be shocked if Instagram ever went with ActivityPub, though.

FWIW, you can now follow people on Threads from Mastodon and interact as if they're just another Mastodon user.

To be clear, strong account portability predates Bluesky by ~5 years. Peergos[0], as reviewed by Jay before Bluesky Inc was created, has had this for years:

https://book.peergos.org/features/migration.html

[0] https://github.com/peergos/peergos

Did threads launch with compatibility? Because I know a lot of “nsfw” creators that choose Bluesky over Threads because threads rules over NSFW content.

Bluesky wasted a few opportunities they could have grabbed market share from Twitter simply because a) you needed and account to view posts (now fixed) b) you needed a code to sign up (now fixed).

But has their ship sailed? L

How many social networks recently, Lemmy? The other one with crypto guys? This one? It's 2005 all over again? I am wondering if it's either because it's a relatively easy thing to code or because investors are likely to throw money at it?

Probably because we need new ones badly. Reddit and Twitter are two sinking bot-infested enshittification ships and we need a new place to go. Network lock-in is proving to be a very difficult nut to crack in the dystopia we have created though. You need people to jump ship but no one wants to go where the millions of eyes aren’t.

Why do you think any halfway popular social network won't be infested with bots and commercalizers?

My hope anyways is that there are more effective countermeasures. I remember Twitter not being nearly as bad before, but that was possibly just because verification actually meant something more than "have $10" and blue checks weren't turbo-boosted.

The fact that the verification system is paid, and that is abused by bots, means twitter no longer has any incentive to remove said bots.

Its basically the entire ad industry, there's little proof ads work, the metrics for ads are all inflated, yet its one of the biggest money makers out there. Same deal with the bots grinding views and likes for marginal payouts.

Reddit wasn’t for a long time. Having leadership in place that actually cares about the users and doing something about bots would go a long way. Maybe when Reddit IPOs and it is a huge bust we can get some new sites going.

More, smaller networks seems like a big improvement over a handful of too-big, everyone's-there networks.

I think the "everyone's there" networks were nice due to the cross-pollination aspect. I would see random trending stuff that I didn't know I would find interesting pop up.

What's bluesky again?

A Twitter alternative.

by Jack Dorsey (he co-founded Twitter)

Jack directed Twitter to fund Bluesky when he was CEO of Twitter, but Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and the technology & app was created by Jay and her team (which I'm a part of).

Thanks for the clarification.

Is he not involved in it anymore?

He's on the board but he's never been involved directly

Just from reading the page it seems like a mix of twitter and reddit. You can follow certain channels instead of an algorithm.

Not sure what they mean with "Dock it every port, your network comes with your" Is it federated?

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39274438

why do we say dupe on orange site? this is like the most trivial inconsequential thing to call out, let this be duped. This is going to be news to someone.

to add some more substance to my comment this is how I see Bluesky's virality/stickiness playing out: everyone's going to move to it, it's going to be an unofficial but incompatible "fediverse2", folks will pretend the actual Fediverse doesn't exist, and then the actual Bluesky public benefit corporation (or some derivative, come on guys you wanna get filthy rich) will eventually turn to a data brokerage/ advertising play to enshittify the entire thing.

We say dupe so a moderator can combine the listings into one and merge the conversations. The original submission is 40mins older, don't worry the people will still see the news. A single article with more upvotes and comments will raise up further/stay there than 2 articles with moderate engagement.

okay that actually makes sense I appreciate your explanation.

yeah but this one is more official right. It is from one of their team members.

Slightly off-topic on this, but are there any apps that manage posting across BlueSky/Mastodon/Threads/Linkedin?

With the fragmentation of social networks and different audiences being in different places, it's a bit annoying to have to manually post in different places (taking account of things like hashtag formats and post length limits), it'd be nice to have a site/app that helped with that.

There have been a few. I know https://www.hootsuite.com is one of those, but does not currently seem updated to support any of the ones you asked about!

https://fedica.com/ seems to maybe be a parent company (acquisition?) of Hootsuite.

https://buffer.com/publish I first heard about this ages ago as a way to build a queue of things to put out to Twitter. They likely support Mastodon and LinkedIn now, but probably not yet the others. See https://support.buffer.com/article/567-supported-channels

Definitely. Hootsuite is the one I’m familiar with but it’s targeted more at agencies or larger content creators and is priced for that.

ha same! I just last week started building an app for myself where I can cross post to mastodon and bluesky (& twitter is in progress, threads doesn't seem to have an api yet). https://grater.app (screenshot at https://imgur.com/lyefPGv )

Can't choose your own handle (it's taken).

Your handle can be your personal domain or any domain also.

My domains are not my handle, and even so, I can't buy a domain with the handle I'd prefer (it's taken).

My point was subtle, that this shouldn't be an issue. It has been solved in various ways.

Yep — tutorial and some examples: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutor...

All the single word handles seem to be taken! :(

Get a short domain somewhere and use it as the handle, custom handles are cooler anyway :)

You don't need a bsky.social handle. Bring whatever domain you want.

Wow that comic invokes very unpleasant feelings for me. Super weird, way too corporate for a ... comic...? Seems confused. Their big selling point is blocking stuff you don't wanna see? Thats the big selling point? And... exploration!?

I've seen the word "block" about 20 times since trying out Bluesky. Seems to be a core part of the culture there to aggressively block anyone posting stuff you don't want to see.

On Twitter I just curate who I follow so I don't see annoying stuff and that's worked perfectly fine for me.

The comic feels like self-parody.

"Come with me to the wonderful land of BlueSky, where everything is *open* and *magic* and all bad trolls are blocked!"

"That's amazing! I think I'll like it here!"

"YAY!"

I sort of wonder if the whole short-form social media era just sort of faded away. After Musk essentially destroyed Twitter, it feels like--although various people casually migrated elsewhere--overall, it feels like a lot of people decided that a Twitter-like thing just wasn't part of their daily lives any more. Sometimes there's a forcing function that takes people off their automatic pilot and it feels like Musk caused a lot of people to do so with Twitter.

I agree that, overall, short-form social media is leaving the mainstream with Twitter's decline. However, I still really enjoy short-form media.

I can't speak for BlueSky, but I've been enjoying Mastodon a lot. Following people I like has given me a high enough signal to noise ratio that I often find myself saying "Hey! Check out this thing I found on Mastodon!". My friend just joined because of this, and they've been enjoying it too, specifically for programming, infosec, and queer memes (caveat N=2).

Idk. I hope there's a future for it.

I still have a Twitter/X account, got a Mastodon account with the Muskopalypse, and have had a Bluesky invite sitting in my mailbox for a while. It's just clearly moved on from something that was part of my routine to eh.

Why is it collecting dates of birth?

Most likely to enable protections for minors. Let's hope.

Yup, exactly for this. There is a lot of NSFW stuff on Bluesky…

I selected my interests as Cooking, Fitness, Nature, Video Games, and my feed has absolutely none of that. Just random politics, activism, and jabs at Twitter. Anyway, nope.

I found this confusing too

I think the interests section was to try get you to find people and feeds.. but after that, the feeds (or just the Discovery feed?) are influenced by who you follow.. so if you are offered a 'bad' (for you) starting group of people to follow, your feed will probably not be great until you find people you like (that are active) and follow them too.

Also was unsure what "Follow all +" button was.. why not "Follow Selected".. and a 'deselect all'.. I had no idea who all but 2 of the suggestions were. Not going to follow a random "Computer Scientist" the system picked for me sight/posts unseen.

I don't actually know how the interests are intended to work, but I can say that the key feature of Bluesky is feeds. (I know this isn't at all obvious.) Feeds are third-party created, for the most part, and essentially function as filters. So, for example, I follow a movies feed. Any post which includes the movie camera emoji, the word "filmsky", or a few other keywords is included in the movies feed. It makes it very easy to swipe over and see discussions of cinema.

That sounds (and is) a lot like tag-based feeds over on Twitter. However, there's additional potential. Behind the scenes, a feed is a service which takes the user info of the person viewing it and the firehose and decides which posts to include based on that input. So "include all posts with these keywords" is valid, but so is "include the top 100 posts with these keywords, as measured by likes." Or "show a feed including only the most recent post from every user the viewer follows."

In other words: feeds are the way a third party can build their own algorithm for the firehose. Very powerful, very useful.

The comic on this post is a whole lot of mess. Talking about moderation? Talking about "what if I want to leave"? Those sound like (1) work for me, and (2) why would I want to leave if it's so great?

Uggh. And the fragmentation into silos continues.

(2) why would I want to leave if it's so great?

A lot of people felt burned by the changes at Twitter over the past 14 months or so. They made meaningful connections on there and with new ownership came changes that altered the character of the platform, in their eyes. But because Twitter is centralized, it's difficult to move your social graph to a new platform in a robust way.

The promise of the AT protocol is being "billionaire-proof." If Bluesky gets bought out and you don't like the new owner, you can move your entire social graph and all your posts to a new atproto service without needing permission from the old service.

That would be the nuclear option. A smaller step you could take before that is use a different set of moderation services to curate the experience you want (more info: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation)

why would I want to leave if it's so great?

If you're on an instance in a federated network and the instance's admin decides that they don't want to keep hosting it, you don't really have an option to stay.

Note, it requires SMS verification

I wonder if that's true if you set up your own federated server.

Nope, it's not a requirement for other PDS operators.

Are there mobile apps for Blueky? When I type bluesky or bsky into f-droid, it comes up blank, and I'm not seeing a custom repository or even just an apk download mentioned on the website either. I thought it was like Mastodon except invite-only (till now), so was expecting a similar client ecosystem, but apparently it's more like Twitter was: open ecosystem closed software?

Or is it like Tildes whose goal is to have a mobile website that is just as good as a native app?

There is an official mobile app for iOS and Android, on iOS there are also a few third party ones, not sure about Android.

There's an official app on the play store. I don't know if it has been mirrored to any other app stores/repositories, but perhaps knowing the app ID will help find it elsewhere. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.blueskyweb...

This is a response to Farcaster hitting great metrics lately.

https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1754905898743402558

If you are outside US, joining Farcaster via Warpcast will cost $5.

I joined, and the UX does feel quite slick. Mostly it is just crypto users on this network.

Note that Farcaster is not decentralized, but "sufficiently decentralized" https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...

I think the "default feed" you're seeing is the "Discover" custom feed that shows up if you haven't followed anybody. Once you do that, your "default feed" is what your follows have posted in reverse chronological order.

IMO, the "Discover" feed can be a bit much sometimes. It's very much the collective id of a certain type of social media poster. And not always my cup of tea.

But the beauty of Bluesky is there are millions of accounts and thousands of custom feeds you can pick from to tailor your experience.

For example, here's one where people share photos of mushrooms: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hsqwcidfez66lwm3gxhfv5in/fe...

Tried it out for a while, simultaneously with Nostr. It is noteworthy that Jack basically abandoned this and went all into Nostr.

Bluesky is too much of a woke echochamber and it doesn't even have a real chance at achieving its mission, which was decentralized, permissionless, uncensorable sharing of information.

Unfortunately, this project is dead on arrival. I don't think it will ever reach mainstream adoption.

Bsky feels like Gab for woke folx and I find it incredibly boring because of that. The discussions are on par with reading front page of reddit comments, even to the point where the most engaged content is a meta commentary on some twitter content.

Unlike reddit, filtering down the feed just doesn’t pay dividends in the way niche subreddits can. I guess it’s because the personalities and views which have been interested in leaving twitter to join bsky all fit the same template.

For instance, the AI, business, tech, and finance communities are simply not there. Performance art, too. Media/politics is there, but the discourse is extremely flat.

Anyone else seem to observe people who previous tended to move to bluesky and kill their twitter happened to be radical and potentially dangerous politicians (I can think of one in sf off the top of my head

"One" is definitely a trend.

bluesky is really a bad name for a social network. sounds too entreprisy, compare it to: twitter, instagram, tiktok

I figured it related to blue-sky thinking.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blue-sky_thinking

I've had some concerns about the namespacing issue.

Bluesky accounts should be permitted to have both a bsky.social username and one with a custom domain. If I am a company and want to use @myname.com as my username, I would not want someone @myname.bsky.social to fall into the hands of anyone else. So it sort of necessitates signing up for 2 accounts, if only to reserve your name so nobody takes it.

Mastodon solves this through verified accounts.

The create account page seems to have incorrect form settings at least for Chrome.

The email field prompts to create a new password (and generates it there) and the password field there is no prompt.

Signed up in an attempt to protect my username (already taken but couldn't verify without making an account).

First impression? After selecting only tech subjects, my recommendations consisted of CNN journalists and newspapers. I decided to skip them and was forwarded to the Discovery feed which consists of American politics, Elon Musk hate, King Charles hate, and furries. So many furries.

I don't see the attraction. It's just a different hate bubble.

Nice, hopefully it'll drown some of the more niche streams and surface more mainstream ones.

Hey! Thanks for the heads up, signed up and now I'm going to do what I did when I signed up to Twitter in the deep past... lurk.

Unsurprisingly, as predicted they eventually lifted the invite system.

Unfortunately the interest in Bluesky is not the same as it was, but still a viable Twitter alternative when compared to the others.

But my goodness this certainly did not age well at all. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35876304

I am over social media just like I was over trying to become a mayor of something on FourSquare, wasting time on useless virtual accolades.

There IS a way to use this to develop your online professional brand, but it is so hard not to get bogged down in the swamp full of below-average intelligence, bots, and now AI garbage.

What does it offer over Mastodon, and following hashtags as topics ?

Yet another social media i don't want to sign up for.

Sorry, I'm getting old and grumpy, but I'm not using any of the other social media sites, and I'm not planning on adding one to the list.

Do they plan to remove the character limit to also be an alternative to other popular social networks?

I've been using Threads pretty exclusively lately. It's not perfect, but it's got what feels like critical mass and is being actively improved.

It'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

With the promises of AT Protocol I wonder what the reality of starting your own competing site to bluesky would be if it were to become as popular as Twitter. I've also been looking into LBRY too and have the same question in regards Odysee.

I'm sure we won't know until someone tries. I have a feeling there might be some unforseen network effects or barriers that build up over time to prevent someone from coming along with a better site. I'm just curious to see what they are and how insurmountable they might be.

So.. another twitter? Also, it seems to require a phone number to sign up, why?

I'm glad this happened as late as it did and that Threads absorbed the FB/IG people first. Let Twitter/Threads remain the home for the influencers, spammers, the eternal September. Hopefully Bluesky continues to attract a steady stream of early adopters but the followers never take over.

Riffing on a toot I saw this morning:

Don't build your house on rented land. Especially if the rent is zero.

No thanks. Mastodon has been there for ages and its background is not another VC funded startup company first burning through money and then finding no real way to sustain the platform, finally turning to ads and selling user data.

It's nice to see this is the case now, though I worry it may be a bit too late. Having BlueSky stuck behind an invite wall gave a huge boost in popularity to other alternatives like Mastodon and Threads, and even now I'm unlikely to find most of the accounts I want to follow on the former service as a result.

It just feels super quiet to me at the moment, and I suspect the long time exclusivity played a big role in that.