10 ms·

Jack Dorsey Unveils Bluesky Social

226 points by throw7 4y ago

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Meekro 4y ago
https://archive.ph/oMWfz https://archive.ph/oMWfz
djbusby 4y ago
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tines 4y ago
Sorry for the critique on form instead of content but man, this is hard to read. Putting periods where commas belong or where a sentence should be rewritten for clarity is an obstacle to easy comprehension.
- philipwhiuk 4y ago
  Indeed - starting every sentence with a conjunction is very jarring.
  - theta_d 4y ago
    Was this written by AI? I stopped after the second paragraph. Too much cognitive load.
- deleted 4y ago
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- tiahura 4y ago
  Not to mention the sentence fragments.
- cryptoanon 4y ago
  Wow. I was wondering why I had such a hard time reading this. Now that you say it, you’re spot on – it’s the text equivalent of stop and go traffic.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  It's the confluence of sales and religion. With these rhetorical tools, everything is a sales pitch. And when everything is a pitch, all conversation is commerce. A new world. A world where hype becomes real and reality is your plaything. We call it Xchange. Xchange your reality. [applause.flac loop=1000]
arcticbull 4y ago
I guess I don't understand what this has in terms of appeal over say a Mastodon. Mastodon of course is famous for being decentralized, and not much else. Also not sure why they had to invent a new protocol from scratch? Am I missing something?
- PandawanFr 4y ago
  web3 reinventing the wheel once again
- jrm4 4y ago
  Not sure if this solves it, but as a relatively heavy twitter user and as someone who REALLY would like an e.g. Mastodon to succeed, the lack of something like a universal handle and an easy way to follow them and find people you're into is 100% why Mastodon just ain't it. A blockchain is a 'not crazy' potential solution?
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Huh? Your universal handle is yourusername@your.domain, you can follow anyone on any instance (moderation polices of your chosen instance notwithstanding). Search I get, decentralized search is hard without centralizing because you can’t even know all the Mastadon instances that exist. Just like email Mastadon is open federation.
    - tensor 4y ago
      Search can always be provided like it is for the web. Third party indexing servers that crawl the network. That's ok, even good maybe.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      Well, email is used by some, and there's no search or big directories. Isolated communities that hear about each other by diffusion is not a bad idea.
      - 4y ago
metadat 4y ago
Perhaps Dorsey and Elon aren't BFFs (forever buddy friends) after all, this is potential competition. There is a big opportunity coming for whoever is prepared to catch the foreseeable wave of twitter account mass-exodus which will take place as soon as Musk takes control and begins asserting themself. Which tw inspired platforms are baked and ready deal with the influx?
tmpz22 4y ago
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cmer 4y ago
Jack and Elon seem to be good friends. Elon clearly knew this was coming and still made a bid for Twitter. Could Elon be planning to bring Twitter to Bluesky? It seems crazy, but you never know.
- smt88 4y ago
  I don't think Elon or anyone who knows Jack Dorsey thinks this will catch on. Dorsey is unfocused, a poor leader, and terrible at building B2C products.
- metadat 4y ago
  Supposedly he's entertaining the notion of transforming Twitter into "X: The Everything App". Maybe it's intended to become more like the vision behind Google Wave of old?
  - dadoge 4y ago
    And he want to make an “everything app” by…checks papers…firing 75% of the staff Lol, what a joke
    - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
      I mean the issue isn't really getting ride of 75% it's keeping the valuable 25%. I think most people can agree that in general twitter's staff does basically nothing of value. I just don't see how they can convince the others to stay after that degree of firing.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - dole 4y ago
    Hopefully not x.com, I still owe them money
- colpabar 4y ago
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
How does he not have a no-compete or something?
- twblalock 4y ago
  Non-compete agreements aren't legal in California.
  - bsder 4y ago
    That's not entirely true for people at Dorsey's level. However, it's been almost a year since Dorsey was CEO even though he didn't step down from the board until May. That is pretty close to the limit of what California would really allow in a non-compete.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    In terms of personal employment, yes California is very leery of non-competes. In terms of business contracts, absolutely not. If you build a product for a customer, you can agree not to build a similar product for said customer's competitors. This is not unusual. Practical example: one customer was a cruise line, and the company had to tactfully ask if building a similar product for a hotel didn't violate the contract. As opposed to, say, a school which would not reasonably compete with cruise lines - Semester at Sea notwithstanding. If you don't want to agree to this, you don't need to sign a contract not to work with competitors. But of course, the customer is probably not going to want to pay as much if they know that they can very quickly lose whatever edge they're getting.
  - delecti 4y ago
    That's not entirely true. California allows non-competes for someone selling a business. We don't know if Dorsey actually did sign a non-compete, but Musk is buying Twitter so this might be one of the rare instances where it'd be legal in California if he had. Source: California law: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?division=7.&chapter=1.&part=2.&lawCode=BPC https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x... > [...] any owner of a business entity selling or otherwise disposing of all of his or her ownership interest in the business entity [...] may agree with the buyer to refrain from carrying on a similar business within a specified geographic area in which the business so sold, or that of the business entity, division, or subsidiary has been carried on, so long as the buyer, or any person deriving title to the goodwill or ownership interest from the buyer, carries on a like business therein
whalesalad 4y ago
https://bsky.app/ https://bsky.app/
- app4soft 4y ago
  https://github.com/bluesky-social https://github.com/bluesky-social
LeoPanthera 4y ago
If you think the answer is a blockchain, you are asking the wrong question.
- version_five 4y ago
  I scanned the documentation and I didn't see anything about blockchain (I assumed at first it would be some web3 BS). Are they just using different language? It looks like it's just an open protocol Edit: I looked at the github, not the medium page, I see I'm wrong. It is some web3 BS
  - rvz 4y ago
    > Edit: I looked at the github, not the medium page, I see I'm wrong. It is some web3 BS Where exactly does it say that BlueSky is yet another web3 / blockchain project? The Medium post isn't from the BlueSky team, its from a random crypto blogger and even he doesn't reference where BlueSky is a blockchain or crypto token platform.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      My read of the protocol docs from when they came out a few days ago is that they're using Blockchain in the distributed merkel-tree ledger sense and not (explicitly?) in the sense of a cryptocurrency. It seems like it models your data as a Merkel tree log, signed by an identity key that can be obtained through DNS. Unless they plan to add a namecoinish thing for identities you shouldn't really need Po* to "secure" that.
    - version_five 4y ago
      Fair enough. They have not really made it clear on the BlueSky site. I found this: > We’re not describing what we’re building as a federated or p2p network, or as a blockchain network, because it doesn’t fall neatly in any of these categories. It could be described as a hybrid federated network with p2p characteristics, but it’s more descriptive to focus on the capabilities – self-authenticating identities and data – than on network topology. From: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-s... Not that it clarifies anything for me. It feels (I'm speculating) like they are very careful not to mention web3, but maybe that's because it really has nothing to do with tokens and whatnot and is actually just a protocol that lets people run their own social network servers. But it doesn't say it's that either. Some plain language would help make it clear if it's legit or just some new take on blockchain scamming
nus07 4y ago
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dymk 4y ago
> web3 Not many keywords immediately turn me off from a project, but this is a surefire one
- k__ 4y ago
  To be fair, if Jack is involved it's probably web5. (Which is basically web3 more or less funnily rebranded)
  - recursive 4y ago
    What happened to web4? Is it over already?
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      It can only be accessed over IPv5.
Ajedi32 4y ago
In case you want to skip to the meat like I did: Technical details: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol Developer documentation: https://atproto.com/guides/overview https://atproto.com/guides/overview
- oooff 4y ago
  The architecture sounds interesting but I wonder how they're planning to deal with spam and other types of Sybil attack.
  - iepathos 4y ago
    That's the best part of passing off algorithm and data responsibility to the users. It's entirely the users' problem to deal with the spam and bots now :P /s
- rvz 4y ago
  And if people bothered to read some of the other BlueSky posts before commenting for the answer to see whether if it is a blockchain / crypto / web3 project in another post: > Bluesky is not a blockchain, and we believe the adoption of social web protocols should be independent of any blockchain. [0] > We’re not describing what we’re building as a federated or p2p network, or as a blockchain network, because it doesn’t fall neatly in any of these categories. It could be described as a hybrid federated network with p2p characteristics, but it’s more descriptive to focus on the capabilities – self-authenticating identities and data – than on network topology. [1] In short, it is NOT a "blockchain social network" and doesn't even use one to begin with. [0] https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-7-2022-overview https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-7-2022-overview [1] https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-s...
oooff 4y ago
What are the technical details of this? How does it use blockchains and cryptocurrency? Is this an integral part of the distributed protocol, or is it more like Mastodon?
marstall 4y ago
a lot more info about what this is can be found here https://blueskyweb.org https://blueskyweb.org
- marstall 4y ago
  although there is nothing about moderation, which would seem to be near the top of the list of what people would want to know about this system ...
im3w1l 4y ago
Do I spot an Emerald Sea reference?
- jonas21 4y ago
  no
lolinder 4y ago
The title here is a bit misleading. I thought this would be an announcement from Jack Dorsey, instead it just appears to be a blogger summarizing this Twitter thread from @bluesky a few days ago: https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1582437529969917953 https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1582437529969917953 @dang, could we get the link changed to point to the original thread?
- airstrike 4y ago
  An even better link is https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol which is what that original tweet pointed to But I'll settle for anything that isn't a medium.com link, particularly a "member-only" post. Fuck that noise.
  - dang 4y ago
    That one was discussed when the post came out: The AT Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 - Oct 2022 (99 comments)
- dang 4y ago
  In principle yes, but that announcement was discussed elsewhere (see my comment downthread) and there doesn't seem to be any significant information yet, otherwise, so I think it makes sense to downweight the follow-ups until there's significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
- greyhair 4y ago
  The content is about what I expect from content on 'Medium' today. Which is why I generally avoid reading post hosted on Medium.
sylens 4y ago
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wilg 4y ago
arthurofbabylon 4y ago
Judging by the bezels on the landing page’s iPhone, they’ve been working on this for a long time. https://bsky.app https://bsky.app
- nominusllc 4y ago
  Wow, fumble. I wonder if that's just a theme though.
- echelon 4y ago
  As someone who doesn't use Apple devices, what am I looking at? Looks like a generic smartphone to me. Is this some kind of Apple consumer faux pas?
  - fhd2 4y ago
    Not an Apple user either, but that Bezel looks like an iPhone 12, latest is 14, possible to tell from how wide the bezel (the part with the selfie camera) is - I guess.
cpif 4y ago
"Unveils" is somewhat misleading -- this project has had a web presence for a number of years already. They have recently distinguished the project proper from the "Bluesky community," which was -- as far as I could tell -- just a chatroom with a Matrix/Discord bridge, vaguely sanctioned by but distinct from Twitter. I couldn't understand most of what was under discussion, but it's a moderately amusing space if people arguing about what buzzwords mean is amusing to you.
jesuscript 4y ago
Social media platform killer is always quite the murder mystery. No one ever knows who the killer is, and the killer never announces it (tiktok > everyone, insta > almost killer, Facebook > MySpace, Friendster). So this ain’t the killer.
- viraptor 4y ago
  TT may be popular but I wouldn't put it in the same category as FB in this case. MySpace was actually killed - it's barely used these days. On the other hand TT coexists with other platforms pretty well and has its own use cases. Nobody why cares about contact with specific people leaves another platform for TT.
  - croes 4y ago
    I think parent means that services like FB didn't claim to be the MySpace killer, they just were in retrospective. And those who are called killer vanished without a hit. Remember Vero, the FB and Insta killer?
huimang 4y ago
The next generation of social networks seems to be focused around decentralization. The protocol they developed (https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/) seems to differ with ActivityPub at least in "Algorithmic Choice", a "market of open algorithms". The other features are already offered by ActivityPub - which is what Mastodon, Pleroma, GNUSocial use. I wish they had built on top of ActivityPub instead of making their own federated protocol, but they may have some particular reasons as to why.
- Spivak 4y ago
  They’ve got some good ideas in their protocol design but god damn it reads like urbit lite. Why did you need to invent xrpc/lexicon? (which is not xml-rpc by the way) but a purposely leaky a schemafull RPC abstraction over HTTP with introspection. Coulda honestly just used an real xmlrpc server at that point. They borrowed every concept except made it JSON. If nothing else it would have given you pre-built libraries for every language ecosystem.
- smt88 4y ago
  Decentralized social networking has been around for decades and never caught on because the pain of setup isn't worth it for most users.
dodgerdan 4y ago
Couldn’t come at a worse time for Musk. The Twitter acquisition has to be the worse tech acquisition ever, judging purely based on the dollar value on day 0.
- iepathos 4y ago
  He'll make the money back with more twitter driven dogecoin pump and dumps
micropresident 4y ago
This is a step in the right direction. Federated protocols that aren't moderated or controlled by private organizations is critical for free speech -- but I wonder how moderation will be handled on systems like this... It seems inevitable that it will still centralize around hubs which are efficient at keeping spam off, and that inevitably leads to other types of censorship. I think they're spot on with needing control over your identity, and them being transferable. Being locked into <username>@host.com is a big pitfall of email. I've been working on a similar federated protocol awhile which integrates Hal Finney's RPoW concept. Moderation isn't federated which is where it diverges from things like mastodon and bluesky. Instead, you're paid in messaging tokens by the sender to keep spam off the platform. Tokens are free, assuming you don't need mass amounts of them to spam. I'm hoping to find some other engineers that might be interested to help work on it. Can contact me Stamp at lotus_16PSJPAVocAM5behRWxqwQnpEVRPJrV4XxbthBhJR. (Human readable handles using DIDs are something we need to get working.) https://web.stampchat.io https://web.stampchat.io
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  > I think they're spot on with needing control over your identity, and them being transferable. I guess this means you need to store some sort of key that can be used to create a persistent id across servers. Which is great. But we need an explicit mechanism to avoid people having to trust a centralized authority to store that key. Storing on their own devices is going to inevitably result in people losing that key. I don't know if secret sharing can ever be dumbed down and simplified that the average non-tech person can use without getting confused.
  - micropresident 4y ago
    Yup. The UX is going to be tricky. In the system I'm building there's a shared-everything KV store that your client publishes to similar to their system. I've got a system worked out for recovering your account in a decentralized way if a trojan exposes your key. However, I think there will be a need for services that help with this.
- busterarm 4y ago
MattDemers 4y ago
I doubt that Bluesky (which I guess has the unfortunate position of being shortened to "BS") is going to capture the "cool" factor to get wide adoption.
deleted 4y ago
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jakecopp 4y ago
https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#matrix-in-the-news- https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#matrix-... > our friends at Bluesky announced their application protocol for building decentralised social media called AT. While not based on Matrix, there are some parallels, and some stuff we may be able to get inspiration from around portable identity :) https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol Sounds like some there are some parallels, and the protocol might inspire portable account identities in Matrix! The only account migration tool I know of at the moment is proprietary [1], I'd love to see portable identity in Matrix come to life. [1]: https://ems.element.io/tools/matrix-migration https://ems.element.io/tools/matrix-migration
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > I'd love to see portable identity in Matrix come to life. Well, fortunately Matrix is working on adding OpenID Connect support[0], so I guess the answer will soon be "Matrix identities are as portable as OIDC identities". Unfortunately, however, that means "not very portable" in practice, but the OIDC people at least recognise that fact and are apparently working to fix it with an extension called SIOP (Self-Issued OpenID Provider).[1] [0] https://areweoidcyet.com/ https://areweoidcyet.com/ [1] https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-self-issued-v2-1_0.html https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-self-issued-v2-1_0.h...
erehweb 4y ago
Can someone ELI5 how this works and why it's useful?
paxys 4y ago
Not that that word has any real meaning, but what exactly is "web3" about this (as the author keeps touting)? From what I can see it is a new protocol that social media servers can use to communicate with each other, very similar to Mastodon, ActivityPub and the rest of the Fediverse ecosystem.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  is web3 decentralization? or crypto? guess it depends on the answer
- k__ 4y ago
  If it's from Jack, it's probably based on Bitcoin/lightning.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    Jack's pushing web5 even. The name is pretty much just tongue in cheek, mocking web3. https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/ https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/
- viraptor 4y ago
  Web3 in theory means you, rather than the service itself own the data. In practice that's pretty much synonymous with "involves blockchain and/or cryptocurrency".
- pie_flavor 4y ago
  Nothing at all. The medium article is simply trying to fit as many buzzwords as possible into one incorrect post.
- topranks 4y ago
  Only decent explanation I read is here: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html What it’s really about though: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
pcurve 4y ago
I wonder if average users would actually care about the selling points he is touting or even understand. How compelling is it for people to use? What’s going to make them migrate away ?
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  Just create a server for Republicans, marketed as "freedom-of-speech space", and an identical server for Democrats, marketed as "safe self-expression space". This way you lock in two of the largest audiences, and then you can focus on the long tail of libertarians, anarchists, etc.
- ninth_ant 4y ago
  If people were interested in account portability, Mastodon would be a lot more popular than it is. I’m not sure what bundling that with crypto really adds, for me at least it’s a turn-off as so much of that space feels scammy these days.
nordsieck 4y ago
I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but I'm broadly skeptical of any federated/decentralized communication network. Email and phones exist for historical reasons; and both are absolutely infested with scams and spam. I'm not saying that any of the centralized networks are immune from those maladies, but the problems seem to be substantially less challenging on that front.
- naasking 4y ago
  > and both are absolutely infested with scams and spam. So is Twitter and Instagram and more. Bots and ads. Just peruse fitness channels anywhere for the most blatant shilling you've ever seen.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- paulgb 4y ago
  Neither email nor phone anticipated the spam problem at the protocol layer, and solutions have instead been tacked on. At least anecdotally, the solutions mostly work, if slow to gain the adoption throughout the network to make them useful. Even phone spam hasn’t been as bad for me since SHAKEN/STIR became law.
- evilos 4y ago
  I think in this context, these protocols just makes\ it so that multiple private "bluesky"s can exist and interact. Users can move between being hosted on bluesky or redsky or whatever. So it's like mastadon but with better security/privacy?
- tensor 4y ago
  Worse, what are you going to do about things like child porn or other highly objectional material? If it's decentralized then you can't block these things. Often advocates of these sorts of things say that the good outweighs the harms, but I don't buy that it's really that simple. Imagine if its your kid that has objectional material posted without their consent. Now you have no way of removing it even if it's against your local laws? This isn't the sort of balance we need.
alphabetting 4y ago
If you have to pay any amount to post it's not a twitter killer
deleted 4y ago
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downrightmike 4y ago
I say we just meet up in the comment section of pornhub.
- badcarbine 4y ago
  Using only flag emojis and exclamation marks
cogman10 4y ago
This place will be overran with nazis in 3, 2, 1...
- moojd 4y ago
  Moderation is a first class citizen in this protocol and I imagine the official blue sky instance will be moderated just like any other big social media site. I'm still getting a feel for it but my first impression is that atproto is kinda like secure scuttlebutt with a federation layer and dns for memorable usernames.
  - jlarocco 4y ago
    Can you explain more about how moderation is first class? The protocol overview [0] mentions moderation only once, in a section titled "Speech, reach, and moderation," and it seems like moderation is punted off to third-party aggregators: "The Indexing services then enable reach by aggregating content from the network, analogous to a search engine." [0] https://atproto.com/guides/overview https://atproto.com/guides/overview
    - moojd 4y ago
      After looking at it some more 'first-class' is overselling it. I'm still working my way through the code but I believe pretty much all interaction with bluesky/atproto by a user would be via federated instances like mastodon that can moderate as they see fit. The instances have final say in what you are allowed to do. The difference being you have a public key identity that is decoupled from a single instance. @moojd.blsky.app and @moojd.example.com can both be aliases to the same pubkey identity and if blsky.app is down my content will still sync with example.com.
    - wmf 4y ago
      Now imagine if all the third-party aggregators block Nazis. They can post as much as they want but virtually no one will see it.
- mjmsmith 4y ago
cube2222 4y ago
Since the blog post is not really concrete in any way (and even using expressions like "it's not yet known what network it will run on", next to citing Ethereum, like it has to run on a Blockchain), I've dug deeper, and this looks like a sensible guide into the protocol underneath: https://atproto.com/guides/overview https://atproto.com/guides/overview It doesn't mention Blockchain, nor NFTs, nor web3, so plus points for that. Looks interesting in general. The architecture looks quite nice, with a lot of separation of concerns (like we have in the www). TLDR is that name resolution, storage, indexing, and recommendation algorithms can all be provided by separate entities, with a sprinkle of cryptography to make it possible. Will be following this to see if anything comes out of it.
- faizshah 4y ago
  Yea I took a look at the source code as well and I can’t find anything crypto related. It seems to be more so in the realm of matrix, dat, mastodon etc. I think where a lot of the newer attempts at distributed web went wrong was attaching themselves closely to crypto. I’d like to dig in more this weekend, it does seem like a pretty nice synthesis of other ideas and if it has major backing + not being attached to crypto I think it could have more longevity and adoption than other distributed web attempts.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    We have gotten to the ugliest place in tech marketing where even things that have nothing to do with blockchain feel the urge to market themselves that way, or at least for the press to report on them as if they do...
    - pfraze 4y ago
      In our defense, we didn't write this article, have clearly said we're not a blockchain, and can't seem to get people NOT to describe us as a blockchain (https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1583229012725633024 https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1583229012725633024)
willis936 4y ago
Billionaire hangout ain't quite punk. Having a claim to counterculture is essential if you want to drum up a social network.
mbesto 4y ago
Why does a new protocol need to exist when Mastodon and Matrix already exist? This smells of centralization masked as "decentralization".
IAmGraydon 4y ago
Is this decentralized platform going to kill Twitter like decentralized currency killed the USD? 99% of people don’t care enough to put up with the complexities that decentralization brings.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  99.99% of people don't care enough to deal with the complexities that TCP/IP bring, but that's why we hide it from them with software.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  The Internet is already quite decentralized. Not perfect of course, but at least this nice forum we're on is totally separate from Facebook, which is separate from Reddit...
paxys 4y ago
Just read up on Bluesky, and it turns out most of the article is misleading or incorrect. Bluesky was an initiative launched by Jack Dorsey while he was CEO of Twitter, and it was intended to develop a set of federated social media protocols and eventually move Twitter to those protocols. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-announces-bluesky-social-media-standards-push.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-anno...) He hired a development team for it (led by Jay Graber) who still work on the project today, probably as employees of Twitter? Jack's role in the project is unclear, apart from being a board member of the organization. I have no idea what the relations between all the parties are at the moment, considering Dorsey x Twitter x Musk x everything else that has happened since December 2019, but as far as I can tell Bluesky – while working independently – is still fully funded by Twitter. It is not Dorsey's company as everyone seems to believe.
- wmf 4y ago
  Technically yeah, Jack is not working on Bluesky but it's his vision and they're still following his vision even after he left Twitter. The Bluesky people kind of downplay their connection to Twitter but IMO without that connection they're just yet another protocol with no users and no killer feature.
  - rektide 4y ago
    I am somewhat saddened to ascertain that most of this project is still rather somewhat under corporate twitter control. Oh boo. I've spent less than an hour reviewing atproto. So far it has passed my sniff tests; seems legit decentralizing. But there's definitely room for gotchas I havent seen yet. Thanks for detailing where the powers lie. So far, I'm still willing to attribute great intent & purpose. But it's important to consider, to know influences. Your post is much appreciated, evem if, for now, I believe it all, ascribe- hestinatly- to this system.
    - jeremie 4y ago
      I am also on the Bluesky board, and while the original funding did come from Twitter (at Jack’s direction), the company has no control over Bluesky and it is 100% independent.
braingenious 4y ago
It is pretty funny to “unveil” a social network in a blog post that links to a business page where clicking “Join” links to a job posting for a mobile developer. If you go to bsky.app it has been “unveiled” that there’s a form to give strangers your email address to notify you when it’s been uh, double-unveiled or whatever.
civilized 4y ago
Remember TBD? Remember Web5? Dorsey announces a launch the moment he has an idea sitting on the john.
bumblebritches5 4y ago
tayo42 4y ago
Do people actually want even more social media in their lives? I get the feeling Instagram is a enough. then chat apps do the rest. all of these networks are on the decline. rehashing something old seems like its doomed to fail.
- smt88 4y ago
  TikTok, BeReal, and many messaging networks (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal) are growing.
- sebow 4y ago
  Imo the problem is not quantity but quality. And even then, the most important characteristic of that quality is the known transparency behind the platform itself, which affects the mentioned quality of behavior & content. I personally don't think this will rise that quickly(for many reasons, the main 2 being the focus on web3 and the second being jack's past), but the fact remains that the market for a non-censorable or at least trustworthy social media platform exists.
  - toofy 4y ago
    > …the market for a non-censorable or at least trustworthy social media platform exists. i’m not sure that it _actually_ does beyond extremely niche. any platform where it is impossible to censor would quickly be overrun with dick pill and millions of other forms of spam.
    - lovemenot 4y ago
      I don't mind what information a platform might display to me, as long as in practice it only shows what I want to see. Give me control over the algo that filters my wheat, and let the chaff flow in abundance.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  I just want a chat app that has an autocorrect system that works decently...
- 4y ago
UIUC_06 4y ago
> The implementation of the next version of the Internet will seek its fundamentals in the Blockchain and the cryptocurrency world. Bad opening line. Hard pass.
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johnsonap 4y ago
The irony of this announcement being paywalled...
jimcavel888 4y ago
nfw2 4y ago
Decentralization isn't a feature that most users care about. One can argue that we should care about it, but the reality is that spending all our collective focus fighting web3 windmills actually INCREASES the dangers of centralization. The app that currently owns the attention of the world's youth is controlled by the CCP, and that's not going to change if we keep building apps no one wants.
- lovemenot 4y ago
  Go ahead, build an app to dethrone the latest king of social media. If you don't someone else surely will. In the meantime, these guys are actually trying. I for one remain open-minded about their chances of success.
shmerl 4y ago
How is it better than let's say Diaspora which exists for a while already but didn't get a lot of traction?
Aeolun 4y ago
This is great. In the first sentence I read both Bitcoin and blockchain, so I know I can entirely disregard this thing.
- wmf 4y ago
  Fortunately it has nothing to do with crypto.
  - topranks 4y ago
    Well they say that they really want to use blockchain, just that doesn’t work very well (no surprise): https://atproto.com/guides/identity#did-methods https://atproto.com/guides/identity#did-methods
r3trohack3r 4y ago
If you haven’t watched the episodes of the Joe Rogan podcast with Jack Dorsey, I’d recommend them. It’s amazing how he carries himself when discussing charged topics and where his headspace is at for social media. He spends a bit ranting about the potential of a permanent public ledger backing a social network and how for-profit moderation could play a role in that world.
DueDilligence 4y ago
agentultra 4y ago
> The implementation of the next version of the Internet will seek its fundamentals in the Blockchain and the cryptocurrency world. Bold claim. Given how fast it's all falling apart I fail to see why and how.
born-jre 4y ago
is did spec from bluesky community? anyway, looks like nothing tangible yet. I am excited about what Nostr[0] is doing is instead. Looks much simpler way to approach the problem. [0]: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
dang 4y ago
> Jack Dorsey has just officially announced the imminent launch of "Imminent"? sounds like this is an announcement of announcement. For those, we can wait until the actual announcement is available and then apply beta reduction. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... In the meantime, the post about the information that came out a few days ago was discussed here: The AT Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 - Oct 2022 (99 comments)
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  I guess it's strategic to announce an announcement when your potential competitor has billions in funding, and potentially half a billion users to migrate to a similar platform (in terms of goals at least).
  - dang 4y ago
    No doubt. And it's strategic for HN to not have duplicate threads and to maximize the substance of the threads it does have.
    - jbverschoor 4y ago
      It's also awfully quit on mister musk's twitter about this :)
phailhaus 4y ago
> For example, the possibility for its users to directly manage the algorithms to which their account will be subjected. This does not make any sense. The problem with social media isn't just "algorithms", it's their entire designs. TikTok's swipe-based UI and powerful editor incentivizes short-form video content that builds off each other. That creates certain social behaviors unique to TikTok. Another example: Twitter's decision not to have a "dislike" buton has a huge effect on how tweets are boosted. You can't "manage" that no matter what decentralized protocol you come up with, because that's baked into the UI. Not to mention, what does it even mean to "choose your algorithm"? Once you give me your data, you have no control over what I do with it. The only thing you can really choose is what piece of data you give away, but the article as it stands doesn't really make sense.
- warble 4y ago
  Isn't this 'choose your algorithm' mean the client app chooses, and the federated system is more of just a database / data feed? Maybe my really quick overview of the AT stuff missed the point however. This would mean your comment about the UI is more up to the user/client app, so this stuff is up for conversation. Unlike tiktok.
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    That would make a lot more sense, and is a really interesting idea. One massive content feed from all of humanity. There's definitely going to be all sorts of issues to solve (like the fact that The Blockchain Does Not Forget).
SLWW 4y ago
I'll stick with Pleroma, I'm not thrilled with the idea of a "Twitter-Killer" associated with the same man who made Twitter.

226 points by throw7 4y ago

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Meekro 4y ago

https://archive.ph/oMWfz https://archive.ph/oMWfz

djbusby 4y ago

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tines 4y ago

Sorry for the critique on form instead of content but man, this is hard to read. Putting periods where commas belong or where a sentence should be rewritten for clarity is an obstacle to easy comprehension.

philipwhiuk 4y ago
Indeed - starting every sentence with a conjunction is very jarring.
- theta_d 4y ago
  Was this written by AI? I stopped after the second paragraph. Too much cognitive load.
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tiahura 4y ago
Not to mention the sentence fragments.
cryptoanon 4y ago
Wow. I was wondering why I had such a hard time reading this. Now that you say it, you’re spot on – it’s the text equivalent of stop and go traffic.
anigbrowl 4y ago
It's the confluence of sales and religion. With these rhetorical tools, everything is a sales pitch. And when everything is a pitch, all conversation is commerce. A new world. A world where hype becomes real and reality is your plaything. We call it Xchange. Xchange your reality. [applause.flac loop=1000]

arcticbull 4y ago

I guess I don't understand what this has in terms of appeal over say a Mastodon. Mastodon of course is famous for being decentralized, and not much else. Also not sure why they had to invent a new protocol from scratch? Am I missing something?

PandawanFr 4y ago
web3 reinventing the wheel once again
jrm4 4y ago
Not sure if this solves it, but as a relatively heavy twitter user and as someone who REALLY would like an e.g. Mastodon to succeed, the lack of something like a universal handle and an easy way to follow them and find people you're into is 100% why Mastodon just ain't it. A blockchain is a 'not crazy' potential solution?
- Spivak 4y ago
  Huh? Your universal handle is yourusername@your.domain, you can follow anyone on any instance (moderation polices of your chosen instance notwithstanding). Search I get, decentralized search is hard without centralizing because you can’t even know all the Mastadon instances that exist. Just like email Mastadon is open federation.
  - tensor 4y ago
    Search can always be provided like it is for the web. Third party indexing servers that crawl the network. That's ok, even good maybe.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    Well, email is used by some, and there's no search or big directories. Isolated communities that hear about each other by diffusion is not a bad idea.
    - 4y ago

metadat 4y ago

Perhaps Dorsey and Elon aren't BFFs (forever buddy friends) after all, this is potential competition. There is a big opportunity coming for whoever is prepared to catch the foreseeable wave of twitter account mass-exodus which will take place as soon as Musk takes control and begins asserting themself. Which tw inspired platforms are baked and ready deal with the influx?

tmpz22 4y ago

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cmer 4y ago

Jack and Elon seem to be good friends. Elon clearly knew this was coming and still made a bid for Twitter. Could Elon be planning to bring Twitter to Bluesky? It seems crazy, but you never know.

smt88 4y ago
I don't think Elon or anyone who knows Jack Dorsey thinks this will catch on. Dorsey is unfocused, a poor leader, and terrible at building B2C products.
metadat 4y ago
Supposedly he's entertaining the notion of transforming Twitter into "X: The Everything App". Maybe it's intended to become more like the vision behind Google Wave of old?
- dadoge 4y ago
  And he want to make an “everything app” by…checks papers…firing 75% of the staff Lol, what a joke
  - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    I mean the issue isn't really getting ride of 75% it's keeping the valuable 25%. I think most people can agree that in general twitter's staff does basically nothing of value. I just don't see how they can convince the others to stay after that degree of firing.
- deleted 4y ago
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- dole 4y ago
  Hopefully not x.com, I still owe them money
colpabar 4y ago

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

How does he not have a no-compete or something?

twblalock 4y ago
Non-compete agreements aren't legal in California.
- bsder 4y ago
  That's not entirely true for people at Dorsey's level. However, it's been almost a year since Dorsey was CEO even though he didn't step down from the board until May. That is pretty close to the limit of what California would really allow in a non-compete.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  In terms of personal employment, yes California is very leery of non-competes. In terms of business contracts, absolutely not. If you build a product for a customer, you can agree not to build a similar product for said customer's competitors. This is not unusual. Practical example: one customer was a cruise line, and the company had to tactfully ask if building a similar product for a hotel didn't violate the contract. As opposed to, say, a school which would not reasonably compete with cruise lines - Semester at Sea notwithstanding. If you don't want to agree to this, you don't need to sign a contract not to work with competitors. But of course, the customer is probably not going to want to pay as much if they know that they can very quickly lose whatever edge they're getting.
- delecti 4y ago
  That's not entirely true. California allows non-competes for someone selling a business. We don't know if Dorsey actually did sign a non-compete, but Musk is buying Twitter so this might be one of the rare instances where it'd be legal in California if he had. Source: California law: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?division=7.&chapter=1.&part=2.&lawCode=BPC https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x... > [...] any owner of a business entity selling or otherwise disposing of all of his or her ownership interest in the business entity [...] may agree with the buyer to refrain from carrying on a similar business within a specified geographic area in which the business so sold, or that of the business entity, division, or subsidiary has been carried on, so long as the buyer, or any person deriving title to the goodwill or ownership interest from the buyer, carries on a like business therein

whalesalad 4y ago

https://bsky.app/ https://bsky.app/

app4soft 4y ago
https://github.com/bluesky-social https://github.com/bluesky-social

LeoPanthera 4y ago

If you think the answer is a blockchain, you are asking the wrong question.

version_five 4y ago
I scanned the documentation and I didn't see anything about blockchain (I assumed at first it would be some web3 BS). Are they just using different language? It looks like it's just an open protocol Edit: I looked at the github, not the medium page, I see I'm wrong. It is some web3 BS
- rvz 4y ago
  > Edit: I looked at the github, not the medium page, I see I'm wrong. It is some web3 BS Where exactly does it say that BlueSky is yet another web3 / blockchain project? The Medium post isn't from the BlueSky team, its from a random crypto blogger and even he doesn't reference where BlueSky is a blockchain or crypto token platform.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    My read of the protocol docs from when they came out a few days ago is that they're using Blockchain in the distributed merkel-tree ledger sense and not (explicitly?) in the sense of a cryptocurrency. It seems like it models your data as a Merkel tree log, signed by an identity key that can be obtained through DNS. Unless they plan to add a namecoinish thing for identities you shouldn't really need Po* to "secure" that.
  - version_five 4y ago
    Fair enough. They have not really made it clear on the BlueSky site. I found this: > We’re not describing what we’re building as a federated or p2p network, or as a blockchain network, because it doesn’t fall neatly in any of these categories. It could be described as a hybrid federated network with p2p characteristics, but it’s more descriptive to focus on the capabilities – self-authenticating identities and data – than on network topology. From: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-s... Not that it clarifies anything for me. It feels (I'm speculating) like they are very careful not to mention web3, but maybe that's because it really has nothing to do with tokens and whatnot and is actually just a protocol that lets people run their own social network servers. But it doesn't say it's that either. Some plain language would help make it clear if it's legit or just some new take on blockchain scamming

nus07 4y ago

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dymk 4y ago

> web3 Not many keywords immediately turn me off from a project, but this is a surefire one

k__ 4y ago
To be fair, if Jack is involved it's probably web5. (Which is basically web3 more or less funnily rebranded)
- recursive 4y ago
  What happened to web4? Is it over already?
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    It can only be accessed over IPv5.

Ajedi32 4y ago

In case you want to skip to the meat like I did: Technical details: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol Developer documentation: https://atproto.com/guides/overview https://atproto.com/guides/overview

oooff 4y ago
The architecture sounds interesting but I wonder how they're planning to deal with spam and other types of Sybil attack.
- iepathos 4y ago
  That's the best part of passing off algorithm and data responsibility to the users. It's entirely the users' problem to deal with the spam and bots now :P /s
rvz 4y ago
And if people bothered to read some of the other BlueSky posts before commenting for the answer to see whether if it is a blockchain / crypto / web3 project in another post: > Bluesky is not a blockchain, and we believe the adoption of social web protocols should be independent of any blockchain. [0] > We’re not describing what we’re building as a federated or p2p network, or as a blockchain network, because it doesn’t fall neatly in any of these categories. It could be described as a hybrid federated network with p2p characteristics, but it’s more descriptive to focus on the capabilities – self-authenticating identities and data – than on network topology. [1] In short, it is NOT a "blockchain social network" and doesn't even use one to begin with. [0] https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-7-2022-overview https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-7-2022-overview [1] https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-s...

oooff 4y ago

What are the technical details of this? How does it use blockchains and cryptocurrency? Is this an integral part of the distributed protocol, or is it more like Mastodon?

marstall 4y ago

a lot more info about what this is can be found here https://blueskyweb.org https://blueskyweb.org

marstall 4y ago
although there is nothing about moderation, which would seem to be near the top of the list of what people would want to know about this system ...

im3w1l 4y ago

Do I spot an Emerald Sea reference?

jonas21 4y ago
no

lolinder 4y ago

The title here is a bit misleading. I thought this would be an announcement from Jack Dorsey, instead it just appears to be a blogger summarizing this Twitter thread from @bluesky a few days ago: https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1582437529969917953 https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1582437529969917953 @dang, could we get the link changed to point to the original thread?

airstrike 4y ago
An even better link is https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol which is what that original tweet pointed to But I'll settle for anything that isn't a medium.com link, particularly a "member-only" post. Fuck that noise.
- dang 4y ago
  That one was discussed when the post came out: The AT Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 - Oct 2022 (99 comments)
dang 4y ago
In principle yes, but that announcement was discussed elsewhere (see my comment downthread) and there doesn't seem to be any significant information yet, otherwise, so I think it makes sense to downweight the follow-ups until there's significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
greyhair 4y ago
The content is about what I expect from content on 'Medium' today. Which is why I generally avoid reading post hosted on Medium.

sylens 4y ago

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wilg 4y ago

arthurofbabylon 4y ago

Judging by the bezels on the landing page’s iPhone, they’ve been working on this for a long time. https://bsky.app https://bsky.app

nominusllc 4y ago
Wow, fumble. I wonder if that's just a theme though.
echelon 4y ago
As someone who doesn't use Apple devices, what am I looking at? Looks like a generic smartphone to me. Is this some kind of Apple consumer faux pas?
- fhd2 4y ago
  Not an Apple user either, but that Bezel looks like an iPhone 12, latest is 14, possible to tell from how wide the bezel (the part with the selfie camera) is - I guess.

cpif 4y ago

"Unveils" is somewhat misleading -- this project has had a web presence for a number of years already. They have recently distinguished the project proper from the "Bluesky community," which was -- as far as I could tell -- just a chatroom with a Matrix/Discord bridge, vaguely sanctioned by but distinct from Twitter. I couldn't understand most of what was under discussion, but it's a moderately amusing space if people arguing about what buzzwords mean is amusing to you.

jesuscript 4y ago

Social media platform killer is always quite the murder mystery. No one ever knows who the killer is, and the killer never announces it (tiktok > everyone, insta > almost killer, Facebook > MySpace, Friendster). So this ain’t the killer.

viraptor 4y ago
TT may be popular but I wouldn't put it in the same category as FB in this case. MySpace was actually killed - it's barely used these days. On the other hand TT coexists with other platforms pretty well and has its own use cases. Nobody why cares about contact with specific people leaves another platform for TT.
- croes 4y ago
  I think parent means that services like FB didn't claim to be the MySpace killer, they just were in retrospective. And those who are called killer vanished without a hit. Remember Vero, the FB and Insta killer?

huimang 4y ago

The next generation of social networks seems to be focused around decentralization. The protocol they developed (https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/) seems to differ with ActivityPub at least in "Algorithmic Choice", a "market of open algorithms". The other features are already offered by ActivityPub - which is what Mastodon, Pleroma, GNUSocial use. I wish they had built on top of ActivityPub instead of making their own federated protocol, but they may have some particular reasons as to why.

Spivak 4y ago
They’ve got some good ideas in their protocol design but god damn it reads like urbit lite. Why did you need to invent xrpc/lexicon? (which is not xml-rpc by the way) but a purposely leaky a schemafull RPC abstraction over HTTP with introspection. Coulda honestly just used an real xmlrpc server at that point. They borrowed every concept except made it JSON. If nothing else it would have given you pre-built libraries for every language ecosystem.
smt88 4y ago
Decentralized social networking has been around for decades and never caught on because the pain of setup isn't worth it for most users.

dodgerdan 4y ago

Couldn’t come at a worse time for Musk. The Twitter acquisition has to be the worse tech acquisition ever, judging purely based on the dollar value on day 0.

iepathos 4y ago
He'll make the money back with more twitter driven dogecoin pump and dumps

micropresident 4y ago

This is a step in the right direction. Federated protocols that aren't moderated or controlled by private organizations is critical for free speech -- but I wonder how moderation will be handled on systems like this... It seems inevitable that it will still centralize around hubs which are efficient at keeping spam off, and that inevitably leads to other types of censorship. I think they're spot on with needing control over your identity, and them being transferable. Being locked into <username>@host.com is a big pitfall of email. I've been working on a similar federated protocol awhile which integrates Hal Finney's RPoW concept. Moderation isn't federated which is where it diverges from things like mastodon and bluesky. Instead, you're paid in messaging tokens by the sender to keep spam off the platform. Tokens are free, assuming you don't need mass amounts of them to spam. I'm hoping to find some other engineers that might be interested to help work on it. Can contact me Stamp at lotus_16PSJPAVocAM5behRWxqwQnpEVRPJrV4XxbthBhJR. (Human readable handles using DIDs are something we need to get working.) https://web.stampchat.io https://web.stampchat.io

abdullahkhalids 4y ago
> I think they're spot on with needing control over your identity, and them being transferable. I guess this means you need to store some sort of key that can be used to create a persistent id across servers. Which is great. But we need an explicit mechanism to avoid people having to trust a centralized authority to store that key. Storing on their own devices is going to inevitably result in people losing that key. I don't know if secret sharing can ever be dumbed down and simplified that the average non-tech person can use without getting confused.
- micropresident 4y ago
  Yup. The UX is going to be tricky. In the system I'm building there's a shared-everything KV store that your client publishes to similar to their system. I've got a system worked out for recovering your account in a decentralized way if a trojan exposes your key. However, I think there will be a need for services that help with this.
busterarm 4y ago

MattDemers 4y ago

I doubt that Bluesky (which I guess has the unfortunate position of being shortened to "BS") is going to capture the "cool" factor to get wide adoption.

deleted 4y ago

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jakecopp 4y ago

https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#matrix-in-the-news- https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#matrix-... > our friends at Bluesky announced their application protocol for building decentralised social media called AT. While not based on Matrix, there are some parallels, and some stuff we may be able to get inspiration from around portable identity :) https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol Sounds like some there are some parallels, and the protocol might inspire portable account identities in Matrix! The only account migration tool I know of at the moment is proprietary [1], I'd love to see portable identity in Matrix come to life. [1]: https://ems.element.io/tools/matrix-migration https://ems.element.io/tools/matrix-migration

dane-pgp 4y ago
> I'd love to see portable identity in Matrix come to life. Well, fortunately Matrix is working on adding OpenID Connect support[0], so I guess the answer will soon be "Matrix identities are as portable as OIDC identities". Unfortunately, however, that means "not very portable" in practice, but the OIDC people at least recognise that fact and are apparently working to fix it with an extension called SIOP (Self-Issued OpenID Provider).[1] [0] https://areweoidcyet.com/ https://areweoidcyet.com/ [1] https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-self-issued-v2-1_0.html https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-self-issued-v2-1_0.h...

erehweb 4y ago

Can someone ELI5 how this works and why it's useful?

paxys 4y ago

Not that that word has any real meaning, but what exactly is "web3" about this (as the author keeps touting)? From what I can see it is a new protocol that social media servers can use to communicate with each other, very similar to Mastodon, ActivityPub and the rest of the Fediverse ecosystem.

micromacrofoot 4y ago
is web3 decentralization? or crypto? guess it depends on the answer
k__ 4y ago
If it's from Jack, it's probably based on Bitcoin/lightning.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Jack's pushing web5 even. The name is pretty much just tongue in cheek, mocking web3. https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/ https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/
viraptor 4y ago
Web3 in theory means you, rather than the service itself own the data. In practice that's pretty much synonymous with "involves blockchain and/or cryptocurrency".
pie_flavor 4y ago
Nothing at all. The medium article is simply trying to fit as many buzzwords as possible into one incorrect post.
topranks 4y ago
Only decent explanation I read is here: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html What it’s really about though: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

pcurve 4y ago

I wonder if average users would actually care about the selling points he is touting or even understand. How compelling is it for people to use? What’s going to make them migrate away ?

warkdarrior 4y ago
Just create a server for Republicans, marketed as "freedom-of-speech space", and an identical server for Democrats, marketed as "safe self-expression space". This way you lock in two of the largest audiences, and then you can focus on the long tail of libertarians, anarchists, etc.
ninth_ant 4y ago
If people were interested in account portability, Mastodon would be a lot more popular than it is. I’m not sure what bundling that with crypto really adds, for me at least it’s a turn-off as so much of that space feels scammy these days.

nordsieck 4y ago

I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but I'm broadly skeptical of any federated/decentralized communication network. Email and phones exist for historical reasons; and both are absolutely infested with scams and spam. I'm not saying that any of the centralized networks are immune from those maladies, but the problems seem to be substantially less challenging on that front.

naasking 4y ago
> and both are absolutely infested with scams and spam. So is Twitter and Instagram and more. Bots and ads. Just peruse fitness channels anywhere for the most blatant shilling you've ever seen.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
paulgb 4y ago
Neither email nor phone anticipated the spam problem at the protocol layer, and solutions have instead been tacked on. At least anecdotally, the solutions mostly work, if slow to gain the adoption throughout the network to make them useful. Even phone spam hasn’t been as bad for me since SHAKEN/STIR became law.
evilos 4y ago
I think in this context, these protocols just makes\ it so that multiple private "bluesky"s can exist and interact. Users can move between being hosted on bluesky or redsky or whatever. So it's like mastadon but with better security/privacy?
tensor 4y ago
Worse, what are you going to do about things like child porn or other highly objectional material? If it's decentralized then you can't block these things. Often advocates of these sorts of things say that the good outweighs the harms, but I don't buy that it's really that simple. Imagine if its your kid that has objectional material posted without their consent. Now you have no way of removing it even if it's against your local laws? This isn't the sort of balance we need.

alphabetting 4y ago

If you have to pay any amount to post it's not a twitter killer

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

downrightmike 4y ago

I say we just meet up in the comment section of pornhub.

badcarbine 4y ago
Using only flag emojis and exclamation marks

cogman10 4y ago

This place will be overran with nazis in 3, 2, 1...

moojd 4y ago
Moderation is a first class citizen in this protocol and I imagine the official blue sky instance will be moderated just like any other big social media site. I'm still getting a feel for it but my first impression is that atproto is kinda like secure scuttlebutt with a federation layer and dns for memorable usernames.
- jlarocco 4y ago
  Can you explain more about how moderation is first class? The protocol overview [0] mentions moderation only once, in a section titled "Speech, reach, and moderation," and it seems like moderation is punted off to third-party aggregators: "The Indexing services then enable reach by aggregating content from the network, analogous to a search engine." [0] https://atproto.com/guides/overview https://atproto.com/guides/overview
  - moojd 4y ago
    After looking at it some more 'first-class' is overselling it. I'm still working my way through the code but I believe pretty much all interaction with bluesky/atproto by a user would be via federated instances like mastodon that can moderate as they see fit. The instances have final say in what you are allowed to do. The difference being you have a public key identity that is decoupled from a single instance. @moojd.blsky.app and @moojd.example.com can both be aliases to the same pubkey identity and if blsky.app is down my content will still sync with example.com.
  - wmf 4y ago
    Now imagine if all the third-party aggregators block Nazis. They can post as much as they want but virtually no one will see it.
mjmsmith 4y ago

cube2222 4y ago

Since the blog post is not really concrete in any way (and even using expressions like "it's not yet known what network it will run on", next to citing Ethereum, like it has to run on a Blockchain), I've dug deeper, and this looks like a sensible guide into the protocol underneath: https://atproto.com/guides/overview https://atproto.com/guides/overview It doesn't mention Blockchain, nor NFTs, nor web3, so plus points for that. Looks interesting in general. The architecture looks quite nice, with a lot of separation of concerns (like we have in the www). TLDR is that name resolution, storage, indexing, and recommendation algorithms can all be provided by separate entities, with a sprinkle of cryptography to make it possible. Will be following this to see if anything comes out of it.

faizshah 4y ago
Yea I took a look at the source code as well and I can’t find anything crypto related. It seems to be more so in the realm of matrix, dat, mastodon etc. I think where a lot of the newer attempts at distributed web went wrong was attaching themselves closely to crypto. I’d like to dig in more this weekend, it does seem like a pretty nice synthesis of other ideas and if it has major backing + not being attached to crypto I think it could have more longevity and adoption than other distributed web attempts.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  We have gotten to the ugliest place in tech marketing where even things that have nothing to do with blockchain feel the urge to market themselves that way, or at least for the press to report on them as if they do...
  - pfraze 4y ago
    In our defense, we didn't write this article, have clearly said we're not a blockchain, and can't seem to get people NOT to describe us as a blockchain (https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1583229012725633024 https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1583229012725633024)

willis936 4y ago

Billionaire hangout ain't quite punk. Having a claim to counterculture is essential if you want to drum up a social network.

mbesto 4y ago

Why does a new protocol need to exist when Mastodon and Matrix already exist? This smells of centralization masked as "decentralization".

IAmGraydon 4y ago

Is this decentralized platform going to kill Twitter like decentralized currency killed the USD? 99% of people don’t care enough to put up with the complexities that decentralization brings.

pessimizer 4y ago
99.99% of people don't care enough to deal with the complexities that TCP/IP bring, but that's why we hide it from them with software.
hot_gril 4y ago
The Internet is already quite decentralized. Not perfect of course, but at least this nice forum we're on is totally separate from Facebook, which is separate from Reddit...

paxys 4y ago

Just read up on Bluesky, and it turns out most of the article is misleading or incorrect. Bluesky was an initiative launched by Jack Dorsey while he was CEO of Twitter, and it was intended to develop a set of federated social media protocols and eventually move Twitter to those protocols. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-announces-bluesky-social-media-standards-push.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-anno...) He hired a development team for it (led by Jay Graber) who still work on the project today, probably as employees of Twitter? Jack's role in the project is unclear, apart from being a board member of the organization. I have no idea what the relations between all the parties are at the moment, considering Dorsey x Twitter x Musk x everything else that has happened since December 2019, but as far as I can tell Bluesky – while working independently – is still fully funded by Twitter. It is not Dorsey's company as everyone seems to believe.

wmf 4y ago
Technically yeah, Jack is not working on Bluesky but it's his vision and they're still following his vision even after he left Twitter. The Bluesky people kind of downplay their connection to Twitter but IMO without that connection they're just yet another protocol with no users and no killer feature.
- rektide 4y ago
  I am somewhat saddened to ascertain that most of this project is still rather somewhat under corporate twitter control. Oh boo. I've spent less than an hour reviewing atproto. So far it has passed my sniff tests; seems legit decentralizing. But there's definitely room for gotchas I havent seen yet. Thanks for detailing where the powers lie. So far, I'm still willing to attribute great intent & purpose. But it's important to consider, to know influences. Your post is much appreciated, evem if, for now, I believe it all, ascribe- hestinatly- to this system.
  - jeremie 4y ago
    I am also on the Bluesky board, and while the original funding did come from Twitter (at Jack’s direction), the company has no control over Bluesky and it is 100% independent.

braingenious 4y ago

It is pretty funny to “unveil” a social network in a blog post that links to a business page where clicking “Join” links to a job posting for a mobile developer. If you go to bsky.app it has been “unveiled” that there’s a form to give strangers your email address to notify you when it’s been uh, double-unveiled or whatever.

civilized 4y ago

Remember TBD? Remember Web5? Dorsey announces a launch the moment he has an idea sitting on the john.

bumblebritches5 4y ago

tayo42 4y ago

Do people actually want even more social media in their lives? I get the feeling Instagram is a enough. then chat apps do the rest. all of these networks are on the decline. rehashing something old seems like its doomed to fail.

smt88 4y ago
TikTok, BeReal, and many messaging networks (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal) are growing.
sebow 4y ago
Imo the problem is not quantity but quality. And even then, the most important characteristic of that quality is the known transparency behind the platform itself, which affects the mentioned quality of behavior & content. I personally don't think this will rise that quickly(for many reasons, the main 2 being the focus on web3 and the second being jack's past), but the fact remains that the market for a non-censorable or at least trustworthy social media platform exists.
- toofy 4y ago
  > …the market for a non-censorable or at least trustworthy social media platform exists. i’m not sure that it _actually_ does beyond extremely niche. any platform where it is impossible to censor would quickly be overrun with dick pill and millions of other forms of spam.
  - lovemenot 4y ago
    I don't mind what information a platform might display to me, as long as in practice it only shows what I want to see. Give me control over the algo that filters my wheat, and let the chaff flow in abundance.
midoridensha 4y ago
I just want a chat app that has an autocorrect system that works decently...
4y ago

UIUC_06 4y ago

> The implementation of the next version of the Internet will seek its fundamentals in the Blockchain and the cryptocurrency world. Bad opening line. Hard pass.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

johnsonap 4y ago

The irony of this announcement being paywalled...

jimcavel888 4y ago

nfw2 4y ago

Decentralization isn't a feature that most users care about. One can argue that we should care about it, but the reality is that spending all our collective focus fighting web3 windmills actually INCREASES the dangers of centralization. The app that currently owns the attention of the world's youth is controlled by the CCP, and that's not going to change if we keep building apps no one wants.

lovemenot 4y ago
Go ahead, build an app to dethrone the latest king of social media. If you don't someone else surely will. In the meantime, these guys are actually trying. I for one remain open-minded about their chances of success.

shmerl 4y ago

How is it better than let's say Diaspora which exists for a while already but didn't get a lot of traction?

Aeolun 4y ago

This is great. In the first sentence I read both Bitcoin and blockchain, so I know I can entirely disregard this thing.

wmf 4y ago
Fortunately it has nothing to do with crypto.
- topranks 4y ago
  Well they say that they really want to use blockchain, just that doesn’t work very well (no surprise): https://atproto.com/guides/identity#did-methods https://atproto.com/guides/identity#did-methods

r3trohack3r 4y ago

If you haven’t watched the episodes of the Joe Rogan podcast with Jack Dorsey, I’d recommend them. It’s amazing how he carries himself when discussing charged topics and where his headspace is at for social media. He spends a bit ranting about the potential of a permanent public ledger backing a social network and how for-profit moderation could play a role in that world.

DueDilligence 4y ago

agentultra 4y ago

> The implementation of the next version of the Internet will seek its fundamentals in the Blockchain and the cryptocurrency world. Bold claim. Given how fast it's all falling apart I fail to see why and how.

born-jre 4y ago

is did spec from bluesky community? anyway, looks like nothing tangible yet. I am excited about what Nostr[0] is doing is instead. Looks much simpler way to approach the problem. [0]: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr

dang 4y ago

> Jack Dorsey has just officially announced the imminent launch of "Imminent"? sounds like this is an announcement of announcement. For those, we can wait until the actual announcement is available and then apply beta reduction. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... In the meantime, the post about the information that came out a few days ago was discussed here: The AT Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108 - Oct 2022 (99 comments)

jbverschoor 4y ago
I guess it's strategic to announce an announcement when your potential competitor has billions in funding, and potentially half a billion users to migrate to a similar platform (in terms of goals at least).
- dang 4y ago
  No doubt. And it's strategic for HN to not have duplicate threads and to maximize the substance of the threads it does have.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    It's also awfully quit on mister musk's twitter about this :)

phailhaus 4y ago

> For example, the possibility for its users to directly manage the algorithms to which their account will be subjected. This does not make any sense. The problem with social media isn't just "algorithms", it's their entire designs. TikTok's swipe-based UI and powerful editor incentivizes short-form video content that builds off each other. That creates certain social behaviors unique to TikTok. Another example: Twitter's decision not to have a "dislike" buton has a huge effect on how tweets are boosted. You can't "manage" that no matter what decentralized protocol you come up with, because that's baked into the UI. Not to mention, what does it even mean to "choose your algorithm"? Once you give me your data, you have no control over what I do with it. The only thing you can really choose is what piece of data you give away, but the article as it stands doesn't really make sense.

warble 4y ago
Isn't this 'choose your algorithm' mean the client app chooses, and the federated system is more of just a database / data feed? Maybe my really quick overview of the AT stuff missed the point however. This would mean your comment about the UI is more up to the user/client app, so this stuff is up for conversation. Unlike tiktok.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  That would make a lot more sense, and is a really interesting idea. One massive content feed from all of humanity. There's definitely going to be all sorts of issues to solve (like the fact that The Blockchain Does Not Forget).

SLWW 4y ago

I'll stick with Pleroma, I'm not thrilled with the idea of a "Twitter-Killer" associated with the same man who made Twitter.