8 ms·

Jack Dorsey Unveils Bluesky Social, the Decentralized Twitter

98 points by redbell 4y ago

Imnimo 4y ago
https://atproto.com/guides/applications#record-types https://atproto.com/guides/applications#record-types So if I'm a social media platform that implements this protocol, am I restricted to supporting only the activities that Bluesky supports? Like if I wanted to have a network that distinguishes people I follow from people who I personally know, am I just out of luck because protocol doesn't support that distinction? And if I do create that distinction, what is its meaning when a user decides to migrate that data elsewhere?
SilverBirch 4y ago
I think there are two interesting sides to this here: First is that essentially a key part of this strategy is ideological, not pragmatic. Centralization came out of pragmatism, not ideology. It seems hard for me to believe that deliberately choosing the less efficient solution is a good idea for a start up. The second is that we seem to be seeing a lot of VC brain here. By that I mean, I can scream at a VC "OMG THERE'S A TRUCK COMING AT YOU AT 100MPH" and the VC will respond "Well what we need to do is look at how the concept of a truck is cha-" before becoming a fine pink mist. I'm not impressed by people who can't answer basic questions about their product. I know Jack will hate to actually address this, but: how do you balance speech, censorship and moderation? I get we can wax lyrical about freedom of speech, but how are you actually going to address thousands of people shouting the N word at your users? And if your answer is "It's decentralized, it's down to X,Y,X people" then I have to point out, you've just outsourced the most difficult differentiator of a social media startup.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  If the speech is illegal in whatever jurisdictions apply, then remove it; otherwise, it should stay. Yes, even trolling and slurs. If a platform emulating the public square goes beyond what is legal, it ceases to be a neutral platform and inevitably becomes a vehicle for propaganda. I realize that means propaganda could be spread by the users, but I'd rather than than the platform and users spreading it. The real question here is defining "public square" legally.
  - labster 4y ago
    Spam is 100% legal in all jurisdictions, so your legal free speech plan sounds like a total hellscape.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Probably not remotely practical, but I wonder what an online equivalent to the "do not call" list would look like.
      - nullc 4y ago
        After it went through congress? Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003
      - lob_it 4y ago
        Domestic network protocols make SPAM, sim jacking (sim swapping, sim hacking), malware and ransomeware limited to TCP/IP (aka the Internet). Mobile phones utilize IP networks (VoLTE or voice over data networks), so dialtone 2.0 becomes an easy option with domestic network protocols as well. ESIM is about to change dynamics as well, so any use of a phone number/SMS/2FA for identity verification is rendered null with the current system in place. https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2019/10/sim-swap-scams-how-protect-yourself https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2019/10/sim-swap-sc... Domestic networking protocols and dialtone 2.0 easily address most ransomware, malware, SPAM, etc much easier than trying to police 3rd world countries. That severe limitation of regulating 3rd world countries is also the same argument with climate change. The can continue to regulate their own soverign borders.
    - youguyssuck 4y ago
      There are definitely laws against spam
      - klyrs 4y ago
        Are there laws against spam that aren't narrowly defined as email or phone spam? I'm not aware of laws against forum/wiki/social media spam. The US postal service is largely spam-funded, as is Canada Post.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  > Centralization came out of pragmatism Sort of? Centralization is more profitable and easier than building new open internet protocols and formats.
  - saghm 4y ago
    Those are certainly more pragmatic than ideological concerns, which is the point GP was making.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
      And I agree. I just think monetization is the larger factor.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        Reliable servers ain't free, at least that's what I think one of the larger issues is.
        2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
        No centralization, no server.
        pixl97 4y ago
        "This, and other things CEOs say while smoking crack." Computer code still runs on CPUs and not the aether. If its accepting connections from other computers it is the server in the client/server model. If it's on your desktop, it just typically means it doesn't have ECC memory and a battery backup dropping the reliability even further. Decentralized architectures have all kinds of fun and complicated failure modes, and especially for consumer use, high speed and low latency typically are not their strong points.
        2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
- markstos 4y ago
  > how do you balance speech, censorship and moderation? Decentralization does help a lot here. The X, Y and Z server owners don’t have to agree or coordinate. The fact that they will disagree on their policies is part of the answer. There won’t be a one-size-fits-all policy. Different servers will try different things and ideas will be shared about what works and what doesn’t. Z server can choose to allow saying mean things and X and Y server can block and ignore posts from Z. Some servers may have a political bias one way or the other and individuals can choose which to join and pay attention to.
  - cykros 4y ago
    Sounds like it'd just be another Mastodon -- and heck, likely get federated (or in most cases, not federated...the whole issue with Mastodon) in with the rest. Back in the Usenet days we had killfiles to do user based filtering -- everything would get sent out, and users would decide what sort of content they didn't want to see. Obviously it was harder back then to just spin up a new identity, so it's not simply a matter of taking the old tech and slapping it on the new, but the approach avoided the splinter effect we get trying to decide for users what will and won't be available to them (whether they like it or not). Snowden actually tweeted a week or two about how trivial this would be to implement on Twitter if they ever actually wanted to (with a working one liner to prove it). The issue thus far has usually been that advertising funded social media THRIVES on the controversy, and only moderates what it needs to to keep advertisers happy. They don't WANT you to make it a pleasant experience, because controversy and fights get more ad views. Perhaps at some point bandwidth becomes cheap enough that we can cut back on how much of a role advertisers play in steering the ship. Until then I don't see a great solution to any of this.
- cma 4y ago
  > It seems hard for me to believe that deliberately choosing the less efficient solution is a good idea for a start up. Many crypto scam startups have made bank with this less efficient strategy. Have you seen all the companies selling banks on internal proof of work blockchains and stuff?
- dqpb 4y ago
  As someone who is frequently rated limited on HN and occasionally scolded by HNs beloved religion-apologist moderator, I find decentralization to be not only pragmatic but truly essential for the next generation of social platforms.
chatterhead 4y ago
So he created a Mastodon clone?
- intothemild 4y ago
  Yes.. but with the power of blockchain™
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Mastodoncoin
hprotagonist 4y ago
now hire back the twitter moderation team, and you’ve effectively recapitulated the freenode/libera hard fork of 2021!
- INTPenis 4y ago
  Oh lord I just made that parallel between the kid who took over freenode and Elon the other day. Both spoiled brats. The two situations are actually very similar, even down to the crowd that took over freenode when everyone sane left for libera.
  - hprotagonist 4y ago
    tell me, have YOU ever seen andrew lee and elon musk together?! stay tuned for the secret south african prince NFTs :)
  - mlindner 4y ago
    Can you elaborate on why Elon is a "spoiled brat"? The term "spoiled brat" generally is implied toward people who were raised in a pampered lifestyle. Contrary to that Elon was bullied as a child in a motherless household with a task master of a father. Further, he had to work for his college payments rather than having his parents pay for it.
aquanext 4y ago
No thanks. I'm done with Jack and I'm done with Elon. Mastodon is great and it's already starting to feel like home. Don't need anymore drama from these reckless people.
- mlindner 4y ago
  Mastodon is only free of issues because the masses haven't found it yet. Give it a few years and it'll be the same as or worse than twitter, given Mastodon's lack of moderation.
  - SamWhited 4y ago
    Mastodon doesn't have a lack of moderation, in fact, it's architecture tends to segregate people out into instances by interest, making it easy to moderate as long as you keep your instance small (most of the really bad stuff will be on a handful of instances that allow it, so you can just block them and only have to deal with the minor problems on your own instance). Mastodon also tends to have one or more moderators per instance, so it probably has a lot more people with moderation privileges than a big centralized company, which can only afford to hire so many people in the call center to handle moderation.
    - dumpsterlid 4y ago
      The key here is mastodon isn't a business, so moderation isn't entirely focused on being cheap. Mastodon, correctly in my opinion, identifies social networks as community resources not as entities to extraft profit from.
  - serf 4y ago
    this is written as if you don't understand federated services. How will it be the same or worse? Which member of it? Mastodon is simply a social federation enabling software; it's similarly abstract to refer to Twitter's software infrastructure.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Moderation shmoderation, but irt "the masses" it seems like a lot of this fediverse stuff tops out in the hundreds of users per instance, not in the thousands or tens of thousands. I'd love to be corrected on this, as I'm afraid that if Mastodon gets one good news day, the entire network would instantly crash.
INTPenis 4y ago
(EDIT: No it's not) This is the scuttlebutt protocol to anyone wondering. First mentioned on HN many years ago. I'm very into this stuff. I was into scuttlebutt long before bluesky was announced even. But the problem I see is that with ActivityPub I already have a whole ecosystem of software and libraries, while with ssbc I have no idea where to even start. When ssbc was first announced I tried using it briefly but it was very basic, I hope they've come further. With the fediverse I can literally jump straight into a container and have an instance running within minutes. Is there an equivalent to activitypub.rocks for sscb? https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ maybe this guide.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- geoah 4y ago
  > This is the scuttlebutt protocol to anyone wondering. Bluesky is not related to secure scuttlebutt, they are working on a new protocol currently called "AT Protocol". https://atproto.com https://atproto.com ATP is mainly federated so a bit closer to mastodon/matrix than SSB which is quite a bit more decentralized iirc. Do check out their docs, it's a work in progress but should give you a better insight to what they're doing.
  - INTPenis 4y ago
    I stand corrected. I thought I read at some point that bluesky was SSB.
    - pfraze 4y ago
      I’m working on bluesky and previously worked on SSB, that might be what you read
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- davoneus 4y ago
prvc 4y ago
*unveiled (on Oct. 25)
cathdrlbizzare 4y ago
Decentralized means complicated and no regular people will use it.
- Jaepa 4y ago
  I wouldn't disagree, but email is decentralized. My gmail account can speak to your yahoo account. Jack was a pretty big proponent of the Protocol, not Platforms mythos put forth by Mike Masnick.
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  Since it appears that regular people ruin every social network, I don't see this as a bad thing :-)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- zajio1am 4y ago
  Like no regular people use e-mail nor phones/SMS.
  - frizlab 4y ago
    Indeed less and less people are using those. And when they do use email, they are using its centralized version, gmail.
    - pedalpete 4y ago
      But they aren't using gmail because it is centralized. The centralization in your example is due to convenience. Unlike social networks where centralization is somewhat core to the system working.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        I'd like to somewhat counter this, due to a common complain we see here on HN, and that is running email servers on smaller or self hosted providers is more likely to have delivery problems going to one of the few big providers like gmail that's left. I would also say that phones are a bad example because while the phone companies are decentralized, the call routing systems have written law behind them to ensure ATT and Verizon actually route calls to each other (and all other companies like CLEC/ILECs).
dorkwood 4y ago
> closer inspection reveals that the underlying technology will not be purely blockchain-based. “I’m confident in our decision not to put social media content on a blockchain,” tweeted Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. “It’s blockchain independent and optional." What does it mean to be blockchain optional?
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  Amazing Jack signed off on this, being so blockchain obsessed that he is.
- cyberge99 4y ago
  Micropayments or similar will likely utilize a blockchain?
- pfraze 4y ago
  We use DIDs for identity but presently no blockchain DID methods. Some people ask us for that, eg did:ethr or did:ion. Unsure it’ll happen (I’m skeptical) but that’s what Jay was talking about.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > We use DIDs for identity but presently no blockchain DID methods. I notice that the documentation[0] says: "We introduced DID Placeholder because we weren't totally satisfied with any of the existing DID methods. ... We cheekily titled the method "Placeholder", because we don't want it to stick around. We're actively hoping to replace it with something less centralized. We expect a method to emerge that fits the bill within the next few years, likely a permissioned DID consortium. which seems to be an admission that the hard part of distributed social networking isn't actually solved yet, and the project relies on "actively hoping" that a solution will eventually "emerge". I'm also not sure what a "permissioned DID consortium" even is, let alone how it would be useful here. Anyway, it seems a bit premature to abandon ActivityPub and introduce yet another incompatible social networking silo, based on the hope that the new project's magic placeholder beans eventually grow into a sturdy beanstalk. Perhaps "Beanstalk Social" would therefore be a better name for Jack's project (and he could even keep the same acronym). [0] https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc
yrgulation 4y ago
I feel like he should have taken a long holiday. Not being rude or anything, but a new social network needs thorough thinking. For instance everywhere i read about the topic on casual forums, someone mentions myspace. Maybe it is time that such a network is built - fun customisations and neutral content.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  "The thing you have to ask yourself ... is why the content was neutral ... do you feel lucky, punk?"
  - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    “What, are you a cop?”
- pixl97 4y ago
  >For instance everywhere i read about the topic on casual forums, someone mentions myspace. My grandparents also talk about how wonderful the past was, but that doesn't mean a lick of it was true. Was MySpace better? In some ways yes, but that's because we were better as social media users, and such massive bot farms, and financial interests in corrupting said social media didn't exist. If you turn on MySpace today it would immediately become foul shithole. The first thing some spammer would do is start creating profiles based on every identity they could find and the site would have to deal with that. Massive amounts of time would be used in getting rid of scams and spam on the sites. User content would not be neutral because peoples internet identities are no longer neutral, we've weaponized and politicized them. In order to maintain the neutrality you'd spend untold amounts of time banning content and polarizing a large amount of the user base against you turning them adversarial. Social media is a garbage fire these days. Most of the time I try to avoid talking about it on HN in order to stay in this sites guidelines.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    I dont think your analogy to rosy retrospection applies here. The issues we have with todays social media are the same issues IRC, usenet and other primordial internet social tools have suffered from in the past at scale. People abandoned those for what they thought was better. They went on to myspace and eventually they gave up myspace and went on to facebook and twitter because they thought these would be even better. And they were for a while. Facebook was really cool when people limited to sharing meal and travel photos with friends and family. Twitter was cool when limited to sharing fun short stories or updates. Then gradually the noisy plebe invaded. The drunken pub types debating angry politics, pseudo intellectuals, wannabe thought leaders, cheap scammers and sleazy politicians. And instead of banning or pushing them towards network ghettos, algorithms where made to amplify specifically their voice, in order to bait all the decent people into engaging with platforms even more. These algorithms developed habits in us that turned everyone into a little bit of the above. We tried this. Doesn't work. We need to iterate what worked. MySpace did. I fail to understand why facebook and twitter didnt put more thought into how to monetise the platform in better ways. Was it lack of imagination or the lack of people skills of their founders? Anger and politics are not the only things that drive sales and profits. Social networks are a reflection of our society and in a society you tend to marginalise the angry violent mobs that try to capture your attention and suck your energy, and instead you go where you can do your shopping, eating, reading, traveling, entertainment consuming safely and peacefully. Social networks can monetise on that. Instead they made us fight each other.
holografix 4y ago
Alternative title: “Twitter ex CEO announces half-baked and social signalling fuelled, competitor product to entice as many as possible to leave Twitter and help line his pockets”
- Whatarethese 4y ago
  Keep the status quo and continue to line the pockets of a leveraged billionaire. Sounds good.
- joecot 4y ago
  > help line his pockets And his ego. The world already has both Mastodon, a decentralized twitter-like social media, and ActivityPub, a protocol for decentralized social media services to connect to each other. Dorsey has chosen to support neither, and instead make his own service and protocol that can't connect to it. Bluesky has a wait list, while there's already a google doc full of Blue Checks that have moved to Mastodon[1]. I'm hoping grass roots open source succeeds over a billionaire with VC funding, but we shall see. https://journa.host/@WalterShaub/109305242003516901 https://journa.host/@WalterShaub/109305242003516901
ratg13 4y ago
Curious why he would remain so invested in Twitter despite wanting to compete with them.
redwood 4y ago
Similar to or compatible with TBL's Inrupt?
tootie 4y ago
This is not a new Twitter. This is a new phpBB or something. Absent centralization you don't get the "town square" factor. In marketing parlance, you don't get "reach". And you avoid controversial moderation tactics by making it not your problem. Dorsey just cut bait and declared moderation and profitability to be impossible while watching Google pull off both. Even Zuckerberg is looking like a genius next to this guy.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >Dorsey just cut bait and declared moderation and profitability to be impossible while watching Google pull off both. I guess you've been ignoring watching Google squirm for years about moderation, they left China because of this. They've been fined for years in the EU for violating laws around this and privacy and this is only expected to get worse and more expensive for them. Moreso Google has deleted plenty of individuals/entities from the Googlesphere for questionable reasons that's leading to increased resentment over the years. Google hangouts/+ epically failed. Google hasn't pulled off anything in the social media market other than losing money
  - tootie 4y ago
    I'm specifically thinking of YouTube. They run a massively profitable ad business, pay creators, sell a premium membership program with a clear value prop, and successfully moderate video content faster than Twitter can moderate text.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      >and successfully moderate video content faster than Twitter can moderate text. There was the whole creepy men in diapers videos ending up on kids YT for months on end (Elsagate?), and mass demonetization issues if the topic is even close to controversial (of course they still show ads to you, the creator doesn't make income). Along with bans across all types of topics that are leaving more and more people confused. When you add in recent pushes for YT shorts because sites like Tik-Tok are pulling lots of viewers away, I still don't think the picture is near as rosy as you make it. The one thing that YT has is a near monopoly on video serving and a 'special' relationship with the movie and music industry that prevents them from being sued off the face of the planet.
muglug 4y ago
You can have decentralisation or you can have sub-second responses to whole-network search queries, but you cannot have both. Twitter has two killer features: the people who use it, and search functionality that allows you to get near-instant results. Mastodon (and I assume Bluesky) cannot compete on either.
- daniel_iversen 4y ago
  The people is just about whichever platform has pull and influence, the architecture and missing out of full text search is something I’m sure people would be happy to live without. Not sure how much the average person searches on Twitter or Facebook (on tiktok and Instagram maybe they search more)
- sempron64 4y ago
  You absolutely can have sub-second responses to search queries for publically accessible decentralized content, if it is indexed by a regular search engine. That is what the web is. Privately accessible content tends to be much smaller so local caching works. And if communication is not meant to be instant, email proves that a decentralized system works. What gets a little more difficult is content that is widely available but behind login. Facebook has this but twitter and mastodon tend to not be this way. In fact mastodon is a workable system for decentralized social networking, so I think the skepticism is unwarranted. The only question in my mind is whether a popular social network can be effectively bootstrapped without a core capital incentive.
  - muglug 4y ago
    Google is reasonably centralised, though.
    - goalieca 4y ago
      Rather, google is the gatekeeper.
- sliken 4y ago
  How many people care about seeing tweets from the last second vs last minute? Or the difference between 95% of the results of a search and 100%, especially if the 95% is missing the least popular 5%.
mdmglr 4y ago
Is decentralization the silver bullet that solves the problems of social media? I don't think it is a technology problem.
- tristan957 4y ago
  Decentralization allows for different forms of moderation across instances and allows for instances to monetize how they want, whether that is pay to play, donations, or advertising. I would argue those are 2 of the most pressing issues social media faces. Maybe others would disagree however.
gautamdivgi 4y ago
Wasn’t bluesky what parag agrawal was working on when he was an individual contributor at twitter?
faizshah 4y ago
I was looking at the code this past week and they are only using simple password auth: https://atproto.com/guides/applications#signing-in https://atproto.com/guides/applications#signing-in I was hoping since identity is such a corner stone of this project that there would be a more fleshed out auth system (OIDC?). Other than that it seems like a reasonable implementation, but I don’t like the addressing scheme. They are using identifiers that look like emails: bluesky@bluesky.app But they are not actually emails so they can collide with real emails.
- pfraze 4y ago
  We don’t use email-style IDs; we use domain names (@alice.com) which will often be subdomains (@alice.host.com). The auth schemes will evolve. That technique is meant for your main app.
Finnucane 4y ago
“I’m sorry I created a blight on humanity, but now I can fix it, with blockchain!” Thanks, but no thanks.
- whyrusleeping 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1583231719943327744 https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1583231719943327744
wan_ala 4y ago
How is this better than ActivityPub? Mastodon already is a decentralized Twitter

98 points by redbell 4y ago

https://atproto.com/guides/applications#record-types https://atproto.com/guides/applications#record-types So if I'm a social media platform that implements this protocol, am I restricted to supporting only the activities that Bluesky supports? Like if I wanted to have a network that distinguishes people I follow from people who I personally know, am I just out of luck because protocol doesn't support that distinction? And if I do create that distinction, what is its meaning when a user decides to migrate that data elsewhere?

SilverBirch 4y ago

I think there are two interesting sides to this here: First is that essentially a key part of this strategy is ideological, not pragmatic. Centralization came out of pragmatism, not ideology. It seems hard for me to believe that deliberately choosing the less efficient solution is a good idea for a start up. The second is that we seem to be seeing a lot of VC brain here. By that I mean, I can scream at a VC "OMG THERE'S A TRUCK COMING AT YOU AT 100MPH" and the VC will respond "Well what we need to do is look at how the concept of a truck is cha-" before becoming a fine pink mist. I'm not impressed by people who can't answer basic questions about their product. I know Jack will hate to actually address this, but: how do you balance speech, censorship and moderation? I get we can wax lyrical about freedom of speech, but how are you actually going to address thousands of people shouting the N word at your users? And if your answer is "It's decentralized, it's down to X,Y,X people" then I have to point out, you've just outsourced the most difficult differentiator of a social media startup.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
If the speech is illegal in whatever jurisdictions apply, then remove it; otherwise, it should stay. Yes, even trolling and slurs. If a platform emulating the public square goes beyond what is legal, it ceases to be a neutral platform and inevitably becomes a vehicle for propaganda. I realize that means propaganda could be spread by the users, but I'd rather than than the platform and users spreading it. The real question here is defining "public square" legally.
- labster 4y ago
  Spam is 100% legal in all jurisdictions, so your legal free speech plan sounds like a total hellscape.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Probably not remotely practical, but I wonder what an online equivalent to the "do not call" list would look like.
    - nullc 4y ago
      After it went through congress? Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003
    - lob_it 4y ago
      Domestic network protocols make SPAM, sim jacking (sim swapping, sim hacking), malware and ransomeware limited to TCP/IP (aka the Internet). Mobile phones utilize IP networks (VoLTE or voice over data networks), so dialtone 2.0 becomes an easy option with domestic network protocols as well. ESIM is about to change dynamics as well, so any use of a phone number/SMS/2FA for identity verification is rendered null with the current system in place. https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2019/10/sim-swap-scams-how-protect-yourself https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2019/10/sim-swap-sc... Domestic networking protocols and dialtone 2.0 easily address most ransomware, malware, SPAM, etc much easier than trying to police 3rd world countries. That severe limitation of regulating 3rd world countries is also the same argument with climate change. The can continue to regulate their own soverign borders.
  - youguyssuck 4y ago
    There are definitely laws against spam
    - klyrs 4y ago
      Are there laws against spam that aren't narrowly defined as email or phone spam? I'm not aware of laws against forum/wiki/social media spam. The US postal service is largely spam-funded, as is Canada Post.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> Centralization came out of pragmatism Sort of? Centralization is more profitable and easier than building new open internet protocols and formats.
- saghm 4y ago
  Those are certainly more pragmatic than ideological concerns, which is the point GP was making.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    And I agree. I just think monetization is the larger factor.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Reliable servers ain't free, at least that's what I think one of the larger issues is.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
        No centralization, no server.
        pixl97 4y ago
        "This, and other things CEOs say while smoking crack." Computer code still runs on CPUs and not the aether. If its accepting connections from other computers it is the server in the client/server model. If it's on your desktop, it just typically means it doesn't have ECC memory and a battery backup dropping the reliability even further. Decentralized architectures have all kinds of fun and complicated failure modes, and especially for consumer use, high speed and low latency typically are not their strong points.
        2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
markstos 4y ago
> how do you balance speech, censorship and moderation? Decentralization does help a lot here. The X, Y and Z server owners don’t have to agree or coordinate. The fact that they will disagree on their policies is part of the answer. There won’t be a one-size-fits-all policy. Different servers will try different things and ideas will be shared about what works and what doesn’t. Z server can choose to allow saying mean things and X and Y server can block and ignore posts from Z. Some servers may have a political bias one way or the other and individuals can choose which to join and pay attention to.
- cykros 4y ago
  Sounds like it'd just be another Mastodon -- and heck, likely get federated (or in most cases, not federated...the whole issue with Mastodon) in with the rest. Back in the Usenet days we had killfiles to do user based filtering -- everything would get sent out, and users would decide what sort of content they didn't want to see. Obviously it was harder back then to just spin up a new identity, so it's not simply a matter of taking the old tech and slapping it on the new, but the approach avoided the splinter effect we get trying to decide for users what will and won't be available to them (whether they like it or not). Snowden actually tweeted a week or two about how trivial this would be to implement on Twitter if they ever actually wanted to (with a working one liner to prove it). The issue thus far has usually been that advertising funded social media THRIVES on the controversy, and only moderates what it needs to to keep advertisers happy. They don't WANT you to make it a pleasant experience, because controversy and fights get more ad views. Perhaps at some point bandwidth becomes cheap enough that we can cut back on how much of a role advertisers play in steering the ship. Until then I don't see a great solution to any of this.
cma 4y ago
> It seems hard for me to believe that deliberately choosing the less efficient solution is a good idea for a start up. Many crypto scam startups have made bank with this less efficient strategy. Have you seen all the companies selling banks on internal proof of work blockchains and stuff?
dqpb 4y ago
As someone who is frequently rated limited on HN and occasionally scolded by HNs beloved religion-apologist moderator, I find decentralization to be not only pragmatic but truly essential for the next generation of social platforms.

chatterhead 4y ago

So he created a Mastodon clone?

intothemild 4y ago
Yes.. but with the power of blockchain™
pessimizer 4y ago
Mastodoncoin

hprotagonist 4y ago

now hire back the twitter moderation team, and you’ve effectively recapitulated the freenode/libera hard fork of 2021!

INTPenis 4y ago
Oh lord I just made that parallel between the kid who took over freenode and Elon the other day. Both spoiled brats. The two situations are actually very similar, even down to the crowd that took over freenode when everyone sane left for libera.
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  tell me, have YOU ever seen andrew lee and elon musk together?! stay tuned for the secret south african prince NFTs :)
- mlindner 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on why Elon is a "spoiled brat"? The term "spoiled brat" generally is implied toward people who were raised in a pampered lifestyle. Contrary to that Elon was bullied as a child in a motherless household with a task master of a father. Further, he had to work for his college payments rather than having his parents pay for it.

aquanext 4y ago

No thanks. I'm done with Jack and I'm done with Elon. Mastodon is great and it's already starting to feel like home. Don't need anymore drama from these reckless people.

mlindner 4y ago
Mastodon is only free of issues because the masses haven't found it yet. Give it a few years and it'll be the same as or worse than twitter, given Mastodon's lack of moderation.
- SamWhited 4y ago
  Mastodon doesn't have a lack of moderation, in fact, it's architecture tends to segregate people out into instances by interest, making it easy to moderate as long as you keep your instance small (most of the really bad stuff will be on a handful of instances that allow it, so you can just block them and only have to deal with the minor problems on your own instance). Mastodon also tends to have one or more moderators per instance, so it probably has a lot more people with moderation privileges than a big centralized company, which can only afford to hire so many people in the call center to handle moderation.
  - dumpsterlid 4y ago
    The key here is mastodon isn't a business, so moderation isn't entirely focused on being cheap. Mastodon, correctly in my opinion, identifies social networks as community resources not as entities to extraft profit from.
- serf 4y ago
  this is written as if you don't understand federated services. How will it be the same or worse? Which member of it? Mastodon is simply a social federation enabling software; it's similarly abstract to refer to Twitter's software infrastructure.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Moderation shmoderation, but irt "the masses" it seems like a lot of this fediverse stuff tops out in the hundreds of users per instance, not in the thousands or tens of thousands. I'd love to be corrected on this, as I'm afraid that if Mastodon gets one good news day, the entire network would instantly crash.

INTPenis 4y ago

(EDIT: No it's not) This is the scuttlebutt protocol to anyone wondering. First mentioned on HN many years ago. I'm very into this stuff. I was into scuttlebutt long before bluesky was announced even. But the problem I see is that with ActivityPub I already have a whole ecosystem of software and libraries, while with ssbc I have no idea where to even start. When ssbc was first announced I tried using it briefly but it was very basic, I hope they've come further. With the fediverse I can literally jump straight into a container and have an instance running within minutes. Is there an equivalent to activitypub.rocks for sscb? https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ maybe this guide.

deleted 4y ago
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geoah 4y ago
> This is the scuttlebutt protocol to anyone wondering. Bluesky is not related to secure scuttlebutt, they are working on a new protocol currently called "AT Protocol". https://atproto.com https://atproto.com ATP is mainly federated so a bit closer to mastodon/matrix than SSB which is quite a bit more decentralized iirc. Do check out their docs, it's a work in progress but should give you a better insight to what they're doing.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  I stand corrected. I thought I read at some point that bluesky was SSB.
  - pfraze 4y ago
    I’m working on bluesky and previously worked on SSB, that might be what you read
deleted 4y ago
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davoneus 4y ago

prvc 4y ago

*unveiled (on Oct. 25)

cathdrlbizzare 4y ago

Decentralized means complicated and no regular people will use it.

Jaepa 4y ago
I wouldn't disagree, but email is decentralized. My gmail account can speak to your yahoo account. Jack was a pretty big proponent of the Protocol, not Platforms mythos put forth by Mike Masnick.
smackeyacky 4y ago
Since it appears that regular people ruin every social network, I don't see this as a bad thing :-)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zajio1am 4y ago
Like no regular people use e-mail nor phones/SMS.
- frizlab 4y ago
  Indeed less and less people are using those. And when they do use email, they are using its centralized version, gmail.
  - pedalpete 4y ago
    But they aren't using gmail because it is centralized. The centralization in your example is due to convenience. Unlike social networks where centralization is somewhat core to the system working.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      I'd like to somewhat counter this, due to a common complain we see here on HN, and that is running email servers on smaller or self hosted providers is more likely to have delivery problems going to one of the few big providers like gmail that's left. I would also say that phones are a bad example because while the phone companies are decentralized, the call routing systems have written law behind them to ensure ATT and Verizon actually route calls to each other (and all other companies like CLEC/ILECs).

dorkwood 4y ago

> closer inspection reveals that the underlying technology will not be purely blockchain-based. “I’m confident in our decision not to put social media content on a blockchain,” tweeted Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. “It’s blockchain independent and optional." What does it mean to be blockchain optional?

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
Amazing Jack signed off on this, being so blockchain obsessed that he is.
cyberge99 4y ago
Micropayments or similar will likely utilize a blockchain?
pfraze 4y ago
We use DIDs for identity but presently no blockchain DID methods. Some people ask us for that, eg did:ethr or did:ion. Unsure it’ll happen (I’m skeptical) but that’s what Jay was talking about.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > We use DIDs for identity but presently no blockchain DID methods. I notice that the documentation[0] says: "We introduced DID Placeholder because we weren't totally satisfied with any of the existing DID methods. ... We cheekily titled the method "Placeholder", because we don't want it to stick around. We're actively hoping to replace it with something less centralized. We expect a method to emerge that fits the bill within the next few years, likely a permissioned DID consortium. which seems to be an admission that the hard part of distributed social networking isn't actually solved yet, and the project relies on "actively hoping" that a solution will eventually "emerge". I'm also not sure what a "permissioned DID consortium" even is, let alone how it would be useful here. Anyway, it seems a bit premature to abandon ActivityPub and introduce yet another incompatible social networking silo, based on the hope that the new project's magic placeholder beans eventually grow into a sturdy beanstalk. Perhaps "Beanstalk Social" would therefore be a better name for Jack's project (and he could even keep the same acronym). [0] https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc

yrgulation 4y ago

I feel like he should have taken a long holiday. Not being rude or anything, but a new social network needs thorough thinking. For instance everywhere i read about the topic on casual forums, someone mentions myspace. Maybe it is time that such a network is built - fun customisations and neutral content.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
"The thing you have to ask yourself ... is why the content was neutral ... do you feel lucky, punk?"
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  “What, are you a cop?”
pixl97 4y ago
>For instance everywhere i read about the topic on casual forums, someone mentions myspace. My grandparents also talk about how wonderful the past was, but that doesn't mean a lick of it was true. Was MySpace better? In some ways yes, but that's because we were better as social media users, and such massive bot farms, and financial interests in corrupting said social media didn't exist. If you turn on MySpace today it would immediately become foul shithole. The first thing some spammer would do is start creating profiles based on every identity they could find and the site would have to deal with that. Massive amounts of time would be used in getting rid of scams and spam on the sites. User content would not be neutral because peoples internet identities are no longer neutral, we've weaponized and politicized them. In order to maintain the neutrality you'd spend untold amounts of time banning content and polarizing a large amount of the user base against you turning them adversarial. Social media is a garbage fire these days. Most of the time I try to avoid talking about it on HN in order to stay in this sites guidelines.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  I dont think your analogy to rosy retrospection applies here. The issues we have with todays social media are the same issues IRC, usenet and other primordial internet social tools have suffered from in the past at scale. People abandoned those for what they thought was better. They went on to myspace and eventually they gave up myspace and went on to facebook and twitter because they thought these would be even better. And they were for a while. Facebook was really cool when people limited to sharing meal and travel photos with friends and family. Twitter was cool when limited to sharing fun short stories or updates. Then gradually the noisy plebe invaded. The drunken pub types debating angry politics, pseudo intellectuals, wannabe thought leaders, cheap scammers and sleazy politicians. And instead of banning or pushing them towards network ghettos, algorithms where made to amplify specifically their voice, in order to bait all the decent people into engaging with platforms even more. These algorithms developed habits in us that turned everyone into a little bit of the above. We tried this. Doesn't work. We need to iterate what worked. MySpace did. I fail to understand why facebook and twitter didnt put more thought into how to monetise the platform in better ways. Was it lack of imagination or the lack of people skills of their founders? Anger and politics are not the only things that drive sales and profits. Social networks are a reflection of our society and in a society you tend to marginalise the angry violent mobs that try to capture your attention and suck your energy, and instead you go where you can do your shopping, eating, reading, traveling, entertainment consuming safely and peacefully. Social networks can monetise on that. Instead they made us fight each other.

holografix 4y ago

Alternative title: “Twitter ex CEO announces half-baked and social signalling fuelled, competitor product to entice as many as possible to leave Twitter and help line his pockets”

Whatarethese 4y ago
Keep the status quo and continue to line the pockets of a leveraged billionaire. Sounds good.
joecot 4y ago
> help line his pockets And his ego. The world already has both Mastodon, a decentralized twitter-like social media, and ActivityPub, a protocol for decentralized social media services to connect to each other. Dorsey has chosen to support neither, and instead make his own service and protocol that can't connect to it. Bluesky has a wait list, while there's already a google doc full of Blue Checks that have moved to Mastodon[1]. I'm hoping grass roots open source succeeds over a billionaire with VC funding, but we shall see. https://journa.host/@WalterShaub/109305242003516901 https://journa.host/@WalterShaub/109305242003516901

ratg13 4y ago

Curious why he would remain so invested in Twitter despite wanting to compete with them.

redwood 4y ago

Similar to or compatible with TBL's Inrupt?

tootie 4y ago

This is not a new Twitter. This is a new phpBB or something. Absent centralization you don't get the "town square" factor. In marketing parlance, you don't get "reach". And you avoid controversial moderation tactics by making it not your problem. Dorsey just cut bait and declared moderation and profitability to be impossible while watching Google pull off both. Even Zuckerberg is looking like a genius next to this guy.

pixl97 4y ago
>Dorsey just cut bait and declared moderation and profitability to be impossible while watching Google pull off both. I guess you've been ignoring watching Google squirm for years about moderation, they left China because of this. They've been fined for years in the EU for violating laws around this and privacy and this is only expected to get worse and more expensive for them. Moreso Google has deleted plenty of individuals/entities from the Googlesphere for questionable reasons that's leading to increased resentment over the years. Google hangouts/+ epically failed. Google hasn't pulled off anything in the social media market other than losing money
- tootie 4y ago
  I'm specifically thinking of YouTube. They run a massively profitable ad business, pay creators, sell a premium membership program with a clear value prop, and successfully moderate video content faster than Twitter can moderate text.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    >and successfully moderate video content faster than Twitter can moderate text. There was the whole creepy men in diapers videos ending up on kids YT for months on end (Elsagate?), and mass demonetization issues if the topic is even close to controversial (of course they still show ads to you, the creator doesn't make income). Along with bans across all types of topics that are leaving more and more people confused. When you add in recent pushes for YT shorts because sites like Tik-Tok are pulling lots of viewers away, I still don't think the picture is near as rosy as you make it. The one thing that YT has is a near monopoly on video serving and a 'special' relationship with the movie and music industry that prevents them from being sued off the face of the planet.

muglug 4y ago

You can have decentralisation or you can have sub-second responses to whole-network search queries, but you cannot have both. Twitter has two killer features: the people who use it, and search functionality that allows you to get near-instant results. Mastodon (and I assume Bluesky) cannot compete on either.

daniel_iversen 4y ago
The people is just about whichever platform has pull and influence, the architecture and missing out of full text search is something I’m sure people would be happy to live without. Not sure how much the average person searches on Twitter or Facebook (on tiktok and Instagram maybe they search more)
sempron64 4y ago
You absolutely can have sub-second responses to search queries for publically accessible decentralized content, if it is indexed by a regular search engine. That is what the web is. Privately accessible content tends to be much smaller so local caching works. And if communication is not meant to be instant, email proves that a decentralized system works. What gets a little more difficult is content that is widely available but behind login. Facebook has this but twitter and mastodon tend to not be this way. In fact mastodon is a workable system for decentralized social networking, so I think the skepticism is unwarranted. The only question in my mind is whether a popular social network can be effectively bootstrapped without a core capital incentive.
- muglug 4y ago
  Google is reasonably centralised, though.
  - goalieca 4y ago
    Rather, google is the gatekeeper.
sliken 4y ago
How many people care about seeing tweets from the last second vs last minute? Or the difference between 95% of the results of a search and 100%, especially if the 95% is missing the least popular 5%.

mdmglr 4y ago

Is decentralization the silver bullet that solves the problems of social media? I don't think it is a technology problem.

tristan957 4y ago
Decentralization allows for different forms of moderation across instances and allows for instances to monetize how they want, whether that is pay to play, donations, or advertising. I would argue those are 2 of the most pressing issues social media faces. Maybe others would disagree however.

gautamdivgi 4y ago

Wasn’t bluesky what parag agrawal was working on when he was an individual contributor at twitter?

faizshah 4y ago

I was looking at the code this past week and they are only using simple password auth: https://atproto.com/guides/applications#signing-in https://atproto.com/guides/applications#signing-in I was hoping since identity is such a corner stone of this project that there would be a more fleshed out auth system (OIDC?). Other than that it seems like a reasonable implementation, but I don’t like the addressing scheme. They are using identifiers that look like emails: bluesky@bluesky.app But they are not actually emails so they can collide with real emails.

pfraze 4y ago
We don’t use email-style IDs; we use domain names (@alice.com) which will often be subdomains (@alice.host.com). The auth schemes will evolve. That technique is meant for your main app.

Finnucane 4y ago

“I’m sorry I created a blight on humanity, but now I can fix it, with blockchain!” Thanks, but no thanks.

whyrusleeping 4y ago
https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1583231719943327744 https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1583231719943327744

wan_ala 4y ago

How is this better than ActivityPub? Mastodon already is a decentralized Twitter