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First Impressions of Bluesky's Brand New iOS App

89 points by rpgbr 4y ago

garrettjoecox 4y ago
Why would they expect anyone to build on top of their new social networking protocol? It is owned and will be driven by a private company and it’s desire for profitability, ActivityPub is an open standard that has been around for ~5 years and battle tested and already in use across different platforms.
- linza 4y ago
  > It is owned and will be driven by a private company and it’s desire for profitability [...] I imagine that that's the exact reason why for example advertisers will opt for bluesky over mastodon immediately, under the assumption that the reach would be the same.
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  Maybe he expects Elmo to buy it and use it for Twitter 2.0?
- hbn 4y ago
  And if they ever plan to monetize they're gonna be at the behest of payment processors and advertisers, and will censor just like everyone else.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    They can't censor other people's instances. Advertisers would advertise per-instance.
    - wmf 4y ago
      I assume the iOS app would have to censor all instances.
- ch71r22 4y ago
  Maybe their efforts will be co-opted, but judging by the team's background -- André Staltz with Secure Scuttlebutt, Paul Frazee with dat/Beaker/Hypercore Protocol -- I think it's pretty clear the driving motivation for much of the team behind Bluesky is not profit. As for why people might want to use it instead of ActivityPub, I think it's just... different from ActivityPub. Even though ActivityPub is an available option I don't see why it should be the last word. Bluesky's answer is this > Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data. > Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors). https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    > We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements I think this will have the opposite effect. Account portability means that being banned on one site can ban you on another if you try to use the same ID. Being persistently recognized across accounts seems like a net-negative for all of these things.
    - serverholic 4y ago
      Same with mastodon. Your id is tied to the server so if you get banned you have to create a new id on another server. Mastodon is worse because your data is in the server owner’s hands. At least with Bluesky your identity and server are separate so you still have your data.
      - 4y ago
- Kye 4y ago
  The OStatus crowd made similar arguments when Mastodon added ActivityPub support. "We already have a protocol." "I don't know about this new upstart's motives." I think it's good to have competing protocols at first. Platforms will eventually consolidate on one for a while like they did AP until something new comes along. I know the BlueSky people considered building on AP, so I'm curious to hear what it lacked that they think they can improve on. It could be that some new platform enabled by that new protocol drives a transition away from AP the way Mastodon did with OStatus.
- warning26 4y ago
  It's an open protocol, right? So theoretically, even if the company went evil, anyone could build their own client right?
steponlego 4y ago
Interesting, I wonder how heavily censored it will be considering it's run by a regime of people formerly attached to old Twitter. My guess is "very to almost completely."
- arcalinea 4y ago
  Hi, Jay from bluesky here. Actually nobody on the team, including myself, has ever worked at Twitter. We're designing for flexible and composable moderation systems driven by user choice.
  - steponlego 4y ago
    Good deal! I just can’t trust anybody from old Twitter after their abuses. Looks like I’ll have to wait and see how your product develops rather than just writing you off as a sort of zombie mode Ole Twitter.
- nomorewords 4y ago
  I don't think anyone inherently wants censorship. It comes down to it when popularity rises and certain standards are expected of it. Would I mind if I had a 8 year old and he saw "fuck" on a website/social media? No I wouldn't but some people decided that we should have a specific linguistic moral code, so the capitalists try to walk the path of least resistance on this topic (just complying)
  - steponlego 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - warning26 4y ago
      And yet, I'll bet that your version of "THE MEDIA THEY CONTROL" doesn't include whichever publication has politics that you, personally, agree with. How mysterious.
      - 4y ago
gfodor 4y ago
The author asked why you’d choose this over Mastodon - the answer is that the AT protocol is designed to be a much better solve for decentralized social media that avoids the scalability and centralization problems of mastodon. That’s the entire point, it’s weird you would have access to this without understanding the entire motive for its existence.
- nicce 4y ago
  After getting used to Mastodon’s 10k character limit, I won’t touch a platform with 256 character post size. It enforces polarisation and hate speech.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    No, it enforces brevity and distillation of content down to its barest minimum.
    - nicce 4y ago
      Exactly; it means that you need to use strong words and attack in any argument to get user engagement. Everyone loves attention and wants to get their words heard, and this will happen when you have only few words to use.
      - Zetice 4y ago
        I see no problem with this; the goal of non-experts communicating is not to be the most accurate, nor should it be.
        nicce 4y ago
        The problem is that political combats and campaings have been made on the same platform, and those might decide the future of the country and many people. E.g. Twitter is not for really for general people to provide content, it is mainly for those with large audience already. And they want attention.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
One of the largest complaints about Mastodon is the complicated (yes it can be complicated) sign up process. You have to pick an instance and if that one is full, pick another, then another, etc. How will Bluesky solve that problem?
- Ciantic 4y ago
  By allowing everyone to register on their app to their own servers? Mastodon is now prioritizing large servers with open registration in joinmastodon.org for this same reason. They re-ordered the servers some weeks ago so that open registration servers come first. I don't think the signup needs to be complicated.
- rpgbr 4y ago
  Right now it's a nonissue because there's only one server/instance. No idea what will it look like when this changes.
pimlottc 4y ago
What the heck does "mambeous" mean? Ambiguous? Amorphous? Ambitious?
- cr3ative 4y ago
  No dictionary I've found defines it. I wonder what they were aiming for too.
- wmeredith 4y ago
  It doesn't mean anything. It's not a word. I think it was supposed to say ambitious or amorphous.
- rpgbr 4y ago
  Hahahaha, apparently DeepL forged a new word! It's (supposedly) a translation of “mambembe”, pt_BR adjective that means something ordinary, mediocre, half-baked, average (in a bad sense). (Plus, it's sounds amazing, although I acknowledge that even in Portuguese it's an uncommon word.) To avoid (more) confusion, I replaced it with “half-baked”.
savolai 4y ago
Mastodon’s UX with regards to following people on other servers seems to be really broken. Is there a simple ”browse to profile, click ”follow”’ experience on any client? All mastodon clients I have seen involved logging in to the foreign server and/or copy/pasting handles. If this can just solve that it already removes critical friction.
- raydev 4y ago
  IceCubesApp and Ivory, both on iOS, handle external follows seamlessly.
- Ciantic 4y ago
  Yes it's weirdly broken, but it seems to be hard problem to solve. Servers aren't connected to each other unless someone follows someone on other server, thus it's a bit hard to build a full graph in one server to browse profiles. Mastodon team should have made own browser extensions a long time ago, now the community is working to make this easier. I use one called StreetPass [1], but it still is a bit barebones, and doesn't yet help with following accounts accross servers. It does make discovering accounts nice. [1]: https://streetpass.social/ https://streetpass.social/
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jghn 4y ago
  I found that the federation aspect of the fediverse breaks the things I most like about Twitter. Sure, there are advantages to it but they're outweighed in my mind by the disadvantages. What you bring up is a big one. Another big one for me is search. I used Twitter search all the time. For local things like "what're those sirens I hear in my neighborhood", to cultural zeitgeist like "who is this artist performing on SNL", to using it as a quasi-Google.
  - camjohnson26 4y ago
    Couldn’t somebody write a simple service that just scrapes profile info for following? Really doubt anyone would care if that aspect is centralized if it’s just a UX improvement. Same with search, although you’ll always have a vocal minority angry that their public posts are being scraped.
rmac 4y ago
How does this article not mention nostr, given that Dorsey also funded nostr (https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr)
- rpgbr 4y ago
  It does! A couple weeks ago I wrote about Nostr too: https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2023/nostr/ https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2023/nostr/
  - rmac 4y ago
    my bad! somehow I missed the mention! Please write on your thoughts on bluesky vs nostr! (no dog in the fight, just interested)
    - rpgbr 4y ago
      Tbh, none of them really attract me right now. They are too clunky and don't have many people to interact with. I'm slightly annoyed by Nostr's proposition and total lack of moderation controls. Even if its developers are well-meaning, I see this as a dangerous, undesirable position to take. I'm really comfortable with Mastodon/ActivityPub. My personal profile is in a public instance[0], and for my Portuguese-written site I'm hosting a Microblog[1]. It's just great. [0] https://hachyderm.io/@ghedin https://hachyderm.io/@ghedin [1] https://social.manualdousuario.net https://social.manualdousuario.net
freewizard 4y ago
Easier account discovery/follow/porting is the surface. The core differentiator of Bluesky/ATP is the ability to have a global view for its network, as compare to Mastodon's limited local view. Things like search engine is not only possible but first class citizen in ATP design. Obviously depending on your attitude towards ad tech, you may like or dislike it. However, if everything still (eventually) follows money as it used to be, and Twitter's 5 billion ad revenue (or more if you believe FB is shrinking too) wants to go elsewhere, ATP is offering a viable solution while Mastodon does not (at least yet).
mzs 4y ago
Does it ask for permission to your contacts? https://bsky.app/support/privacy https://bsky.app/support/privacy FWIW mastodon never asked me.
- bnewbold 4y ago
  No, the Bluesky app does not ask for your contacts. Somebody else could build an app for Bluesky that did ask, the same as somebody could in theory build an RSS feed reader that asks for contacts.
raydev 4y ago
> ActivityPub has the advantage of being a de facto standard and not being owned by a private company. It should be clear by this point that "being owned by a private company" is not a disadvantage. If the Bluesky team nails the onboarding experience, then Mastodon/ActivityPub will remain a niche service.
nbrempel 4y ago
The article mentions running separate servers to be able to claim your own domain. However, in AT I believe you can simply add a TXT record. There is no need to run a server unless you want to. Also, you can be @example.com if you want. You don’t need to be a user on a server like @me@example.com.

89 points by rpgbr 4y ago

Why would they expect anyone to build on top of their new social networking protocol? It is owned and will be driven by a private company and it’s desire for profitability, ActivityPub is an open standard that has been around for ~5 years and battle tested and already in use across different platforms.

linza 4y ago
> It is owned and will be driven by a private company and it’s desire for profitability [...] I imagine that that's the exact reason why for example advertisers will opt for bluesky over mastodon immediately, under the assumption that the reach would be the same.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Maybe he expects Elmo to buy it and use it for Twitter 2.0?
hbn 4y ago
And if they ever plan to monetize they're gonna be at the behest of payment processors and advertisers, and will censor just like everyone else.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  They can't censor other people's instances. Advertisers would advertise per-instance.
  - wmf 4y ago
    I assume the iOS app would have to censor all instances.
ch71r22 4y ago
Maybe their efforts will be co-opted, but judging by the team's background -- André Staltz with Secure Scuttlebutt, Paul Frazee with dat/Beaker/Hypercore Protocol -- I think it's pretty clear the driving motivation for much of the team behind Bluesky is not profit. As for why people might want to use it instead of ActivityPub, I think it's just... different from ActivityPub. Even though ActivityPub is an available option I don't see why it should be the last word. Bluesky's answer is this > Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data. > Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors). https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements I think this will have the opposite effect. Account portability means that being banned on one site can ban you on another if you try to use the same ID. Being persistently recognized across accounts seems like a net-negative for all of these things.
  - serverholic 4y ago
    Same with mastodon. Your id is tied to the server so if you get banned you have to create a new id on another server. Mastodon is worse because your data is in the server owner’s hands. At least with Bluesky your identity and server are separate so you still have your data.
    - 4y ago
Kye 4y ago
The OStatus crowd made similar arguments when Mastodon added ActivityPub support. "We already have a protocol." "I don't know about this new upstart's motives." I think it's good to have competing protocols at first. Platforms will eventually consolidate on one for a while like they did AP until something new comes along. I know the BlueSky people considered building on AP, so I'm curious to hear what it lacked that they think they can improve on. It could be that some new platform enabled by that new protocol drives a transition away from AP the way Mastodon did with OStatus.
warning26 4y ago
It's an open protocol, right? So theoretically, even if the company went evil, anyone could build their own client right?

steponlego 4y ago

Interesting, I wonder how heavily censored it will be considering it's run by a regime of people formerly attached to old Twitter. My guess is "very to almost completely."

arcalinea 4y ago
Hi, Jay from bluesky here. Actually nobody on the team, including myself, has ever worked at Twitter. We're designing for flexible and composable moderation systems driven by user choice.
- steponlego 4y ago
  Good deal! I just can’t trust anybody from old Twitter after their abuses. Looks like I’ll have to wait and see how your product develops rather than just writing you off as a sort of zombie mode Ole Twitter.
nomorewords 4y ago
I don't think anyone inherently wants censorship. It comes down to it when popularity rises and certain standards are expected of it. Would I mind if I had a 8 year old and he saw "fuck" on a website/social media? No I wouldn't but some people decided that we should have a specific linguistic moral code, so the capitalists try to walk the path of least resistance on this topic (just complying)
- steponlego 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - warning26 4y ago
    And yet, I'll bet that your version of "THE MEDIA THEY CONTROL" doesn't include whichever publication has politics that you, personally, agree with. How mysterious.
    - 4y ago

gfodor 4y ago

The author asked why you’d choose this over Mastodon - the answer is that the AT protocol is designed to be a much better solve for decentralized social media that avoids the scalability and centralization problems of mastodon. That’s the entire point, it’s weird you would have access to this without understanding the entire motive for its existence.

nicce 4y ago
After getting used to Mastodon’s 10k character limit, I won’t touch a platform with 256 character post size. It enforces polarisation and hate speech.
- Zetice 4y ago
  No, it enforces brevity and distillation of content down to its barest minimum.
  - nicce 4y ago
    Exactly; it means that you need to use strong words and attack in any argument to get user engagement. Everyone loves attention and wants to get their words heard, and this will happen when you have only few words to use.
    - Zetice 4y ago
      I see no problem with this; the goal of non-experts communicating is not to be the most accurate, nor should it be.
      - nicce 4y ago
        The problem is that political combats and campaings have been made on the same platform, and those might decide the future of the country and many people. E.g. Twitter is not for really for general people to provide content, it is mainly for those with large audience already. And they want attention.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

One of the largest complaints about Mastodon is the complicated (yes it can be complicated) sign up process. You have to pick an instance and if that one is full, pick another, then another, etc. How will Bluesky solve that problem?

Ciantic 4y ago
By allowing everyone to register on their app to their own servers? Mastodon is now prioritizing large servers with open registration in joinmastodon.org for this same reason. They re-ordered the servers some weeks ago so that open registration servers come first. I don't think the signup needs to be complicated.
rpgbr 4y ago
Right now it's a nonissue because there's only one server/instance. No idea what will it look like when this changes.

pimlottc 4y ago

What the heck does "mambeous" mean? Ambiguous? Amorphous? Ambitious?

cr3ative 4y ago
No dictionary I've found defines it. I wonder what they were aiming for too.
wmeredith 4y ago
It doesn't mean anything. It's not a word. I think it was supposed to say ambitious or amorphous.
rpgbr 4y ago
Hahahaha, apparently DeepL forged a new word! It's (supposedly) a translation of “mambembe”, pt_BR adjective that means something ordinary, mediocre, half-baked, average (in a bad sense). (Plus, it's sounds amazing, although I acknowledge that even in Portuguese it's an uncommon word.) To avoid (more) confusion, I replaced it with “half-baked”.

savolai 4y ago

Mastodon’s UX with regards to following people on other servers seems to be really broken. Is there a simple ”browse to profile, click ”follow”’ experience on any client? All mastodon clients I have seen involved logging in to the foreign server and/or copy/pasting handles. If this can just solve that it already removes critical friction.

raydev 4y ago
IceCubesApp and Ivory, both on iOS, handle external follows seamlessly.
Ciantic 4y ago
Yes it's weirdly broken, but it seems to be hard problem to solve. Servers aren't connected to each other unless someone follows someone on other server, thus it's a bit hard to build a full graph in one server to browse profiles. Mastodon team should have made own browser extensions a long time ago, now the community is working to make this easier. I use one called StreetPass [1], but it still is a bit barebones, and doesn't yet help with following accounts accross servers. It does make discovering accounts nice. [1]: https://streetpass.social/ https://streetpass.social/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jghn 4y ago
I found that the federation aspect of the fediverse breaks the things I most like about Twitter. Sure, there are advantages to it but they're outweighed in my mind by the disadvantages. What you bring up is a big one. Another big one for me is search. I used Twitter search all the time. For local things like "what're those sirens I hear in my neighborhood", to cultural zeitgeist like "who is this artist performing on SNL", to using it as a quasi-Google.
- camjohnson26 4y ago
  Couldn’t somebody write a simple service that just scrapes profile info for following? Really doubt anyone would care if that aspect is centralized if it’s just a UX improvement. Same with search, although you’ll always have a vocal minority angry that their public posts are being scraped.

rmac 4y ago

How does this article not mention nostr, given that Dorsey also funded nostr (https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr)

rpgbr 4y ago
It does! A couple weeks ago I wrote about Nostr too: https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2023/nostr/ https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2023/nostr/
- rmac 4y ago
  my bad! somehow I missed the mention! Please write on your thoughts on bluesky vs nostr! (no dog in the fight, just interested)
  - rpgbr 4y ago
    Tbh, none of them really attract me right now. They are too clunky and don't have many people to interact with. I'm slightly annoyed by Nostr's proposition and total lack of moderation controls. Even if its developers are well-meaning, I see this as a dangerous, undesirable position to take. I'm really comfortable with Mastodon/ActivityPub. My personal profile is in a public instance[0], and for my Portuguese-written site I'm hosting a Microblog[1]. It's just great. [0] https://hachyderm.io/@ghedin https://hachyderm.io/@ghedin [1] https://social.manualdousuario.net https://social.manualdousuario.net

freewizard 4y ago

Easier account discovery/follow/porting is the surface. The core differentiator of Bluesky/ATP is the ability to have a global view for its network, as compare to Mastodon's limited local view. Things like search engine is not only possible but first class citizen in ATP design. Obviously depending on your attitude towards ad tech, you may like or dislike it. However, if everything still (eventually) follows money as it used to be, and Twitter's 5 billion ad revenue (or more if you believe FB is shrinking too) wants to go elsewhere, ATP is offering a viable solution while Mastodon does not (at least yet).

mzs 4y ago

Does it ask for permission to your contacts? https://bsky.app/support/privacy https://bsky.app/support/privacy FWIW mastodon never asked me.

bnewbold 4y ago
No, the Bluesky app does not ask for your contacts. Somebody else could build an app for Bluesky that did ask, the same as somebody could in theory build an RSS feed reader that asks for contacts.

raydev 4y ago

> ActivityPub has the advantage of being a de facto standard and not being owned by a private company. It should be clear by this point that "being owned by a private company" is not a disadvantage. If the Bluesky team nails the onboarding experience, then Mastodon/ActivityPub will remain a niche service.

nbrempel 4y ago

The article mentions running separate servers to be able to claim your own domain. However, in AT I believe you can simply add a TXT record. There is no need to run a server unless you want to. Also, you can be @example.com if you want. You don’t need to be a user on a server like @me@example.com.