4 ms·

Ask HN: Will you become active on BlueSky?

1 points by amrrs 4y ago

With the recent Twitter drama, seems a lot of people are joining BlueSky. But any new social media at this age seems like a far fetched idea. Would you be active on BlueSky?

smoldesu 4y ago
Nope. I still don't really like Twitter's culture, using Mastodon in conjunction with RSS feels like everything I need. You might see me on there if they add ActivityPub support though!
rektide 4y ago
Who knows. It depends on whether the tech has standards & protocols that seem like it will have long term sticking power, & be something we can grow & shape & nurture forward. There's a lot of very smart developers who seem to have gotten a lot of license to make new protocols & systems that made sense to them, and so, yeah, I'm excited to see what happens. But there's a lot of very promising new personal-scale communication systems. ActivityPub, Nostr, and now @ are all promising protocols. Anything could happen. But I do expect to be exploring BlueSky for at least a while.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I wonder if everyone can agree that "working together" should be a common goal. All of these protocols are noble efforts. What I wish Dorsey had done though is establish a council of stakeholders to build a sort of "lingua franca" for them. It's obviously wishful thinking, but I think a lot of people are largely making the same thing. If we all want to be able to talk to everyone else, it doesn't make sense to treat this as a competitive arena. We'll just have to see where things go. My guess is that people will converge back on an RSS-style standard that prioritizes openness, but it's anyone's call. We've settled on questionable standards before, we may do it again...
  - brianjking 4y ago
    Yeah, would be real nice to see systems work together. But I think that's unlikely.
  - rektide 4y ago
    I've changed views a lot. I absolutely intend to spend a significant fraction of my life working on interoperability & interoperation, in trying to find & capture the essences that are the same. I identify a lot with the value system you're presenting. I'd felt a bit morose originally that BlueSky/@ had made their own fresh take. What's charged is my mindset. I'm no longer coming with such a view of scarcity. Of insisting we work together. You know who gets everyone in a big meeting room & then decides what to do & builds that architecture out? Corporations. In contrast, I think the organic growth model is a huge win here. We can cover more ground, better assay where the rich & nutritious veins are, better explore the many ecosystems of possibilities with an organic model. It's all still so early, we're so young. ActivityPub, Nostr, BlueSky/@.... they barely have antecedents and none are proven. We are in free-form mode, none of us know what to do yet. You mention RSS, but that's a read-only medium. That attempts to explore the bounds of that didn't get that far: Google Buzz, the Salmon Protocol. OpenSocial. They weren't necessarily bad techs but we never really figured it out, democratized it, pulled it off. We have multiple different explorers now, and I like it. The ability to keep making useful growth, is, I think, what counts here. ActivityPub has shown some decent flexibility in going across-mediums, but we don't have a ton of extensions, a ton of new modes for it (I think Akkoma, an Elixer-based fork of Pleroma is the most boundary-pushing, and reaction-emoji is their main defining claim to fame). BlueSky is brand new and we have no idea how far it'll go, but it also has a lot of really neat compelling web-oriented ideas in it's core, of signed DIDs that let it be web without having to rely on http:// http:// and dns:// and give us self-sovereignty. Nostr I think is incredibly fantastically compelling, for it's hackability, and what a huge roster of incredibly smart & sharp "Nostr Implementation Possibilities," (https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips). What a beautiful phrase that captures so much essence of where we are: finding possibilities. Right now, we need to emerge a shit ton of complexity. We need really wild off the wall stuff. We need lots of ideas & possibilities. We need growth & exploring bounds. Once we have some actual experience building these things & running them as smaller scale individual/microcollective operators & peers, I think then we can focus a lot more on narrowing down & coming together & deciding where and how to meet.
brianjking 4y ago
Yes, if I can get an account invite.
mindcrime 4y ago
Probably not. I have Mastodon and XMPP already. And I still use Twitter a bit as well. It's not clear that BlueSky adds anything useful for me.
retrocryptid 4y ago
no

1 points by amrrs 4y ago

With the recent Twitter drama, seems a lot of people are joining BlueSky. But any new social media at this age seems like a far fetched idea. Would you be active on BlueSky?

smoldesu 4y ago

Nope. I still don't really like Twitter's culture, using Mastodon in conjunction with RSS feels like everything I need. You might see me on there if they add ActivityPub support though!

rektide 4y ago

Who knows. It depends on whether the tech has standards & protocols that seem like it will have long term sticking power, & be something we can grow & shape & nurture forward. There's a lot of very smart developers who seem to have gotten a lot of license to make new protocols & systems that made sense to them, and so, yeah, I'm excited to see what happens. But there's a lot of very promising new personal-scale communication systems. ActivityPub, Nostr, and now @ are all promising protocols. Anything could happen. But I do expect to be exploring BlueSky for at least a while.

smoldesu 4y ago
I wonder if everyone can agree that "working together" should be a common goal. All of these protocols are noble efforts. What I wish Dorsey had done though is establish a council of stakeholders to build a sort of "lingua franca" for them. It's obviously wishful thinking, but I think a lot of people are largely making the same thing. If we all want to be able to talk to everyone else, it doesn't make sense to treat this as a competitive arena. We'll just have to see where things go. My guess is that people will converge back on an RSS-style standard that prioritizes openness, but it's anyone's call. We've settled on questionable standards before, we may do it again...
- brianjking 4y ago
  Yeah, would be real nice to see systems work together. But I think that's unlikely.
- rektide 4y ago
  I've changed views a lot. I absolutely intend to spend a significant fraction of my life working on interoperability & interoperation, in trying to find & capture the essences that are the same. I identify a lot with the value system you're presenting. I'd felt a bit morose originally that BlueSky/@ had made their own fresh take. What's charged is my mindset. I'm no longer coming with such a view of scarcity. Of insisting we work together. You know who gets everyone in a big meeting room & then decides what to do & builds that architecture out? Corporations. In contrast, I think the organic growth model is a huge win here. We can cover more ground, better assay where the rich & nutritious veins are, better explore the many ecosystems of possibilities with an organic model. It's all still so early, we're so young. ActivityPub, Nostr, BlueSky/@.... they barely have antecedents and none are proven. We are in free-form mode, none of us know what to do yet. You mention RSS, but that's a read-only medium. That attempts to explore the bounds of that didn't get that far: Google Buzz, the Salmon Protocol. OpenSocial. They weren't necessarily bad techs but we never really figured it out, democratized it, pulled it off. We have multiple different explorers now, and I like it. The ability to keep making useful growth, is, I think, what counts here. ActivityPub has shown some decent flexibility in going across-mediums, but we don't have a ton of extensions, a ton of new modes for it (I think Akkoma, an Elixer-based fork of Pleroma is the most boundary-pushing, and reaction-emoji is their main defining claim to fame). BlueSky is brand new and we have no idea how far it'll go, but it also has a lot of really neat compelling web-oriented ideas in it's core, of signed DIDs that let it be web without having to rely on http:// http:// and dns:// and give us self-sovereignty. Nostr I think is incredibly fantastically compelling, for it's hackability, and what a huge roster of incredibly smart & sharp "Nostr Implementation Possibilities," (https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips). What a beautiful phrase that captures so much essence of where we are: finding possibilities. Right now, we need to emerge a shit ton of complexity. We need really wild off the wall stuff. We need lots of ideas & possibilities. We need growth & exploring bounds. Once we have some actual experience building these things & running them as smaller scale individual/microcollective operators & peers, I think then we can focus a lot more on narrowing down & coming together & deciding where and how to meet.

brianjking 4y ago

Yes, if I can get an account invite.

mindcrime 4y ago

Probably not. I have Mastodon and XMPP already. And I still use Twitter a bit as well. It's not clear that BlueSky adds anything useful for me.

retrocryptid 4y ago