20 ms·
I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
- iLoveOncall 3y agoSo not even 10,000 posts a day. Is it really worth having topics about a barren social network reach the homepage every day?
- debesyla 3y agoHackernews is also a social network - and it seems like this thing works with even less posts per day? You don't need a huge following to have a functioning social group.
- SeanAnderson 3y agoIt's not even fully open to the public yet. I'm waitlisted. 10k post/day seems great for a closed alpha.
- summarity 3y agoPretty good for 50k users (and keep in mind almost half a million downloads that can be converted into users)
- iLoveOncall 3y ago50K posting users. I have an account but didn't post anything, like most people on any social media are lurkers.
- EwanToo 3y agoThey have around 60k registrations, they've stated that in the last 48 hours or so
- dragonwriter 3y agoNo, as of a couple days ago, Bluesky said they had about 50K total users. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/black-tech-twitter-trans-users-marginalized-groups-flock-bluesky-rcna82442 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/black-tech-twitter-trans-users-...
- qzx_pierri 3y ago[flagged]
- gkoberger 3y agoMaybe it's anti-Elon, or maybe it's anti-the-things-Elon-is-doing-to-Twitter. Just because the people who like Elon have joined a cult of personality doesn't mean the people who dislike what he's done to Twitter have done the same. For example, I still think Tesla's are cool cars and Space X is doing exciting things. For me, Twitter has become absolutely unusable. Every person on my FYP and in the replies is someone with 328 followers, crappy opinions and $8/month to burn. I went from loving Twitter for over a decade to finding it utterly devoid of anything interesting anymore. If you happen to like it more now, that's great, keep using it! But a lot of people simply don't get value out of the app anymore.
- sammalloy 3y ago[flagged]
- catiopatio 3y ago[flagged]
- sammalloy 3y ago[flagged]
- catiopatio 3y ago[flagged]
- sammalloy 3y ago[flagged]
- gkoberger 3y agoYes. It's interesting, from a tech perspective, to a lot of people here based on its combination of the decentralized nature of the AT protocol combined with usability that seems to work for people (compared to Mastodon). It's small, but it has a lot of interesting ideas behind the scenes and interesting people using it.
- herval 3y agogood ol' hackernews and its "it's a new startup, is it even worth talking about?" mob
- aurelius83 3y agoI’d love for you to validate the users against the list of verified twitter 1.0 users and see what percentage migrated over.
- navanchauhan 3y agoAnother metric I would be interested in looking is verified skeeters (people with a custom root domain) vs verified Twitter users and separate Twitter Blue subscribers (with < 1 million followers)
- sbarre 3y agoSomeone did post that stat last week (beta users who verified via domain) and if I recall it was under 10%?
- mikece 3y agoThe fact that someone can download all posts on a social network tells you how little usage it has attracted.
- skc 3y agoIt's still in closed Beta and invite only
- XorNot 3y agoWhich broadly describes why things are going okay there. There isn't anything to moderate, there's no spam, there's no fixated person harrassment. There's nothing hard being solved.
- manojlds 3y agoEh, it's in a closed beta.
- waboremo 3y agoEven on large platforms you can (technically) download all posts. Might take some time and you might need to cycle some storage, but it's doable. So I don't really think that's a great metric to observe usage. Ignoring that judging usage based on a still invite only platform is also a little silly.
- capableweb 3y agoWould be interesting to see if your comment has any basis at all by comparing how things looked for Twitter at the same timescale, or Facebook, or any other social media. Just to look at the numbers in isolation is hardly interesting.
- ndriscoll 3y agoYou can download all of the (public) posts and comments on Reddit. It's a ~2TB torrent.
- visarga 3y ago
- jeron 3y agoGlad to know all 5 of my posts have been archived
- olah_1 3y agoIs there such a thing as private posts? or “friends only” posts or something? Or is it all public?
- Hamuko 3y agoAll public. There aren't even DMs. No private accounts either. I think some kind of private communication is on the roadmap.
- demarq 3y agoNext challenge make incremental updates to the archive
- latchkey 3y agoI signed into it and there was a meme about posting pictures of butts. Apparently porn still drives the internet.
- capableweb 3y ago[flagged]
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoThat google leak about AI, part of their reasoning is civitai and stable diffusion. The subtext is “we can’t compete with AI because it’s all porn and thus super popular”.
- ShamelessC 3y agoAre you referring to the blog post from an individual employee? Not really a leak per se. or was there something else that I missed?
- SeanAnderson 3y agoI would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist. It might go poorly, but I'm unwilling to write off weird attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in the wild. I've seen several posts lately that have made me feel like the HN sentiment towards Bluesky is negative. Throwing them under the bus for the domain validation mistake. Hatred at commercialization of a protocol. Questioning why Bluesky would do anything but become a worse Twitter since Jack Dorsey is at the helm. C'mon! At least give it the benefit of doubt while in beta! I, for one, frequently lament how fragmented my IM programs have become. I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind the goal. Do I have concerns that this is another attempt at building a walled garden around something I wish to be open and interoperable? Of course! Do I think it's a net negative on society for someone to be making their attempt? No! Bring on the new tech! I wish I had a more nuanced argument to make my case because I'm sure there will be tons of replies here telling me why my opinion is bad and I'll be unable to refute them. And those responses will likely make very fair points, but oh well! I needed to at least try to throw some optimism about technology into the HackerNews foray.
- brvsft 3y ago[flagged]
- dragonwriter 3y agoYou can just not click on Bluesky links, no one is forcing you to read articles you aren’t interested in.
- brvsft 3y ago[flagged]
- dragonwriter 3y ago> The fact that they even take up visual space is an annoyance Yes, we all have things other HN users are interested in that we aren’t. That’s a consequence of participating in a community, as distinct from a hivemind.
- areoform 3y agoBluesky is absurd in both its small village feel and the breadth of people who post there and you can interact with. It's the same vibe as very early clubhouse. Broke artists next to philanthropists.
- bombcar 3y agoAll invite-only early-access things that get hot are like it; once they go to general availability they go to shit, it seems.
- neltnerb 3y agoIt's so predictable that it's frustrating to see people who should know better falling for it. Of course it's a fresh feel without the trolls. It's not open to all yet, so of course it is. I don't know why they expect it to turn out any differently, it's hard to take this tool seriously. Facebook was fresh once too. It was invite only for elite universities so everyone had roughly the same expectations for where lines were (they were not in acceptable places, but homogeneity helps with that).
- mahathu 3y agoHow about using a tree-like structure to track who invited whom to the platform. Offer a generous yet limited number of invites to users, potentially adjusting this amount based on their positive interactions within the network. Permanently ban accounts that violate the rules, and if the new accounts a user invites keep getting banned (automatically) investigate whether that user is using multiple accounts, which would also be against the rules. I'm sure deciding where to draw the line and clearly defining rules, and then enforcing them is a complex task (same as in public policy or international relations) inherent to any social network, and it is unlikely that an optimal solution exists considering the difference of opinions. However, could this type of rule help mitigate the issues mentioned?
- morkalork 3y agoIt's funny to see people advocate for a classist system of nobility hundreds of years later. Please, tell us more about how you'd like to restrict a social network to those who are, as they say, "well bred".
- amelius 3y agoWhat is Bluesky?
- kyleyeats 3y ago[flagged]
- e4e5 3y agoConsidering there's no explication on bluesky's website, i don't understand why this comment is downvoted
- mullingitover 3y agoSo far it seems to be Mastodon, with some tweaks, and the improvement that while it's federated in theory, right now there's only one server. This addresses the critical flaw people point out with Mastodon, which is that because it requires you to choose a server it's too confusing. The requirement to choose a hosting provider is why email famously never took off.
- snickerbockers 3y ago>the improvement that while it's federated in theory, right now there's only one server has the federation even been implemented? Is it an open protocol? Why on earth should anybody trust them not to go back on their word once they've gotten enough critical mass that nobody wants to leave because that's where their friends are (the so-called "network effect")?
- steveklabnik 3y ago> Is it an open protocol? https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/
- Philadelphia 3y agoEmail started off as something you only got through your ISP. It then turned into something you only got through Google. It’s not really an example of a service where the vast majority of people make an active choice.
- btown 3y agoGiven that Bluesky makes it this easy to download data, it's quite alarming that the graph of who blocks & mutes who is fully public and easy to extract into a database: https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-graph#appbskygraphgetblocks https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-graph#appbskygraphgetb... On Twitter, blocking a toxic user does not notify them - while they can query the block status of one profile at a time, they can never get a full list of people who block them. But it would be trivial to create a Bluesky app view that provides this inverted index. And some people would be inclined to use the list of people who block them as a "target list" of people whose views differ from them, to share with their networks as prospects for targeted harassment that may even cross into real-life violence. (The fact that critics of the infamous Ki*f*ms forum have been swatted - and that I am even now reticent to type the full name - is just the tip of the iceberg of potential dangers here.) I hope that Bluesky comes up with a better mechanism here - it's tough to do in a federated system, but research like https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1577.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1577.pdf may be helpful.
- capableweb 3y agoIt's a tough line to walk. On one hand, if you participate in a system where almost everything is inherently public (the web/internet, since anyone can screenshot anything and publish wherever they want), it's hardly unexpected that information that was once public, can remain public forever. On the other hand, people have some sort of expectation that the data they publicly post online to remain in some sort of semi-private state. Bluesky app might invite only for now, but the underlying protocol and technology makes everything very public, forever, and makes it trivial to cache locally (for good or bad purposes).
- btown 3y agoThere's a vast difference between "public" and "actively surfaced." Indeed, blocking someone on Twitter would not prevent them from finding your public profile in an incognito window and seeing your posts - it would simply prevent your posts from being easily and automatically accessible to them in their feed. In practice, this tends to reduce conflict. My concern with Bluesky is that it makes it very possible for tools to make block information easily and automatically accessible - in fact, it would allow a bad actor to create a service that shows a feed of just content from people who want to block you from seeing it. That's a recipe for disaster.
- bnewbold 3y agosome quick thoughts/notes (I am on the bluesky team, but this isn't an official policy statement): - content on bluesky is public, but we have not set expectations/comms around that well yet, and this dump may be a surprise to some existing accounts. where exactly bluesky falls on the spectrum from "congressional register (immutable)" to "public web" to "public IRC or discord room" to "private signal group" is still being worked out, but probably closest to "public web" - the protocol supports both "deletions" (retaining history), and "purge" (aka "rebase") to remove all not-current content. this isn't exposed via UI yet and accounts have not had the chance to purge old deletions - the federation protocol and unified firehose should make it possible for third parties to maintain a live mirror of the entire corpus. importantly, it will be easy (or at least "easier") to respect intents w/r/t deletions when done this way, compared to dumps - obviously neither "deletion" nor "purge" can perfectly remove content from 3rd party dumps and infra, or from hostile parties. but it does signal user intent clearly, and we expect as a norm that third parties will respect that intent. ADS-B, robots.txt, CC licensing are related to these norms, though all unique. right-to-be-forgotten, archiving, re-use licensing, use in ML training, commercial/non-profit reuse, search indexing, etc, are all on our radar - blobs/images are not included in this corpus - this specific corpus does not (I assume) include our important "label" moderation metadata. at least for our (Bluesky) core moderation decisions, that information will be public - private/group content is not yet part of protocol. eg, no built-in mechanism for DMs or follower-only posts. we will probably do those eventually, but it will be basically a whole separate protocol, not a bolt-on to existing stuff. wildly different privacy/security concerns with non-public content - there are some other cool projects, like https://bsky.jazco.dev/ https://bsky.jazco.dev/, working with the full social graph, pulled via public API
- brundolf 3y agoThanks for weighing in It's disappointing to hear that follower-only/circles (whitelisted viewers) posts are basically incompatible with the current protocol. I'd hoped something could be done where the post content was encrypted in such a way that only specific authenticated users could decrypt it, or something along those lines
- 3y ago
- OJFord 3y agoLast time I saw bsky on HN a maintainer shared a skip-waitlist invitation code ('anyone on HN is probably better behaved than some of the trolls we've dealt with', or something to that effect) - which was unfortunately dead by the time I found it। Any chance of an encore? Or I am on the waitlist: something I don't recall at username dot com।
- capableweb 3y ago-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- hQIMA0WyYxZsfRGeARAA6bV9x72wGv6TT1YQC8RowJ7O3N05DcJ9g3CCw9y9Tdk1 gL99QlURQvdYJImDUmIrXd6pE2MVQPTfQFhh8BSsqjxS/BVQO9I30GgQEzlquUBB uzMvBwJHUPU/ZV/MJpwU4DTVcfaOLGHJNXJtOiHfXiinu9+m+blIRZGJ05pVhfU0 qA00gpIfNpl7rZaBqZoSRG+mXuWkVD6FUEFgrHoBppkGltfnKoPJ4BtUlKURvK+B 4y+nOwdJb41oU4KXluSXLQsn45Af6ob4DiHl/xXw+s0csgHGePWckrdxirmF2Dot uQ3d/iu/FG2Qd9FX/yfkG31RfWERl81c/MMOw1ME8rsXTV0leNDELdzkHwQW9olA 7Xr64dKw3BNALvtUDLMks++u7qADrYJxPvhPKwwQDzlGvqU5xZNjHh8+xSAEr2pt PEXN/Ifk+6Z7qdbhBndwGj+3rxsrG7LheDzQZyImx/qjOx/Jc+MNjQFHRBpRPtHe n3IdbaAfMsY3L2/1q07DAdGSy8EsApb0/le3Lm/u1So7buSOLgnT7edt8tpTpad4 J9Und/3bKWHNQ3j+xdWn/1dg4NBsMfmxUM9rddK23YPUDDCLPfmc+x8ctDJ/SD71 stEDpt69qE96VJ2w+N/bkRUhZPwAZ7z9NjVpwi6vfEwiFVK6u3yXkvbGZinkJl/S YAE8gEnEKtiDu7CtrAL4PBx6m9dsZSYZ/ku0+oIy9EU+oCSv33FrZ92d2huLUxQ0 IzpR0osBxLPOCUdCHkO7KCSUIOpT3zbcxaVMtcJJTsbDnqazRGMiLsD58a6fHR66 Eg== =tmx/ -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
- teddyfrozevelt 3y agoDid you sign an invite code using the key in their bio? That's so neat! I'm not sure if you have more, but I'm also on the waitlist (bluesky@owen.sh) and would love to check it out.
- capableweb 3y agoYes! And no, last one :(
- crossroadsguy 3y agoThat is cool. People get only one invite? Anyway I have added a temp email in my profile. Just in case one lands in my inbox.
- gfodor 3y agoOk. Now someone fine tune llama on this and then you’ll be able to understand how you’ll have a custom social user agent that shields you from toxic people and moderates on your behalf.
- doodlesdev 3y agoWhat are the advantages of ATProto over ActivityPub? I don't get it, if you want to make a decentralized social network why not go with the standardized, working, protocol? What does ATProto offer over ActivityPub?
- Hamuko 3y agoCharacter limits for one thing. "text": { "type": "string", "maxLength": 3000, "maxGraphemes": 300 } https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-feed#appbskyfeedpost https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-feed#appbskyfeedpost
- detaro 3y agoHow is that a benefit over ActivityPub? Hard-coding a post size limit in the protocol seems like a negative thing to me?
- citruscomputing 3y agoThe mastodon server I use has a max length of 5k characters, so not really.
- Hamuko 3y agoThat's not part of the ActivityPub protocol.
- ZacnyLos 3y agoApparently Mastodon's decentralisation works better.
- detaro 3y agoBluesky doesn't have any yet, so that's kind of obvious. How bluesky fares once it gets there remains to be seen.
- remram 3y agoThe download link is dead. Maybe someone should put this on BitTorrent/IPFS/... and share a magnet here?
- absentmoon 3y agoI assume the bandwidth was too costly. It seems to be archived on Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20230509042606/https://worthdoingbadly.com/bsky/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230509042606/https://worthdoin...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- snowoutside 3y agoIt's very interesting they are using camelCase for their Postgres column names instead of snake_case. I like it. Is that something folks are doing? Can it be done without "doubleQuoting" all of the response column names or without using an ORM?
- ed25519FUUU 3y agoProbably using Java or similar so the columns are easier to serialize.
- steveklabnik 3y agoThey're using TypeScript.
- ShamelessC 3y agoThat’s very interesting? Not trying to be rude, just seems very mundane to me.
- kbumsik 3y agoSlightly off topic, but it seems that "cid" for identifier along with URI. How cid is generated? Is it completely random?
- progval 3y agoit's a hash: https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc
- penguin_booze 3y agoHm, I thought 'order by' clause took a column name, not a table sub-expression.
- 8organicbits 3y agoThat's so much smaller than I expected. Mastodon stats claim 1.1B posts [1]. Both are growing fast, but I'm surprised by that gap. [1] https://the-federation.info/ https://the-federation.info/
- input_sh 3y agoWhy are you surprised by that? Mastodon is older, a lot more ironed out (in its own quirky ways), actually open to the public, and bot-friendly. Of course it's orders of magnitude more popular at this point in time. That said, even though I'm rooting for Mastodon, I would not be shocked if Bluesky catches up very quickly. In any case, any of the two is an improvement over a locked down and thoroughly broken Twitter.
- glenstein 3y agoRight, Blue sky is invite only, and has just started out. And like you, I strongly prefer Mastodon, but if Blue sky helps organize us into a post Twitter world so much the better.
- capableweb 3y agoBluesky just existed for a short while so far, it's to be expected. What would be more interesting would be to compare Mastodon with bluesky when Mastodon was as old as bluesky is now. Is this something someone can figure out?
- parasti 3y agoTwitter was not going up in flames when Mastodon came out, so that wouldn't make for a fair comparison.
- capableweb 3y agoThe two initial waves of migrations from Twitter to Mastodon absolutely happened when "shit it the fan" in the Twitter world, just like now with Bluesky. And if that's not a fair comparison, and neither is comparing them straight up by data right now, how could be fairly compare them then?
- pyaamb 3y agoPrediction: If Bluesky gains any sort of traction, Elon will kill it.
- capableweb 3y agoQuestion: How exactly could Elon kill a open protocol?
- Nasreddin_Hodja 3y agoAdding support of other open protocol to Twitter, ActivityPub for example.
- chrsw 3y agoQRD on the foundation of all this? Bluesky is a company that built a social media network on top of their proprietary "@" (at) protocol?
- sbarre 3y agoAT Protocol is open source, so not proprietary. My understanding is that Bluesky as a company is building a client experience, and funding the development of the protocol, but the long term vision is for open source and federation, so no central controlling entity. In fact there are already several other open source competing clients that can be used with the private beta, and Bluesky (currently) has no issue with this.
- steveklabnik 3y agoBlueSky itself is already open source and on GitHub. Paul was doing a live stream of himself working on it today, even.
- 0xDEF 3y agoOne of the main reasons I'm still on twitter is because of how you can mute certain topics/words and accounts. Extensively using that has turned twitter into a source of learning and knowledge for me. I have also used uBlock to block the trending sidebar.
- aszantu 3y agoWould like to get invited