8 ms·

I 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 tech

I 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 ago
  You 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.
      - brvsft 3y ago
        Most links on HN don't interest me, and they don't bother me either, but the shilling for Bluesky has been quite apparent lately. If anything, their presence is more indicative of a hivemind than my eagerness for them to go away. Your proposal that I must want every link on HN to be something I am interested in is obviously a bad faith argument. Later.
        nickthegreek 3y ago
        I think the uptick of blue sky posts is directly tied to a bunch of techies/journos getting their invites and are excited for a possible Twitter alternative. But I’ve also seen articles talk about the issues with bluesky as well (hell threads, bunch of butts, public block lists, s3 domain thing). Exciting times.
      - bmacho 3y ago
        > That’s a consequence of participating in a community, as distinct from a hivemind. Then surely you upvoted 'brvsft' for being a good member and asking the community to not to share more Bluesky content?
    - astrange 3y ago
      This didn't happen, but more importantly Twitter was far more proactive about resisting law enforcement requests for private info than other social media companies, which is the actual thing to be worried about. Current Twitter ownership is allowing India's government to censor things worldwide and is obviously compromised in China as well.
    - orphea 3y ago
      You can hide posts you don't want to see. Problem solved.
agentofoblivion 3y ago
[flagged]
tbalsam 3y ago
I think this is a good take that I don't need to add much to, to be honest. Maybe this doesn't add as much to the discussion as vehement agreement or disagreement might to the curious HN reader, but I do really personally appreciate it. <3 :)
sneak 3y ago
People seem to be generally anti-social-media and, furthermore, anti-social-media-magnate. I'm a fan of publishing. I think any-to-any publishing is one of the most important applications of the internet.
- barnabee 3y ago
  Agreed. The most important property of any-to-any publishing is not to (algorithmically or otherwise) turn any-to-any into some-to-many by creating celebrities and boosting the same content to everyone. I think this is something TikTok (for all their issues) probably got more right than others. There’s a lot further to go before we perfect this, but Nostr, Bluesky, et al. are doing at least something right.
  - sneak 3y ago
    People prefer to receive information that other people get (ie from popular people and large outlets), so algorithmic prioritization of existing popular brands/people is literally just giving (most) readers what they want. Sites that do this will outcompete sites that do not. Decentralized systems do provide an escape hatch, however, so that's good and useful for the minority of users that seek out niches or deep cuts.
    - barnabee 3y ago
      I don’t know if that’s true but it seems like TikTok’s success is at least partially attributable to it not being?
      - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
        It's not as if TikTok doesn't have influencers and hasn't created a bunch of celebrities.
capableweb 3y ago
> 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. One thing regarding bluesky that is often overlooked, and is related to XMPP (Jabber), is that Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP is one of three board members, the others being Jack of Twitter fame and Jay Graber who is the CEO. Hopefully, the combined experience of running a platform the founder himself consider a failure with the experience of inventing a open protocol still being used today, can create something cool. But it's way too early to tell, as you say. One can only stand by and see where they end up. They certainly have interesting ideas, but the crux is always in the implementation.
RheingoldRiver 3y ago
> 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. I remember writing a tutorial on how to connect your League of Legends chat of all things to Pidgin, once upon a time. I doubt it still works, Riot's completely remade their client since then....but, yeah, those days were certainly nice.
grimgrin 3y ago
I'm happy it exists too. By far my favorite discussion about it was Oxide's last podcast: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/blue-skies-over-mastodon https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/blue-skies-... Emily Kisane was on the ep, following their piece that blew up https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon > In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Erin Kissane and long-time acquaintances of the show Tim Bray and Steve Klabnik.
wnevets 3y ago
> I 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. Isn't it just a variation of mastodon?
- detaro 3y ago
  no.
  - wnevets 3y ago
    Then what is the biggest difference between the two besides the name of the protocol?
    - johnny22 3y ago
      the design of the protocol :)
      - wnevets 3y ago
        And that design lead to what difference?
        admax88qqq 3y ago
        Biggest difference that I noticed is in Bkueaky you identity is not tied to the site you signed up at. Mastodon has a huge flaw in that your identity is not stable. Like email your identity is tied to your provider, and if you change providers you have to change your identity, and all your contacts have to update their addresses boom so to speak. In Bluesky your identity is stable, with some caveats. It's easy to "bring your own domain" without having to host your own service provider.
        wnevets 3y ago
        So its mastodon with better identity management?
jug 3y ago
I'm also trying to stay positive. In that spirit, I really enjoy: 1. The very good documentation this early in the project! This is not common. 2. The very rapid response developer team that does it live! Once the combination of surprisingly rapid membership growth + no blocks blew up and it became an urgent moderation feature, they had blocks within weeks despite the technically challenging task due to the kind of federated protocol and distributing blocklists. You can tell they have seasoned developers on the team. This is not just any kind of gimmick network trying to cash grab on Twitter exodus like I feel Hive Social was. It is an actual attempt at something better than Mastodon that has a fun, social experience with good onboarding and solving account migration headaches in mind. 3. The rare service disruptions despite the developers having their plates full and commonly introducing updates to the service. This speaks loudly about software architecture skills and being humble to risk management with good software hygiene. This again is not something that just happens but takes effort, experience and intent. 4. The exciting model of DNS approval which I still like. It's bloody fantastic to self-verify in a way that actually makes sense, and it feels very "World Wide Web" in a Tim Berners-Lee way. It uses pillars of the modern Internet in a way to strengthen a service and promises verification at scale. It can do company-wide verifications (domain.tld) as well as contributor-specific ones (username.team.company.tld). So, I dearly hope any misuse can be countered. 5. I worry they are overreaching with the AT protocol and federation but there is the "Shooting for the stars and aiming for the moon" saying here. I can only wish them the best and if I refer to the points above, the developer team seems surprisingly capable and full of actual intent here.
- boringg 3y ago
  I don't want to sound cynical but all the things you describe are mostly early stage nimble startups with goos teams. As they grow quality erodes.
  - nr2x 3y ago
    Email still works, spam and all.
- chefandy 3y ago
  I really like your take and the one to which it responds. Mastodon is super neat and I'd love to see a broadly appealing open-source, non-commercial, decentralized social media network become dominant. However, the sharp decline in active users since the Twitter exodus supports what I've been saying for years: it is simply too much technical resistance for general social media audiences. I find it annoying and I used to enjoy dial-up BBSs. It being such a centralized organization definitely gives me "oh boy, here we go again" feels but it's not like it's not like typical users are going to choose anything better. Eschewing this is the essence of the perfect killing the good.
jordanreger 3y ago
+1 this. I'm very much hoping they'll stick to the protocol because it seems very well thought out and designed as a social protocol. I see this as a Deno situation where the runtime is free and open and will always be that way, but they build products upon it. That way everyone benefits from a good thing.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
snickerbockers 3y ago
TBH I haven't paid much attention to it, but as somebody who was already using Mastodon as their primary social network for years before Musk took over, I'm not sure I understand what niche BlueSky is even supposed to fill that ActivityPub/Fediverse doesn't already fill. It just seems like a bunch of guys who got ousted from their jobs trying to invent a new commercial social network. And one of the things that needs to be emphasized that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that twitter was already terrible a *long* time before Musk bought it. Jack and his cronies aren't actually any better than Musk is, they're just smart enough not to make an ass of themselves in front of the entire world. I don't trust them.
- gfodor 3y ago
  Mastodon is filling a niche, because it has to. Bluesky is designed to one day swallow Twitter.
- barnabee 3y ago
  This tells me that you don’t actually want what Twitter is (was?) good at. Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me. It’s a different type of community/service, one that doesn’t have much value for me. (Not to say it’s bad! I just don’t care for it, it doesn’t do something I want.) Equally, Twitter wasn’t (and mostly still isn’t) terrible for everyone. Everyone gets to choose what it is! I am particular about who I follow, I unfollow quickly, and I care not for celebrities and people’s “personal brand”. Twitter is an incredible resource, if you want it to be. That said, it could clearly be better, and any replacement that prevents a single entity controlling everyone’s algorithmic feed or deciding who can post or what they can say is worth exploring.
  - Nasreddin_Hodja 3y ago
    > Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me. Fediverse/ActivityPub is not just Mastodon.
  - snickerbockers 3y ago
    No, i understand what Twitter is. I was using it as far back as 2009. I have a problem with recent pre-musk changes, such as putting posts from people you dont follow and often dont agree with into your feed to make people argue. If you don't post iften enough, several times a day they will even send you notifications for posts that don't involve you and don't even come from people you follow. And then there's Twitter turning itself into the arbiter of truth. Users were having blue checks revoked as a punitive measure, which means that it's not really about "verifying" somebody, it's just a stupid status symbol. They have an AI that will automatically ban you on a whim if you talk about certain subjects; i was permanently banned for over a month for making a joke at the expense of anti-vaxxers before amoderator finally reviewed my case and removed the infraction from my account. Their role in covering up the hunter Biden laptop leak is also disturbing. I don't even think there was anything noteworthy in the leak, but Twitter censoring something that might be embarrassing for a politician under the guise of combatting misinformation is a scandal unto itself. These are all things that happened before Elon musk announced he was buying Twitter. It is absolutely a terrible, abusive platform and i cannot fathom why anybody would trust Jack Dorsey to run another social network.
NetOpWibby 3y ago
Positivity…about Bluesky…on HN?! Incredible. If nothing else, Bluesky is a breath of fresh air. I’ve found some overlap of people trashing Bluesky to then asking for an invite LOL.
stjohnswarts 3y ago
I lot of people hate themselves and the world and complain about everything. I wouldn't worry too much about what the HN unimind thinks about something.
realitysballs 3y ago
Did you read any content of top posts shown in the article ? …it is quite toxic stuff. Seems like foreshadow . Hate to kill optimism though.
mushbino 3y ago
A worse Twitter? The amount of blatant racism, bigotry, and calls for violence have exploded in the past couple of months. These people all buy blue checks so they get amplified. It's insane. My bluesky invite cannot come soon enough.
- nonameking2026 3y ago
  I haven’t seen this… https://youtu.be/g1na0OFm89k https://youtu.be/g1na0OFm89k
- 0xy 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    > I presume you would call IQ statistics "racism" Putting aside the value of IQ figures, no, the figures themselves are not racist. How someone uses them, of course, can be.
    - 0xy 3y ago
      Given IQ statistics throw a pretty big spanner in the works of white supremacists by showing them that Ashkenazi Jews are the top of the average list, it's pretty hard to see how they're racist.
      - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
        I'm glad you agree!
  - afguoibiobio 3y ago
    >Last time Jack Dorsey was in charge of Twitter, they did essentially nothing about CSAM. I am going to assume you have no evidence Twitter's new management is more active in combating child porn. You can, I'm sure, find evidence of them claiming they're taking a stand, but what they've actually done is gut the safety and moderation teams. The rise of hateful speech, on the other hand, is quite clear. We have seen a massive, sustained uptick in racist posts since the site was taken over. We see an increase in accounts associated with terrorists organizations like ISIS, many of them "verified" and impersonating famous people. We have seen an increase in postings from QAnon followers, many with verified accounts. We have seen and measured increases in violent speech across the board. I would classify all these things as "actual terrible stuff", as would any decent person. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-speech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s... Twitter is every bit as censored as it ever has been. It regularly bans people for criticizing Twitter policy; blocks, throttles, and downranks competitors; downranks left-wing organizations and news sources; and (pathetically) requires Felon's posts to always be ranked highly. Twitter is still censored, just by a manchild dictator rather than the hard work of fallible people. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-free-speech-matt-taibbi-substack/673698/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-... >I presume you would call IQ statistics "racism" Not necessarily, but most likely. I have never met a person in the wild who wanted to talk about IQ statistics without using them as a pseudo-scientific fig leaf to justify genocide. I've been on the Internet; I've played this game. And, let me guess, next you'll say there's no way such you're racist because these statistics show Asian and Jewish people have higher IQ than white people.
pabs3 3y ago
Pidgin still interfaces with everything, including walled gardens like Facebook :) https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://pidgin.im/plugins/
- SeanAnderson 3y ago
  Holy moly, you just made my day. I will have to give it a shot. I thought that once all the walled gardens developed their own protocols that it was dead in the water!
  - pabs3 3y ago
    All the walled gardens supported in the old days of Pidgin were reverse engineered, same goes for the modern walled gardens. The tools for reverse engineering of protocols (like Wireshark) have only gotten better since then.
  - pabs3 3y ago
    Please note that Pidgin is still GTK2 but there is a GTK4 version in the works that has a more modern interface. I think they welcome donations to make that go more quickly.
    - account42 3y ago
      Where can we donate to keep the GTK2 interface as long as possible?
      - pabs3 3y ago
        GTK2 itself is dead, so you would need to start with a fork of that. For Pidgin, this appears to be the donate page: https://imfreedom.org/donate/ https://imfreedom.org/donate/
danjac 3y ago
If this were just a fun side project, great, no problem, let's give people the benefit of the doubt. However we have seen the harms of social media in all aspects from the self esteem of teenage girls to harassment to financial scams to stochastic terrorism. This isn't 2007 any more, anyone entering the social media arena in 2023 with all we know today has to be prepared for skepticism, scrutiny and criticism, whether they are closed source, open source, protocol based or fully commercial.
mort96 3y ago
I don't understand why they wouldn't implement ActivityPub-federation. Instead of strengthening the best federated social network, they chose to undermine it. Why?
- joelg 3y ago
  on bluesky (sorry) the devs have been super active and responsive and eager to explain their approach. they have talked about this specific choice at length - that after an extensive ecosystem review and lots of thought, it seemed like a different architecture had a better chance of working at scale. I hope they find the time to explain this more publicly but it’s definitely a decision they didn’t make lightly. More generally, I have a ton of respect for the standardization process and for the amount of (mostly volunteer!) engineering over the years that had gone into fediverse, but it’s been so long and growth has been so slow that I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a new project to try something different.
floor_ 3y ago
Better to be critical of a product in beta than have toxic positivity about it so things can be fixed.
tsuujin 3y ago
I’m excited for blue sky just because I’m excited to see movement in real alternatives to the couple of major social players. I also wish I could actually get an invite to BS. I’ve been waiting a long time and they seem unlikely to actually hand it out at this point.
tiffanyg 3y ago
Lol, this is HN. Comments are often incredibly negative, and frequently enough - wrong or not quite right, yet arrogant &/ opinionated etc. Others taught me long ago to try to keep something of a 'critical eye' turned on whenever I'm reading news etc. I try not to judge simply for the sake of judging, nor let past impressions completely overwhelm info right in front of me, but having some sort of basic impression / expectation of people, journals, newspapers, websites, etc. is helpful in avoiding some time wastage and filling my mind up with (more) utter nonsense. I end up disagreeing with / doubting many comments on HN, yet still get a LOT out of reading even those comments - just in the sense of sort of the 'zeitgeist' and what sorts of BS I'm likely to come upon elsewhere. ... IMAO (in my arrogant opinion)

brvsft 3y ago

[flagged]

dragonwriter 3y ago
You 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.
    - brvsft 3y ago
      Most links on HN don't interest me, and they don't bother me either, but the shilling for Bluesky has been quite apparent lately. If anything, their presence is more indicative of a hivemind than my eagerness for them to go away. Your proposal that I must want every link on HN to be something I am interested in is obviously a bad faith argument. Later.
      - nickthegreek 3y ago
        I think the uptick of blue sky posts is directly tied to a bunch of techies/journos getting their invites and are excited for a possible Twitter alternative. But I’ve also seen articles talk about the issues with bluesky as well (hell threads, bunch of butts, public block lists, s3 domain thing). Exciting times.
    - bmacho 3y ago
      > That’s a consequence of participating in a community, as distinct from a hivemind. Then surely you upvoted 'brvsft' for being a good member and asking the community to not to share more Bluesky content?
  - astrange 3y ago
    This didn't happen, but more importantly Twitter was far more proactive about resisting law enforcement requests for private info than other social media companies, which is the actual thing to be worried about. Current Twitter ownership is allowing India's government to censor things worldwide and is obviously compromised in China as well.
  - orphea 3y ago
    You can hide posts you don't want to see. Problem solved.

agentofoblivion 3y ago

[flagged]

tbalsam 3y ago

I think this is a good take that I don't need to add much to, to be honest. Maybe this doesn't add as much to the discussion as vehement agreement or disagreement might to the curious HN reader, but I do really personally appreciate it. <3 :)

sneak 3y ago

People seem to be generally anti-social-media and, furthermore, anti-social-media-magnate. I'm a fan of publishing. I think any-to-any publishing is one of the most important applications of the internet.

barnabee 3y ago
Agreed. The most important property of any-to-any publishing is not to (algorithmically or otherwise) turn any-to-any into some-to-many by creating celebrities and boosting the same content to everyone. I think this is something TikTok (for all their issues) probably got more right than others. There’s a lot further to go before we perfect this, but Nostr, Bluesky, et al. are doing at least something right.
- sneak 3y ago
  People prefer to receive information that other people get (ie from popular people and large outlets), so algorithmic prioritization of existing popular brands/people is literally just giving (most) readers what they want. Sites that do this will outcompete sites that do not. Decentralized systems do provide an escape hatch, however, so that's good and useful for the minority of users that seek out niches or deep cuts.
  - barnabee 3y ago
    I don’t know if that’s true but it seems like TikTok’s success is at least partially attributable to it not being?
    - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
      It's not as if TikTok doesn't have influencers and hasn't created a bunch of celebrities.

capableweb 3y ago

> 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. One thing regarding bluesky that is often overlooked, and is related to XMPP (Jabber), is that Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP is one of three board members, the others being Jack of Twitter fame and Jay Graber who is the CEO. Hopefully, the combined experience of running a platform the founder himself consider a failure with the experience of inventing a open protocol still being used today, can create something cool. But it's way too early to tell, as you say. One can only stand by and see where they end up. They certainly have interesting ideas, but the crux is always in the implementation.

RheingoldRiver 3y ago

> 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. I remember writing a tutorial on how to connect your League of Legends chat of all things to Pidgin, once upon a time. I doubt it still works, Riot's completely remade their client since then....but, yeah, those days were certainly nice.

grimgrin 3y ago

I'm happy it exists too. By far my favorite discussion about it was Oxide's last podcast: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/blue-skies-over-mastodon https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/blue-skies-... Emily Kisane was on the ep, following their piece that blew up https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon > In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Erin Kissane and long-time acquaintances of the show Tim Bray and Steve Klabnik.

wnevets 3y ago

> I 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. Isn't it just a variation of mastodon?

detaro 3y ago
no.
- wnevets 3y ago
  Then what is the biggest difference between the two besides the name of the protocol?
  - johnny22 3y ago
    the design of the protocol :)
    - wnevets 3y ago
      And that design lead to what difference?
      - admax88qqq 3y ago
        Biggest difference that I noticed is in Bkueaky you identity is not tied to the site you signed up at. Mastodon has a huge flaw in that your identity is not stable. Like email your identity is tied to your provider, and if you change providers you have to change your identity, and all your contacts have to update their addresses boom so to speak. In Bluesky your identity is stable, with some caveats. It's easy to "bring your own domain" without having to host your own service provider.
        wnevets 3y ago
        So its mastodon with better identity management?

jug 3y ago

I'm also trying to stay positive. In that spirit, I really enjoy: 1. The very good documentation this early in the project! This is not common. 2. The very rapid response developer team that does it live! Once the combination of surprisingly rapid membership growth + no blocks blew up and it became an urgent moderation feature, they had blocks within weeks despite the technically challenging task due to the kind of federated protocol and distributing blocklists. You can tell they have seasoned developers on the team. This is not just any kind of gimmick network trying to cash grab on Twitter exodus like I feel Hive Social was. It is an actual attempt at something better than Mastodon that has a fun, social experience with good onboarding and solving account migration headaches in mind. 3. The rare service disruptions despite the developers having their plates full and commonly introducing updates to the service. This speaks loudly about software architecture skills and being humble to risk management with good software hygiene. This again is not something that just happens but takes effort, experience and intent. 4. The exciting model of DNS approval which I still like. It's bloody fantastic to self-verify in a way that actually makes sense, and it feels very "World Wide Web" in a Tim Berners-Lee way. It uses pillars of the modern Internet in a way to strengthen a service and promises verification at scale. It can do company-wide verifications (domain.tld) as well as contributor-specific ones (username.team.company.tld). So, I dearly hope any misuse can be countered. 5. I worry they are overreaching with the AT protocol and federation but there is the "Shooting for the stars and aiming for the moon" saying here. I can only wish them the best and if I refer to the points above, the developer team seems surprisingly capable and full of actual intent here.

boringg 3y ago
I don't want to sound cynical but all the things you describe are mostly early stage nimble startups with goos teams. As they grow quality erodes.
- nr2x 3y ago
  Email still works, spam and all.
chefandy 3y ago
I really like your take and the one to which it responds. Mastodon is super neat and I'd love to see a broadly appealing open-source, non-commercial, decentralized social media network become dominant. However, the sharp decline in active users since the Twitter exodus supports what I've been saying for years: it is simply too much technical resistance for general social media audiences. I find it annoying and I used to enjoy dial-up BBSs. It being such a centralized organization definitely gives me "oh boy, here we go again" feels but it's not like it's not like typical users are going to choose anything better. Eschewing this is the essence of the perfect killing the good.

jordanreger 3y ago

+1 this. I'm very much hoping they'll stick to the protocol because it seems very well thought out and designed as a social protocol. I see this as a Deno situation where the runtime is free and open and will always be that way, but they build products upon it. That way everyone benefits from a good thing.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

snickerbockers 3y ago

TBH I haven't paid much attention to it, but as somebody who was already using Mastodon as their primary social network for years before Musk took over, I'm not sure I understand what niche BlueSky is even supposed to fill that ActivityPub/Fediverse doesn't already fill. It just seems like a bunch of guys who got ousted from their jobs trying to invent a new commercial social network. And one of the things that needs to be emphasized that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that twitter was already terrible a *long* time before Musk bought it. Jack and his cronies aren't actually any better than Musk is, they're just smart enough not to make an ass of themselves in front of the entire world. I don't trust them.

gfodor 3y ago
Mastodon is filling a niche, because it has to. Bluesky is designed to one day swallow Twitter.
barnabee 3y ago
This tells me that you don’t actually want what Twitter is (was?) good at. Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me. It’s a different type of community/service, one that doesn’t have much value for me. (Not to say it’s bad! I just don’t care for it, it doesn’t do something I want.) Equally, Twitter wasn’t (and mostly still isn’t) terrible for everyone. Everyone gets to choose what it is! I am particular about who I follow, I unfollow quickly, and I care not for celebrities and people’s “personal brand”. Twitter is an incredible resource, if you want it to be. That said, it could clearly be better, and any replacement that prevents a single entity controlling everyone’s algorithmic feed or deciding who can post or what they can say is worth exploring.
- Nasreddin_Hodja 3y ago
  > Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me. Fediverse/ActivityPub is not just Mastodon.
- snickerbockers 3y ago
  No, i understand what Twitter is. I was using it as far back as 2009. I have a problem with recent pre-musk changes, such as putting posts from people you dont follow and often dont agree with into your feed to make people argue. If you don't post iften enough, several times a day they will even send you notifications for posts that don't involve you and don't even come from people you follow. And then there's Twitter turning itself into the arbiter of truth. Users were having blue checks revoked as a punitive measure, which means that it's not really about "verifying" somebody, it's just a stupid status symbol. They have an AI that will automatically ban you on a whim if you talk about certain subjects; i was permanently banned for over a month for making a joke at the expense of anti-vaxxers before amoderator finally reviewed my case and removed the infraction from my account. Their role in covering up the hunter Biden laptop leak is also disturbing. I don't even think there was anything noteworthy in the leak, but Twitter censoring something that might be embarrassing for a politician under the guise of combatting misinformation is a scandal unto itself. These are all things that happened before Elon musk announced he was buying Twitter. It is absolutely a terrible, abusive platform and i cannot fathom why anybody would trust Jack Dorsey to run another social network.

NetOpWibby 3y ago

Positivity…about Bluesky…on HN?! Incredible. If nothing else, Bluesky is a breath of fresh air. I’ve found some overlap of people trashing Bluesky to then asking for an invite LOL.

stjohnswarts 3y ago

I lot of people hate themselves and the world and complain about everything. I wouldn't worry too much about what the HN unimind thinks about something.

realitysballs 3y ago

Did you read any content of top posts shown in the article ? …it is quite toxic stuff. Seems like foreshadow . Hate to kill optimism though.

mushbino 3y ago

A worse Twitter? The amount of blatant racism, bigotry, and calls for violence have exploded in the past couple of months. These people all buy blue checks so they get amplified. It's insane. My bluesky invite cannot come soon enough.

nonameking2026 3y ago
I haven’t seen this… https://youtu.be/g1na0OFm89k https://youtu.be/g1na0OFm89k
0xy 3y ago
[flagged]
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  > I presume you would call IQ statistics "racism" Putting aside the value of IQ figures, no, the figures themselves are not racist. How someone uses them, of course, can be.
  - 0xy 3y ago
    Given IQ statistics throw a pretty big spanner in the works of white supremacists by showing them that Ashkenazi Jews are the top of the average list, it's pretty hard to see how they're racist.
    - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
      I'm glad you agree!
- afguoibiobio 3y ago
  >Last time Jack Dorsey was in charge of Twitter, they did essentially nothing about CSAM. I am going to assume you have no evidence Twitter's new management is more active in combating child porn. You can, I'm sure, find evidence of them claiming they're taking a stand, but what they've actually done is gut the safety and moderation teams. The rise of hateful speech, on the other hand, is quite clear. We have seen a massive, sustained uptick in racist posts since the site was taken over. We see an increase in accounts associated with terrorists organizations like ISIS, many of them "verified" and impersonating famous people. We have seen an increase in postings from QAnon followers, many with verified accounts. We have seen and measured increases in violent speech across the board. I would classify all these things as "actual terrible stuff", as would any decent person. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-speech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s... Twitter is every bit as censored as it ever has been. It regularly bans people for criticizing Twitter policy; blocks, throttles, and downranks competitors; downranks left-wing organizations and news sources; and (pathetically) requires Felon's posts to always be ranked highly. Twitter is still censored, just by a manchild dictator rather than the hard work of fallible people. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-free-speech-matt-taibbi-substack/673698/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-... >I presume you would call IQ statistics "racism" Not necessarily, but most likely. I have never met a person in the wild who wanted to talk about IQ statistics without using them as a pseudo-scientific fig leaf to justify genocide. I've been on the Internet; I've played this game. And, let me guess, next you'll say there's no way such you're racist because these statistics show Asian and Jewish people have higher IQ than white people.

pabs3 3y ago

Pidgin still interfaces with everything, including walled gardens like Facebook :) https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://pidgin.im/plugins/

SeanAnderson 3y ago
Holy moly, you just made my day. I will have to give it a shot. I thought that once all the walled gardens developed their own protocols that it was dead in the water!
- pabs3 3y ago
  All the walled gardens supported in the old days of Pidgin were reverse engineered, same goes for the modern walled gardens. The tools for reverse engineering of protocols (like Wireshark) have only gotten better since then.
- pabs3 3y ago
  Please note that Pidgin is still GTK2 but there is a GTK4 version in the works that has a more modern interface. I think they welcome donations to make that go more quickly.
  - account42 3y ago
    Where can we donate to keep the GTK2 interface as long as possible?
    - pabs3 3y ago
      GTK2 itself is dead, so you would need to start with a fork of that. For Pidgin, this appears to be the donate page: https://imfreedom.org/donate/ https://imfreedom.org/donate/

danjac 3y ago

If this were just a fun side project, great, no problem, let's give people the benefit of the doubt. However we have seen the harms of social media in all aspects from the self esteem of teenage girls to harassment to financial scams to stochastic terrorism. This isn't 2007 any more, anyone entering the social media arena in 2023 with all we know today has to be prepared for skepticism, scrutiny and criticism, whether they are closed source, open source, protocol based or fully commercial.

mort96 3y ago

I don't understand why they wouldn't implement ActivityPub-federation. Instead of strengthening the best federated social network, they chose to undermine it. Why?

joelg 3y ago
on bluesky (sorry) the devs have been super active and responsive and eager to explain their approach. they have talked about this specific choice at length - that after an extensive ecosystem review and lots of thought, it seemed like a different architecture had a better chance of working at scale. I hope they find the time to explain this more publicly but it’s definitely a decision they didn’t make lightly. More generally, I have a ton of respect for the standardization process and for the amount of (mostly volunteer!) engineering over the years that had gone into fediverse, but it’s been so long and growth has been so slow that I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a new project to try something different.

floor_ 3y ago

Better to be critical of a product in beta than have toxic positivity about it so things can be fixed.

tsuujin 3y ago

I’m excited for blue sky just because I’m excited to see movement in real alternatives to the couple of major social players. I also wish I could actually get an invite to BS. I’ve been waiting a long time and they seem unlikely to actually hand it out at this point.

tiffanyg 3y ago

Lol, this is HN. Comments are often incredibly negative, and frequently enough - wrong or not quite right, yet arrogant &/ opinionated etc. Others taught me long ago to try to keep something of a 'critical eye' turned on whenever I'm reading news etc. I try not to judge simply for the sake of judging, nor let past impressions completely overwhelm info right in front of me, but having some sort of basic impression / expectation of people, journals, newspapers, websites, etc. is helpful in avoiding some time wastage and filling my mind up with (more) utter nonsense. I end up disagreeing with / doubting many comments on HN, yet still get a LOT out of reading even those comments - just in the sense of sort of the 'zeitgeist' and what sorts of BS I'm likely to come upon elsewhere. ... IMAO (in my arrogant opinion)