7 ms·

Bluesky Frustrations

43 points by GavinAnderegg 3y ago

hobo_mark 3y ago
Person who never used a service has opinions about said service. Not much to see here.
DelaneyM 3y ago
The biggest frustration I have with Bluesky is the velvet rope and its consequences on community building. I've been on the wait list since Feb 22, but for whatever reason I don't have access. That's just sour grapes, I know, but it also means that others who don't run in the right circles also don't have access. It means the community is intentionally exclusive and cliquey. I don't know what it is about tech that everyone wants to become the people who abused them in high school, but it's a bad trend and we should be better. If invites aren't going to be chronological they should at least be random. Invite people who are different intentionally. Otherwise we end up with another clubhouse-esque VC circle jerk.
- jghn 3y ago
  I get and agree w/ your general point. But at least for Bluesky watching folks in my feeds talk about getting access it's been a pretty diverse group. Much, much, much more diverse than Clubhouse. And by that I mean across industries, economic groups, etc and not just "diverse within Technology"
  - blitzar 3y ago
    Watching folks in my feeds talk about getting access to Clubhouse back in the day and not getting in was a pretty diverse group too ... I think I might still be on the waitlist at clubhouse - by the time my number came up I had less than zero interest in the whole thing.
    - jghn 3y ago
      Granted both our posts were anecdata but what I didn't add was that for me Clubhouse was the opposite. The folks I knew joining Clubhouse were very much cut from the same cloth. I already knew I didn't want to use it as I have no interest in using a voice/audio based app. But the membership didn't help any either.
- Closi 3y ago
  I can't say I blame them for not wanting to suddenly have to firefight 1 million users on an immature platform. Aware that your issue is the approach and the fact that invites are the main way of scaling this rather than just issuing random waitlists, but there is an issue about networks which I assume they are needing - i.e. users already on there will want their friends on there with them, as it is a social network. The issue about creating networks of people that know each other and interact is probably pretty key to building a real social network - see how Facebook rolled out by college campus.
  - riffic 3y ago
    I don't think they even have anything (note I am purely speculating) beyond a single ec2 instance at the moment. it's going to take a lot of time to scale the necessary infra to support the demand
    - yabones 3y ago
      So decentralized it can't even run on a second server yet...
  - input_sh 3y ago
    I also don't blame them for being invite-only and have no intention of begging people for an invite. But, the inability to check any post by people already there is absolutely unacceptable. Not being able to verify a screenshot of public figures is just a huge no-no in my book.
    - roonyh 3y ago
      They have self authenticating data structures no? Someone should be able to write a program that can verify any post.
      - tough 3y ago
        Yes, only a web-frontend client is missing, see someone else who downloaded all posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845504
- rudyfraser 3y ago
  I signed up for the beta on February 21st and got my invite last week at the top of May as they started letting folks in. From a graph I saw, they only had a couple hundred users til about April, then the May batch brought in another 50K (of which I was one). It's at 65K total now I think. I have a negligible following on social media and don't know anyone over there so I don't think they're being cliquey with the invites. To someone else's point, they're doing a lot of firefighting. When I got in, your followers list did an infinite loop, "hellthreads" were causing errors every time you viewed a reply, and content moderation was (and still is) constantly breaking (NSFW stuff keeps breaking through on their placeholder "what's hot" algorithm). I was able to register @salesforce.herokuapp.com as my handle, etc. I think it's a beta in the truest sense of the word and you'll probably get an invite soon.
- haskellandchill 3y ago
  Hey you seem like a cool person, I'll have an invite soon if you want me to send you one, my email is in my profile here :)
- strangattractor 3y ago
  It was quite telling how easy it was for Musk to buy Twitter. Most founders of successful startups fight tooth and nail to hold on to their company but Twitter rolled over so fast the deal was done before Musk had a chance to change his mind. The problem is with the product space not the product. There is no fix for all these issues - only compromises. Bluesky will not be any different - people will be toxic, unhappy with moderation, unhappy without moderation, want blue checkmarks, think blue checkmarks are BS - blah de blah blah blah.
berkle4455 3y ago
Mastodon will fail simply because nobody is paid to work on the project and things the core team are not good at (like creating a good UI/UX) will never happen. And that's going to continue to be the perpetual hurdle to user adoption or anyone taking it seriously outside of tech circles.
- mattl 3y ago
  People are being paid though. There are several Patreons and the core project runs one.
  - mempko 3y ago
    It's peanuts compared to VC funded projects.
    - epidemian 3y ago
      Considering that VC funded projects tend to attract "career oriented" developers that have no incentive other than money or prestige, i'd say that could be a good thing.
- naravara 3y ago
  > (like creating a good UI/UX) will never happen. Ivory is a fantastic UI for Mastodon. Mastodon's only big hiccup really is the confusion around picking an instance. But that will go away once a few "normie" instances get a foothold and serve as a kind of "America Online" for the Fediverse. Secondarily the fact that it doesn't tune for engagement means casual users will tend to bounce off of it (since there is nothing to sink them in and keep them coming back). But to many that's a feature rather than a bug. Akin to losing smokers by banning smoking in bars.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > But to many that's a feature rather than a bug. I don't use Mastodon (nor Twitter, nor Bluesky, etc.), but if that sort of thing did appeal to me, Mastodon would be the only one that would be acceptable precisely because it doesn't tune for engagement. "Tuning for engagement" and/or using the usual "stickiness" tricks is a huge red flag to me.
hirundo 3y ago
"These were hashtags, posts, or users the service thought I should see – and there was usually something in there that left me feeling worse." I'd gotten into the habit of catching up on social media in bed before getting up in the morning. Then I noticed that I was getting up pissed off most mornings, so stopped the habit as an experiment. It was the difference between being my naturally cheerful self in the shower, and some species of low level rage monster. I've spent a life as a voracious newshound and infovore but have come to see info-gluttony as somewhat analagous to calorific gluttony. The sources of calories really do matter. A more hygienic media bubble is a better place for me to live.
- padobson 3y ago
  I'm with you here. I have a personal rule that the first information into my head each day comes from the Bible, which for all the criticism it gets is ultimately a story of hope in the face of many disasters. It's been a huge boon to my mental health.
- bombcar 3y ago
  So absolutely little of what is out there is actionable or needed; just ignoring it and focusing on your day and your people is hard (it's like avoiding snack food) but it is so worth it.
rvz 3y ago
It looks like Bluesky is already in the lead of Twitter alternatives with fast growth and attracting normal users (not techies) and demand in less than a year after launching their app. Users don't need to 'Choose a server' and aren't confused on signing up and know how to use basic features like search and can find the users that are who they say they are. For BlueSky, two months with this growth in adoption is very early days. But we will see what happens when the invite system is lifted and if the users are retained enough on BlueSky and what the users on Twitter will decide to move on to if Twitter gets 'worse'. But it seems that BlueSky so far is winning amongst the rest of the other failed alternatives that have tried for years to challenge Twitter.
- riffic 3y ago
  I hope the Bluesky PBLLC will submit their "AT protocol" to the ietf as an rfc. we already have an existing protocol though
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    Maybe they’re not submitting it because they’re worried the IETF will say “we already have an existing protocol” and use the standards carrot as a way to force them to make compromises.
    - riffic 3y ago
      they can submit an I-D if it were so desired: https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/#:~:text=Anyone%20can%20write%20an%20Internet,%2C%20relevance%2C%20and%20adequate%20writing https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/#:~:text=Anyone%20can%....
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I wonder how well the "find users who are who they say they are" is going to work once the test server starts federating. They've got this whole platform now with users who never got the brief on federation and its implications, so it'll be interesting to see what will happen once they unleash federated identities on the unsuspecting masses. BlueSky is already worse because you can't just link to public skeets, you need to be in the special club to see the stuff people post. Sure, you could use some kind of external service that parses the underlying data, but what user is going to use that? I'll happily stick to Mastodon until the people I follow all disappear to nostr or BlueSky. I might give running a BS server a go, but with the utter lack of documentation there is now I'm guessing that'll be in a few years at the earliest.
bhaak 3y ago
Most people are frustrated because they want to be on it but don't get an invitation (me included). I'm surprised how these old tricks still work very well. If Bluesky can catch the journalist as Twitter did there is a good chance it can replace Twitter. Even though I saw some news outlet set up their own Mastodon servers.
ranger207 3y ago
Bluesky is going to be successful because of its current state of being invite-only and sponsored by Dorsey. It's essentially the new blue checkmark: an indication that you're part of the group of "always-online Twitter powerusers". Once Bluesky opens up people will join because they either want to be part of that group or the people that you'd follow on pre-Elon Twitter are part of that group. Technology has little to do with it
- phailhaus 3y ago
  Yep, since Twitter's UI is extremely easy to copy, all you need is the users and the culture. Granted that's usually the hardest part, but Elon is giving everyone tons of reasons to move away.
mikeryan 3y ago
Serious question. The issue of public block lists comes up quite a bit. I’m not sure why this is a problem? This could be me. I’ve always used social networks with an assumption that everything I did was public.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  https://mosquitocapital.substack.com/p/bluesky-is-not-ready https://mosquitocapital.substack.com/p/bluesky-is-not-ready > 2) Blocking: Your list of blocked users is public. Anyone can see it through the API. Someone harassing you? They, and all of their buddies, will know as soon as you block them. People can build profiles of who's ripe for harassment just by searching for large blocklists.
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    >Someone harassing you? They, and all of their buddies, will know as soon as you block them. But Twitter has a huge "This person has blocked you" page? This doesn't sound like a massive upset to the status quo.
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      But this is not a "discoverable" thing, and only the person who was blocked can see it. I (or more contextually appropriate, a bad actor/harasser) can't trivially check if someone else has been blocked by another user on Twitter.
- throwaway202303 3y ago
  It could be seen as defamation. If the block list is titled “nazis” or “antisemetics”, two of the worst labels you can be assigned in modern western society, then you can be publicly described that way with no context or recourse.
- GavinAnderegg 3y ago
  Imagine you were a touchy person with a big audience. Also imagine you had a tool where you could find all the people who blocked you, and you noticed someone important on that list. You could make that person's life (at best) quite annoying if you wanted to know why they blocked you.
rchaud 3y ago
> People are having a great time! But I suspect this is because the service is currently small, simple, and centralized. Once the decentralized systems are in place, there’s a good chance it’ll be more confusing. Precisely! This is what has been ticking me off about the Bluesky love-in so far; it's as if people are so desperate to call something "new Twitter" that they forgot the systemic factors around why Twitter turned bad. Today, BSK is exclusive. Getting an invite gives one the ability to peer into what's happening at the cool table. It's invite-only, so most people there will be cool and not try to clickbait or build clout. Problem is, Facebook was exclusive once too. It didn't last. Twitter also was once just a quirky little online space. Then the Arab Spring happened and now everybody writes with an assumed gravitas, as if their 280 chars are going to be featured in a CNN story.
- sroussey 3y ago
  I signed up for it months ago and got an invite code. It’s therefore not invite only.
  - dom96 3y ago
    If you need an invite code to join then it is very much "invite only" I also signed up months ago and yet am still waiting for an invite.
    - sroussey 3y ago
      Eh, not if you invite yourself.
  - aprilnya 3y ago
    “I have a sandwich, therefore no one is starving”
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- davidw 3y ago
  > the systemic factors around why Twitter turned bad. Being controllable by one guy who does dumb stuff on a whim? That's a tough, tough nut to crack, I think. On one hand you can just make something totally open, and then it turns into a "hive of scum and villainy" and normal people don't want anything to do with it (something like: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-k... ) Or you can have strong moderation and ownership. When that goes well, like HN, it's about as good as it gets in terms of being a mostly pleasant community to participate in. But that could all go away, if, say, YCombinator sold it to the Saudis or the Kardashians or whatever... I can't for the life of me figure out why someone who was doing some genuinely cool stuff like rockets would want to get involved with something where even when it's working pretty well, people are going to complain about it and think it's unfair.
mempko 3y ago
I'm happy with Mastodon and want the fediverse to succeed. I don't want one single project controlling the fediverse. I have a feeling Bluesky is trying to Microsoft (embrace, extend, extinguish) the fediverse. Why? Because there is no clear way to make money off people in the fediverse. You can't rent seek like the centralized services do. My sense is Bluesky is embracing federation the same way Microsoft embraced open source.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  Given that Bluesky does not use ActivityPub, it's hard to make a case that it's embracing, extending, and extinguishing it, given that there's no embrace in the first place.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    It's embracing just enough things that look vaguely ActivityPub-like if you squint and is getting a lot of marketing that the parts it didn't directly embrace it extended/chose "better" alternatives, such that from a PR perspective at least does seem to using a similar playbook, even if not that exact playbook.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      There's already a very simple way to describe this kind of relationship: competing. They're competing protocols and products.
      - WorldMaker 3y ago
        That's a given, the concern is still valid that the asymmetric nature of the competition may be "unfair". One is an adopted open source standard of a small but diverse ecosystem and the other is a well-funded, seemingly more popular, more closed than open with a lot of vested interest in crashing the open source ecosystem. Especially when it feels like the "more closed than open" is presenting itself as "open source" in what feels like a bait-and-switch to piggy-back on the goodwill of the actual open source ecology with a goal towards moving people (back) to more closed, corporate controlled tools. ("bait-and-switch" was the word I think I was looking for here.)
cynix 3y ago
I wonder if Bluesky will be Clubhouse all over again: it was cool in the early days when invites are hard to get, but the novelty wears off quickly as it grows? Guess I'll find out once I manage to get an invite :D

43 points by GavinAnderegg 3y ago

Person who never used a service has opinions about said service. Not much to see here.

The biggest frustration I have with Bluesky is the velvet rope and its consequences on community building. I've been on the wait list since Feb 22, but for whatever reason I don't have access. That's just sour grapes, I know, but it also means that others who don't run in the right circles also don't have access. It means the community is intentionally exclusive and cliquey. I don't know what it is about tech that everyone wants to become the people who abused them in high school, but it's a bad trend and we should be better. If invites aren't going to be chronological they should at least be random. Invite people who are different intentionally. Otherwise we end up with another clubhouse-esque VC circle jerk.

jghn 3y ago
I get and agree w/ your general point. But at least for Bluesky watching folks in my feeds talk about getting access it's been a pretty diverse group. Much, much, much more diverse than Clubhouse. And by that I mean across industries, economic groups, etc and not just "diverse within Technology"
- blitzar 3y ago
  Watching folks in my feeds talk about getting access to Clubhouse back in the day and not getting in was a pretty diverse group too ... I think I might still be on the waitlist at clubhouse - by the time my number came up I had less than zero interest in the whole thing.
  - jghn 3y ago
    Granted both our posts were anecdata but what I didn't add was that for me Clubhouse was the opposite. The folks I knew joining Clubhouse were very much cut from the same cloth. I already knew I didn't want to use it as I have no interest in using a voice/audio based app. But the membership didn't help any either.
Closi 3y ago
I can't say I blame them for not wanting to suddenly have to firefight 1 million users on an immature platform. Aware that your issue is the approach and the fact that invites are the main way of scaling this rather than just issuing random waitlists, but there is an issue about networks which I assume they are needing - i.e. users already on there will want their friends on there with them, as it is a social network. The issue about creating networks of people that know each other and interact is probably pretty key to building a real social network - see how Facebook rolled out by college campus.
- riffic 3y ago
  I don't think they even have anything (note I am purely speculating) beyond a single ec2 instance at the moment. it's going to take a lot of time to scale the necessary infra to support the demand
  - yabones 3y ago
    So decentralized it can't even run on a second server yet...
- input_sh 3y ago
  I also don't blame them for being invite-only and have no intention of begging people for an invite. But, the inability to check any post by people already there is absolutely unacceptable. Not being able to verify a screenshot of public figures is just a huge no-no in my book.
  - roonyh 3y ago
    They have self authenticating data structures no? Someone should be able to write a program that can verify any post.
    - tough 3y ago
      Yes, only a web-frontend client is missing, see someone else who downloaded all posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845504
rudyfraser 3y ago
I signed up for the beta on February 21st and got my invite last week at the top of May as they started letting folks in. From a graph I saw, they only had a couple hundred users til about April, then the May batch brought in another 50K (of which I was one). It's at 65K total now I think. I have a negligible following on social media and don't know anyone over there so I don't think they're being cliquey with the invites. To someone else's point, they're doing a lot of firefighting. When I got in, your followers list did an infinite loop, "hellthreads" were causing errors every time you viewed a reply, and content moderation was (and still is) constantly breaking (NSFW stuff keeps breaking through on their placeholder "what's hot" algorithm). I was able to register @salesforce.herokuapp.com as my handle, etc. I think it's a beta in the truest sense of the word and you'll probably get an invite soon.
haskellandchill 3y ago
Hey you seem like a cool person, I'll have an invite soon if you want me to send you one, my email is in my profile here :)
strangattractor 3y ago
It was quite telling how easy it was for Musk to buy Twitter. Most founders of successful startups fight tooth and nail to hold on to their company but Twitter rolled over so fast the deal was done before Musk had a chance to change his mind. The problem is with the product space not the product. There is no fix for all these issues - only compromises. Bluesky will not be any different - people will be toxic, unhappy with moderation, unhappy without moderation, want blue checkmarks, think blue checkmarks are BS - blah de blah blah blah.

berkle4455 3y ago

Mastodon will fail simply because nobody is paid to work on the project and things the core team are not good at (like creating a good UI/UX) will never happen. And that's going to continue to be the perpetual hurdle to user adoption or anyone taking it seriously outside of tech circles.

mattl 3y ago
People are being paid though. There are several Patreons and the core project runs one.
- mempko 3y ago
  It's peanuts compared to VC funded projects.
  - epidemian 3y ago
    Considering that VC funded projects tend to attract "career oriented" developers that have no incentive other than money or prestige, i'd say that could be a good thing.
naravara 3y ago
> (like creating a good UI/UX) will never happen. Ivory is a fantastic UI for Mastodon. Mastodon's only big hiccup really is the confusion around picking an instance. But that will go away once a few "normie" instances get a foothold and serve as a kind of "America Online" for the Fediverse. Secondarily the fact that it doesn't tune for engagement means casual users will tend to bounce off of it (since there is nothing to sink them in and keep them coming back). But to many that's a feature rather than a bug. Akin to losing smokers by banning smoking in bars.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > But to many that's a feature rather than a bug. I don't use Mastodon (nor Twitter, nor Bluesky, etc.), but if that sort of thing did appeal to me, Mastodon would be the only one that would be acceptable precisely because it doesn't tune for engagement. "Tuning for engagement" and/or using the usual "stickiness" tricks is a huge red flag to me.

hirundo 3y ago

"These were hashtags, posts, or users the service thought I should see – and there was usually something in there that left me feeling worse." I'd gotten into the habit of catching up on social media in bed before getting up in the morning. Then I noticed that I was getting up pissed off most mornings, so stopped the habit as an experiment. It was the difference between being my naturally cheerful self in the shower, and some species of low level rage monster. I've spent a life as a voracious newshound and infovore but have come to see info-gluttony as somewhat analagous to calorific gluttony. The sources of calories really do matter. A more hygienic media bubble is a better place for me to live.

padobson 3y ago
I'm with you here. I have a personal rule that the first information into my head each day comes from the Bible, which for all the criticism it gets is ultimately a story of hope in the face of many disasters. It's been a huge boon to my mental health.
bombcar 3y ago
So absolutely little of what is out there is actionable or needed; just ignoring it and focusing on your day and your people is hard (it's like avoiding snack food) but it is so worth it.

rvz 3y ago

It looks like Bluesky is already in the lead of Twitter alternatives with fast growth and attracting normal users (not techies) and demand in less than a year after launching their app. Users don't need to 'Choose a server' and aren't confused on signing up and know how to use basic features like search and can find the users that are who they say they are. For BlueSky, two months with this growth in adoption is very early days. But we will see what happens when the invite system is lifted and if the users are retained enough on BlueSky and what the users on Twitter will decide to move on to if Twitter gets 'worse'. But it seems that BlueSky so far is winning amongst the rest of the other failed alternatives that have tried for years to challenge Twitter.

riffic 3y ago
I hope the Bluesky PBLLC will submit their "AT protocol" to the ietf as an rfc. we already have an existing protocol though
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  Maybe they’re not submitting it because they’re worried the IETF will say “we already have an existing protocol” and use the standards carrot as a way to force them to make compromises.
  - riffic 3y ago
    they can submit an I-D if it were so desired: https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/#:~:text=Anyone%20can%20write%20an%20Internet,%2C%20relevance%2C%20and%20adequate%20writing https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/#:~:text=Anyone%20can%....
jeroenhd 3y ago
I wonder how well the "find users who are who they say they are" is going to work once the test server starts federating. They've got this whole platform now with users who never got the brief on federation and its implications, so it'll be interesting to see what will happen once they unleash federated identities on the unsuspecting masses. BlueSky is already worse because you can't just link to public skeets, you need to be in the special club to see the stuff people post. Sure, you could use some kind of external service that parses the underlying data, but what user is going to use that? I'll happily stick to Mastodon until the people I follow all disappear to nostr or BlueSky. I might give running a BS server a go, but with the utter lack of documentation there is now I'm guessing that'll be in a few years at the earliest.

bhaak 3y ago

Most people are frustrated because they want to be on it but don't get an invitation (me included). I'm surprised how these old tricks still work very well. If Bluesky can catch the journalist as Twitter did there is a good chance it can replace Twitter. Even though I saw some news outlet set up their own Mastodon servers.

ranger207 3y ago

Bluesky is going to be successful because of its current state of being invite-only and sponsored by Dorsey. It's essentially the new blue checkmark: an indication that you're part of the group of "always-online Twitter powerusers". Once Bluesky opens up people will join because they either want to be part of that group or the people that you'd follow on pre-Elon Twitter are part of that group. Technology has little to do with it

phailhaus 3y ago
Yep, since Twitter's UI is extremely easy to copy, all you need is the users and the culture. Granted that's usually the hardest part, but Elon is giving everyone tons of reasons to move away.

mikeryan 3y ago

Serious question. The issue of public block lists comes up quite a bit. I’m not sure why this is a problem? This could be me. I’ve always used social networks with an assumption that everything I did was public.

pavel_lishin 3y ago
https://mosquitocapital.substack.com/p/bluesky-is-not-ready https://mosquitocapital.substack.com/p/bluesky-is-not-ready > 2) Blocking: Your list of blocked users is public. Anyone can see it through the API. Someone harassing you? They, and all of their buddies, will know as soon as you block them. People can build profiles of who's ripe for harassment just by searching for large blocklists.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  >Someone harassing you? They, and all of their buddies, will know as soon as you block them. But Twitter has a huge "This person has blocked you" page? This doesn't sound like a massive upset to the status quo.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    But this is not a "discoverable" thing, and only the person who was blocked can see it. I (or more contextually appropriate, a bad actor/harasser) can't trivially check if someone else has been blocked by another user on Twitter.
throwaway202303 3y ago
It could be seen as defamation. If the block list is titled “nazis” or “antisemetics”, two of the worst labels you can be assigned in modern western society, then you can be publicly described that way with no context or recourse.
GavinAnderegg 3y ago
Imagine you were a touchy person with a big audience. Also imagine you had a tool where you could find all the people who blocked you, and you noticed someone important on that list. You could make that person's life (at best) quite annoying if you wanted to know why they blocked you.

rchaud 3y ago

> People are having a great time! But I suspect this is because the service is currently small, simple, and centralized. Once the decentralized systems are in place, there’s a good chance it’ll be more confusing. Precisely! This is what has been ticking me off about the Bluesky love-in so far; it's as if people are so desperate to call something "new Twitter" that they forgot the systemic factors around why Twitter turned bad. Today, BSK is exclusive. Getting an invite gives one the ability to peer into what's happening at the cool table. It's invite-only, so most people there will be cool and not try to clickbait or build clout. Problem is, Facebook was exclusive once too. It didn't last. Twitter also was once just a quirky little online space. Then the Arab Spring happened and now everybody writes with an assumed gravitas, as if their 280 chars are going to be featured in a CNN story.

sroussey 3y ago
I signed up for it months ago and got an invite code. It’s therefore not invite only.
- dom96 3y ago
  If you need an invite code to join then it is very much "invite only" I also signed up months ago and yet am still waiting for an invite.
  - sroussey 3y ago
    Eh, not if you invite yourself.
- aprilnya 3y ago
  “I have a sandwich, therefore no one is starving”
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
davidw 3y ago
> the systemic factors around why Twitter turned bad. Being controllable by one guy who does dumb stuff on a whim? That's a tough, tough nut to crack, I think. On one hand you can just make something totally open, and then it turns into a "hive of scum and villainy" and normal people don't want anything to do with it (something like: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-k... ) Or you can have strong moderation and ownership. When that goes well, like HN, it's about as good as it gets in terms of being a mostly pleasant community to participate in. But that could all go away, if, say, YCombinator sold it to the Saudis or the Kardashians or whatever... I can't for the life of me figure out why someone who was doing some genuinely cool stuff like rockets would want to get involved with something where even when it's working pretty well, people are going to complain about it and think it's unfair.

mempko 3y ago

I'm happy with Mastodon and want the fediverse to succeed. I don't want one single project controlling the fediverse. I have a feeling Bluesky is trying to Microsoft (embrace, extend, extinguish) the fediverse. Why? Because there is no clear way to make money off people in the fediverse. You can't rent seek like the centralized services do. My sense is Bluesky is embracing federation the same way Microsoft embraced open source.

steveklabnik 3y ago
Given that Bluesky does not use ActivityPub, it's hard to make a case that it's embracing, extending, and extinguishing it, given that there's no embrace in the first place.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  It's embracing just enough things that look vaguely ActivityPub-like if you squint and is getting a lot of marketing that the parts it didn't directly embrace it extended/chose "better" alternatives, such that from a PR perspective at least does seem to using a similar playbook, even if not that exact playbook.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    There's already a very simple way to describe this kind of relationship: competing. They're competing protocols and products.
    - WorldMaker 3y ago
      That's a given, the concern is still valid that the asymmetric nature of the competition may be "unfair". One is an adopted open source standard of a small but diverse ecosystem and the other is a well-funded, seemingly more popular, more closed than open with a lot of vested interest in crashing the open source ecosystem. Especially when it feels like the "more closed than open" is presenting itself as "open source" in what feels like a bait-and-switch to piggy-back on the goodwill of the actual open source ecology with a goal towards moving people (back) to more closed, corporate controlled tools. ("bait-and-switch" was the word I think I was looking for here.)

cynix 3y ago

I wonder if Bluesky will be Clubhouse all over again: it was cool in the early days when invites are hard to get, but the novelty wears off quickly as it grows? Guess I'll find out once I manage to get an invite :D