14 ms·
Purchase and manage domains directly through Bluesky
- latenightcoding 3y agoI just want auto-renew to work properly sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't, lost a couple of high value domain names even tho they've had my CC for years.
- cryptoz 3y agoI once let my Hotmail account go 30 or 90 days without a login, so Microsoft followed their policy to delete my email and open the username to the public. Someone saw my email on dns records, found it was available, registered the email and stole my domain. Extremely bitter about that ~17 years later. Extremely.
- DigiEggz 3y agoThat is mortifying and cruel. It's unfortunate that Microsoft didn't prevent registration of expired emails for a set period of time. They had to have an idea that this type of situation would occur. I'm tempted to ask what the domain was...
- MiddleEndian 3y agoMS killed my Hotmail account randomly, could not get it reactivated. Probably because I never logged in as well. Unclear... It was tied to my leftover MSDN account from when I worked at MS, so at that point it was no more free legal MS downloads for me :(
- wahahah 3y agoLong time namecheap user without any autorenew problems, even with insufficient funds forcing them to retry. You can also add funds to your account in advance, just got an email suggesting that for an upcoming renewal.
- afavour 3y agoLooks great. But maybe the effort should be going towards scaling up so they can remove the invite only requirement, Threads is going to actively eat Bluesky’s lunch while it remains.
- jquery 3y agoThe lack of search / trending is really a bummer, I hope that is just a v1 launch choice and not long term product vision. Otherwise I'm impressed with the launch and its sheer scale, very smooth.
- rhaway84773 3y agohttps://www.threads.net/t/CuW3CzRtm9z/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://www.threads.net/t/CuW3CzRtm9z/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA... > The real test is not if we can build up a lot of hype, but if you all find enough value in the app to keep using it over time. And there are tons of basics that are missing: search, hashtags, a following feed, graph syncing, fedeverse support, messaging maybe…
- Sakos 3y agoWait, what does Threads show you if it doesn't have a following feed? Also, how the hell do you launch a Twitter competitor without search and tags?
- jquery 3y ago>Wait, what does Threads show you if it doesn't have a following feed? its like tiktok and twitter had a baby. it shows you content it thinks you will like based on how you use the app. i think? it's good at surfacing what i want to see based on my initial follows
- xwdv 3y agoThe lunch is ate.
- klysm 3y agoThey better hurry up if they want to be relevant. Time to ship garbage!
- silisili 3y agoToo late IMO. Twitter the incumbent, Threads just popped up out of nowhere with a whole heap of users. People switch when other people switch, generally. Those tired of Twitter now have an easy place to call home, there's not going to be any momentum to then want to switch again. Mastodon tried, and did get some following, but IMO is too complicated in concept for the common user. Bsky on the other hand just blew it.
- tapoxi 3y agoThreads is federating with Mastodon, which is good for both of them.
- alasarmas 3y agoFederation will end faster than you can say “The Gmail web client does not have an interface for joining chat rooms on other [Jabber] servers” [0] 0. https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/12237/how-can-i-connect-to-a-jabber-chat-room-within-google-chat https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/12237/how-can-i-...
- Hamuko 3y agoJust tried it, didn't work.
- MarkMarine 3y agoI’m not positive this is a winner for normie users. The exclusivity of a user name is important, I want @mark, not @mark.abcdef while I know there is an @mark.abcdęf out there.
- klysm 3y agoThis is that any different with regular usernames? Like @mārk
- MarkMarine 3y agoI think it’s a little different. Maybe I’m just a nerd but some domains are cool and some are not.
- dkh 3y agoThe thing is, there is no @mark, if you have @mark on bluesky, your username is actually @mark.bsky.social. Every user is attached to a domain name no matter what, so this feature lets you at least use your own instead of theirs.
- greyface- 3y ago> The thing is, there is no @mark Not yet! Is ICANN still accepting applications for new gTLDs?
- deleted 3y ago
- astrea 3y agoWhat’s exactly the benefit of this other than making the domain space more toxic than it already is with parking, squatting, etc?
- saurik 3y agoYou want to have all of that toxicity--if it must exist--concentrated in a single place. Every new service shouldn't create a new namespace with its own hoard of asshats squatting usernames, and every time I join a new service I shouldn't have to jostle to get a username compatible with the ones I already have. If you use a hostname, you figure out your hostname once and then know that all subsequent services you ever use will have a single correct username.
- e63f67dd-065b 3y agoI'm weary of tying my domain registrar to social media. One of the nice things about owning my domain is that I can control it -- if I get banned on bluesky, a much more likely occurrence than CloudFlare kicking me out, what's the policy of transferring out?
- jrflowers 3y agoYou just put a txt record in your DNS to get a Bluesky username. They don’t have to manage your domain Edited for clarity
- vermilingua 3y agoPresumably you'd transfer your domain from Namecheap, not bluesky; there are extremely strict conditions on registrars around domain portability.
- robalfonso 3y agoThis is actually really messy. It’s unclear to me who is the registrant in this scenario. If blue sky then you don’t own anything and there is no portability. If you are the registrant that’s great but namecheap is going to need contact information that’s verifiable which may turn people off who would like a bit more separation on their social profiles. I also wonder does blue sky see that registrant data? Can’t say I like that very much.
- eddythompson80 3y agoIt works in a similar way that lets encrypt DNS challenge works. They just partnered with Namecheap to make the process simple because asking people to buy a domain and setup TXT records is still a fairly complicated and technical process. Apple does the same with iCloud emails and Cloudflare domains.
- nba456_ 3y agoBluesky trying to go the way of Clubhouse with their invite-only clownshow
- sahaj 3y agoThe Bluesky infra would not be able to handle scale without invite-only clownshow. Meta can open the floodgates without breaking a sweat.
- morkalork 3y agoMight be worth it to push through anyways. Twitter had its fail whales back in the day, I think a couple of temporary outages caused by demand might even be a good thing and add to the hype. Absence makes the heart grow fonder doesn't it? Seems silly to trade insane growth for perfectionism instead.
- mrcwinn 3y agoAnd as many of us have observed, the key isn't just the app or UI, it's that there are people there. With Threads, people are indeed there. Like it or not I think this means Bluesky is dead-on-didn't-arrive. Is it any surprise Facebook got this right? Understanding "it's cool because there are people there" is part of their origin story, after all.
- Barrin92 3y agoisn't Bluesky supposed to run on a federated protocol? They could just open source their reference implementation and let people run their own instances. Not even the protocol itself seems to be public.
- vermilingua 3y agoCould be a huge boon to the self-hosted movement, might reach the critical mass of users that are willing to fund open source development of self-hosted cloud, just BYO domain
- bwoodward 3y agoits only a txt record, not hosting a node (etc)
- vermilingua 3y agoYes, but it may mean that many people may be buying domains for the first time, and then realising that that opens the door to self hosting many other services.
- evanmoran 3y agoI can’t wait to read the tell all book about Bluesky during this three day period when Threads hits a hundred million users and Bluesky makes the most important strategic decision of its existence.
- sigmar 3y ago"we shut down new user signups so we could focus on the really important stuff: acting as a frontend for namecheap"
- _cenw 3y agoAt least they have a sign up. Threads is just an empty website in the EU right now.
- mikelward 3y agoWith a long wait list.
- troupo 3y ago> Threads is just an empty website in the EU right now. And it should stay that way. CJEU declares Meta/Facebook's GDPR approach largely illegal: https://noyb.eu/en/cjeu-declares-metafacebooks-gdpr-approach-largely-illegal https://noyb.eu/en/cjeu-declares-metafacebooks-gdpr-approach... Threads won't launch until compliant with GDPR and Digital Markets Act: https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/no-instagram-threads-app-in-the-eu-irish-dpc-says-metas-new-twitter-rival-wont-be-launched-here/a1927220337.html https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/no-instagram-...
- blitzar 3y ago> Threads is just an empty website in the EU right now. And it should stay that way. Not launching in the EU is a massive red flag on the data hoovering ambitions facebook have for threads.
- prakhar897 3y agoBluesky is dead. Nobody is going to move again. They had the chance of outrun threads but slept on it. Whatever they release now, will never get initial users to get it off ground.
- lapcat 3y ago> They had the chance of outrun threads but slept on it. I don't think that's a fair criticism. Threads is backed by a $750 billion market cap megacorporation, while Bluesky just announced a seed round of $8 million, a mere drop in the bucket for Meta. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
- ketzo 3y agoI mean, regardless of why they are missing their chance, they’re still missing it.
- stubybubs 3y agoDorsey's net worth is something north of $4B, not to mention all the connections he has for investment. Raising a paltry $8M was not due to the difficulty of procuring money; not to attempting to scale rapidly was a deliberate choice. It's quite possibly going to end up a very bad choice. Seems pretty clear typical users don't care about decentralization, verification for themselves, or algorithm customization at all. They just want to post and look at nonsense. I'm not sure what will become of Bluesky, but I don't think it'll the Twitter replacement. Seems more like a classic case of developing for power users instead of typical ones.
- greyface- 3y agoJack provided the initial funding 2 years ago, but despite all the chatter to the contrary, it doesn't appear to me that he's involved in the company much these days. On Bluesky, he's not very active, and it's not clear he believes in the platform. His most recent post (https://bsky.app/profile/jack.bsky.social/post/3jy3cth45t22r https://bsky.app/profile/jack.bsky.social/post/3jy3cth45t22r) was 23 days ago, and states that Bluesky "isn't a [Twitter] replacement". He seems to be much more into Nostr these days, judging by his tweets.
- jonny_eh 3y agoIs Bluesky a Threads clone?
- karlshea 3y agoNo
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- benatkin 3y agoThis makes it a tiny bit more like app.net. Not in terms of control but in terms of floating the idea of paying an annual subscription fee.
- lapcat 3y ago> This makes it a tiny bit more like app.net. This was such a missed opportunity by the community, because app.net was the best implementation of a Twitter alternative ever made. Better than Bluesky, better than Mastodon, better than Threads, etc. I quit Twitter in 2012 and joined app.net. It was great! But not enough people did that to make app.net last. I still think about what we could have had instead of the current lineup of crap. :-( > Not in terms of control but in terms of floating the idea of paying an annual subscription fee. Where did you see that, other than the general idea of "paid services"?
- benatkin 3y agoTo me it was vaporware. I signed up for it and got a $50 lesson in being careful about supporting crowdfunding projects.
- lapcat 3y agoHow was it vaporware? It existed, it worked. In fact it worked great. I used app.net for years. I wouldn't be nostalgic about vaporware.
- benatkin 3y agoIt was vaporware that eventually launched after I stopped being interested in it, and seemed to always be sidetracked from its stated mission. Here's where they seemed to focus on trying to build their own killer app rather than on third party apps: > Could Broadcast be app.net’s breakout app? It depends on how quickly it can corral a large base of users on the publishing side — and it could also depend on whether Twitter and Facebook make moves toward selective push notifications, too. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2013/with-newsletter-for-mobile-dalton-caldwell-wants-to-make-your-native-app-obsolete/ https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2013/with-newslett...
- villgax 3y agoJust want to know how they'll bend to coercion from governments
- atleastoptimal 3y agoPaying for a username, lol. Bluesky will take off any minute bros!
- senectus1 3y agobetter than paying for a bluetick imho... I'd actually look at this, at least you get something for your money, than can be used elsewhere
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- coderintherye 3y agoHave you all considered that the VC-backed winner-take-all model of one platform left standing does not have to be the way? Threads for the status-seekers Spill for hip folks Truth Social for alt-right Bluesky for the cozy web Mastodon for the true geeks So on and so on...and that's a good thing.
- lostmsu 3y agoTrue geeks use Secure Scuttlebutt
- Spivak 3y agoIt is fine, there's a huge diversity in social media right now. I don't think Bluesky has a good narrative for any particular kind of user. I don't think it's going to hit cozy web status being an open air massively global network. The hallmark of the cozy web is a mix of private/semi-open/actually niche communities.
- whyenot 3y agoThis looks interesting, but it seems like it would lead to some pretty long and cumbersome user names. It also doesn’t address the problem of the moment: everyone who was itching to leave Twitter already have a place to go and based on Thread’s sign-ups, they are already moving in large numbers. Are most people going to want to move again whenever Bluesky opens its gates? I think the answer is no, unless Meta/Threads really screws something up. Threads isn’t great, but it’s …adequate and likely will improve quickly. That might be good enough for most people.
- elif 3y agoUnnecessary, pointless, expensive features are precisely how you define the inverse of the original Twitter vision. Bare minimum but fast message passing as a social communication layer. If all of these new platforms are trying to become a better or more bloated version of what Twitter has become, then they will never catch on like the viral tool that Twitter originally was. None of them learned the lesson of google wave, it seems. (i.e. look at these really cool features and extensions, this is what you want right?)
- belugacat 3y agoEngineers and designers and PMs are so smart and experienced and so eager to show each other how good at their job they are. Thorough, complex, expansive feature sets are where those skillsets can shine; no glory in building something simple, to the point, and limited in scope. Most products suck because people just cannot help themselves. It takes insane focus and control to override those tendencies when hundreds or thousands of people are working on a product (miss you Steve).
- netheril96 3y ago> limited in scope. These three words evoke PTSD in me as hearing it means promotion is no-go again.
- dkh 3y agoActually, bluesky has supported custom domains since the very beginning (the Namecheap deal is the part of this story that is actually new/noteworthy) and it is very widely-used. I am unsure what % of active users are using their own domain, but it is not insignificant. The domain feature hasn't blocked dev on more important things. In fact this deal is (according to bluesky) their first attempt at something to generate some revenue, with the goal being to never have to use advertising, something that the users would in fact be grateful for and consider to be important.
- anderspitman 3y agoSee here: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial
- jpwerty 3y agoThe dirty little secret about Bluesky is that it's actually pretty goddamn great on the inside. I have never in my life had normals asking for a social media invite, but I currently have a list of fourteen people waiting for a code. It works, feels, tastes, shares, and functions like Classic Twitter without the waves of repugnant users or miserably overbaked features. Collaborative mute lists make screening out horseshit easy. Shit stays put and is there when you return to the app. The timeline is hard chronological and the utter lack of ads is delightful. Hashtag hash is not missed. Everything just works with a modicum of taste to boot. Threads is not an equivalent product.
- guraf 3y ago> I currently have a list of fourteen people waiting for a code. That tends to happen when there's an exclusive club, people want to peak in. It is, in no way, an indication of the quality of the platform. > the waves of repugnant users or miserably overbaked features. That tends to happen when there's hardly any users at all. The "repugnant" or "normals" will flock in all the same, if the platform ever takes off. > the utter lack of ads is delightful. That tends to happen in all pre-revenue startups. Twitter was ads-free for years.
- dkh 3y agoThey intend to not move to ads. This domain name feature was described specifically by bluesky as the first attempt at bringing in revenue from other means
- elif 3y agoIdeologically these Twitter exodus communities will become even more microcosmic than the presumed "alt-right, redpilled" ideology they purport to escape. Twitter may be these things in part, but by being a direct reaction away from these things, the new networks will become necessarily more niche and specialized ideologically. In the same way that the ideological specialization of Twitter is not helpful for its growth, these new networks will be likewise more of an echo-chamber, and regardless of the "correctness" of their ideology, the unilaterality of it will starve it of the multifaceted discourse which provides the "town square" functionality which is core to these platforms' ethos.
- n42 3y agousing big words doesn’t make this intellectual. people want to make jokes and have light hearted conversations with others without hatred spewing everywhere. it’s pretty simple.
- elif 3y agoAs I said, my point is irrespective of the righteousness of any particular ideologies. Your reflexive ideological defense buttresses my position of ideological segregation prompting the twitter exodus. If you desire light hearted discussion, I suggest avoiding nonresponsive arguments and implications of pseudointellectualism.
- n42 3y agoI get it. less diversity of thought means more echo chambers. you're saying that fundamentally these platforms will fail to be the town squares they want to be by doing that. and I'm saying that most people do not want a town square, they just want a dinner party without the village idiots.
- elif 3y agoin your metaphor, my point is that the table that started with village idiots at it and scared some people away still has more diversity of thought than the table who have self-selected a new table.
- HHC-Hunter 3y agoCan anyone answer me this, where is the funding for bluesky coming from?
- peanuty1 3y agoOriginally from Twitter and now from Jack Dorsey?
- coolspot 3y agoJack in the box… I mean Jack[1] in the Block[2]. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey 2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block,_Inc.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago"Bluesky’s seed round was led by Neo, a community-led firm with partners like Code.org co-founder Ali Partovi and former Twitter PM Suzanne Xie, the company noted in its announcement. Joining the round were various angel investors, including Joe Beda (co-creator of Kubernetes), Bob Young of Red Hat, Amjad Masad of Replit, Amir Shevat, Heather Meeker, Jeromy Johnson, Automattic, Protocol Labs, Sarah Drasner, Katelyn Donnelly, Ali Evans, Stav Erez, Kris Nóva, Brad Fitzpatrick, Abdul Ly, and others." https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/bluesky-announces-its-8m-seed-round-first-paid-service-custom-domains/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/bluesky-announces-its-8m-s...
- jacurtis 3y agoCool.... This is the type of feature / partnership you build in year 5, not pre-launch. Wouldn't it be better to focus on features and scalability needed for opening up the network to more users to build the network beyond a beta phase or adding core features to the app?
- eddythompson80 3y agoSeems like identity management is at the core of what Bluesky is trying to change. Twitter managing verification of accounts makes it harder to not be seen as an endorsement of some degree. With this system, Bluesky doesn’t need to verify @iphone, when Apple can just create @iphone.apple.com. It’s pretty central to their identity management and verification. Having it in year 5 is like not having it at all.
- quadrifoliate 3y agoWhat you say is true, but the Namecheap partnership is premature even taking that into account. Why? The high sensitivity domains that are most likely to want to be verified via the (mildly confusing) domain-to-user mapping on Bluesky already exist. To take your example, Apple is not likely to try and register iphone.apple.com on Namecheap. On the other hand, "normal" users who just want to chat with their friends are not going to care, and might actually be a little confused by this announcement. "Wait, I need to buy a domain to use Bluesky?" Now, I could be wrong, and Bluesky might be trying to get a bunch of high-flying corporate accounts on board first. In that case, they are doing the right thing, and I look forward to when large media orgs start posting on Bluesky.
- anderspitman 3y agoI agree this might confuse users initially, but we need to normalize owning and using domains. We also need to make it much easier and this is an important step.
- sushid 3y ago
- ponorin 3y agoi've been following art communities on twitter, and while threads have indeed taken off massively, there's still a surprising amount of interest on bluesky, and there are people who are joining both, even after threads' opening up. there are several anecdotes of people not liking threads because of its corporate cleanliness. so no, bluesky isn't as dead as you may think. if anything it's gonna be as big as mastodon, as much as it pains me to say that as a fediverse advocate.
- prakhar897 3y agoI don't get the argument that scaling is harder for startups than for Big Tech. 1. At Meta, you had to use internal "approved" tooling to build you product. which is far worse than products in open market. BlueSky can put it all on serverless like AWS Lambda and call it a day. 2. If funds are an issue, then raise more. There's no way around it. you had to scale sometime. Even if you optimise well, you'll still burn a huge amount supporting free users. 3. Threads was built by 10 Engineers. A simple MVP shouldn't have a massive team behind it anyways. I feel the founders are largely responsible for not having their priorities sorted out.
- Hamuko 3y agoMeta has a $750 billion market cap and just slapped Threads on top of the Instagram database. How do you achieve the same with a startup and AWS Lambda?
- tguvot 3y agoLambda is a web scale
- eddythompson80 3y ago> BlueSky can put it all on serverless like AWS Lambda and call it a day. > If funds are an issue, then raise more. This is exactly the cancer that’s eating most modern services. Burn money, raise money, burn money, have investors holding you by the balls demanding profitability over a massively expensive inefficient system, shove ads everywhere, degrade experience. Add more haphazard money-pit feature to drive value. Burn more money. Rinse and repeat. > A simple MVP shouldn't have a massive team behind it anyways This is true, but not for a social media app that’s expecting (or wanting) hundreds of millions of free non-paying users. Opening the floodgates, then optimizing after the fact worked in the 2000s, but it doesn’t work today. It’s a good way to repeat and be stuck in the cycle above.
- treve 3y agoNew take on "I could build this in a weekend"
- 3y ago
- anderspitman 3y agoLot of negative comments here but IMO this is huge. The best way to keep anything commercial good in the long term is competition, and the only way to have competition with web services is if users can go somewhere else, which requires a portable identity/username and open protocols. Bluesky is currently the only platform offering both in a convenient package. Even Mastodon doesn't make it this easy[0]. [0]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
- Nova0G 3y agoWhen are we going to be able to USE BlueSky..? Looks like Meta has beaten Jack to the Punch and released their Twitter replacement... Who's to say anyone will wanna use BSky once people are integrated into Threads
- dkh 3y agoI must say, the number of people in here saying bluesky is dead because of Threads' overnight growth is surprising and upsetting. Believing all that matters is how fast they get users is hugely missing the point. Bluesky has been taking their time in order to get things right--and getting certain things right is very important. Twitter already exists; we need alternatives because things were handled wrong. For example, Bluesky right now is ironing out a fairly novel moderation system. They are doing this not only transparently, but with the input and active involvement of the users. This takes time and it is also wise to complete moderation systems before opening the app up to everyone. Ineffective (or nonexistent?!) moderation systems are one of the biggest issues people have with many/most platforms including Twitter, and it is more important that they get it right than they get a zillion users overnight. Crowning whichever one can "move faster and break things" as the winner is the wrong approach, and demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about the problems plaguing Twitter and other platforms. Honestly, Threads and Bluesky are barely comparable given how different they are philosophically and on a lot of very fundamental levels.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- c7b 3y agoOne concern: suppose Bluesky does take off - isn't that going to compound the existing problem with domaining?
- ryan29 3y agoI doubt it. There are so many TLDs now that everyone can have a reasonably decent domain on a thematic TLD. All of those have premium pricing schemes that are unattractive to domainers for the really good domains.
- moomoo11 3y agoI didn’t really understand the domain thing when I signed up with my invite. After that I never used it again. Honestly all these social media apps like Twitter suck. I never used Twitter nor social media much, probably won’t change. Personally, I’m out. Y’all have fun and enjoy.
- anttiharju 3y agoI'd like to have fun and enjoy, can you share an invite? My email's in my profile
- moomoo11 3y agoSorry I gave one like 2 days ago. I think it has a 14 day cool down. Hopefully someone else here can give you one and set you up today :)
- anttiharju 3y agoSomeone sent me one (Jay, the ceo? I'm confused - maybe I got it through the waiting list), but thank you :) Unfortunately went into my spam folder but happened to notice it
- shafyy 3y agoBluesky is going down the VC path, and we all know how this ends ups for social media companies. Sure, they'll try to monetize without ads. But it's unclear to me what kind of revenue stream would generate enough cash. Sure as hell it won't be this Namecheap thing. In my opinion, the only way to go for a social media company is to be a non-profit.
- DoItToMe81 3y agoNamecheap is the worst company possible for this, because it's trivial to trick them into removing domains. Here's a reminder that a troll managed to get them to remove domains, through Twitter, by claiming that they were run by Russians.
- corobo 3y agoCould you back that up? The irony of anyone accepting that Namecheap fell for a "trust me bro" with a source of "trust me bro" is funny, but I'd also like to read more
- DoItToMe81 3y agoCan't find the one about Russians, but I found one where a troll was reporting random sites for being "possibly suspicious", which were all falsely taken down without investigation (https://web.archive.org/web/20220204063105/https://twitter.com/Namecheap/status/1489485337885921284 https://web.archive.org/web/20220204063105/https://twitter.c...).
- n_ary 3y agoSomehow, this BlueSky reminds me of Okuna(previously Open.social). It was invite only, very enthusiastic community iniviting only handful sane(non-arehle) people and everyone was suggesting good features. Founders were committed to non-ad revenue via various premium features etc… and then slowly community died down slowly, posts stopped, early users inactive for months and one day it just closed door with a small message that it is hard to build social network etc etc… I hope BlueSky doesn’t go in the way of Okuna(and lot of similar ones before it).
- iamsaitam 3y agoPower move, Bluesky launches now in EU with open signups.
- hkt 3y agoIt is always a little bit bizarre to see things like this. Domains are generally for organisations, for good reason: they cost money to acquire, they're globally unique, and they cost money to run. Identity is a funny thing, and certainly online it is ambiguous because most of us think of it as being in some way absolute: we have our identities regardless of context, and we want our technology to reflect that. I'd argue in reality our identities are functions of association. Groups we're part of, etc. Online identity as-is is like that, but with a feudal relationship between the "domain administrators" and the people who associate with them. The right answer isn't to atomise identity (that's technically pretty hard to do anyway) but to make those identity-and-means-of-communication hosts into bonafide associations, owned by their members, operated for their benefit, and operated as constitutional democracies with rights to protect minorities and elections to the organisation's board, committees, or key executive positions. We in tech need to get past the idea that the social problems that have emerged from the internet have technical solutions. Maybe some do, but the vast majority do not.
- davidgerard 3y agolol, and I thought Mastodon was a conspiracy by Big Janky Off-Brand Domain Name. but really, Bluesky users have spent the past two months going wild with novelty domain names. You can pay $1 for the first year for all manner of stupid funny names, and people do. For anyone here that would be easy - but for non-techies you can see the use case for a service that does it for them. This really is just providing a convenient service that this specific userbase demonstrably wants. If anyone else wanted to do the same they could, nobody's stopping you. But this is an actual service for Bluesky's users.
- beepbooptheory 3y agoI don't understand the emphasis on "identity management" or "account portability". It has from the beginning been the single justification I have heard from the atproto people for reinventing the ActivityPub wheel. One thing that is good about the internet has always been that nobody needs to know you're a dog. That you can move between worlds and identities as much as you want. That there is a hard break between my identity, and my social media accounts. I don't want a social security number on the internet! This push here to decentralize oddly seems to amount to a kind of centralization of the one thing regular users probably dont want centralized! People like having alts, characters, fungible and plural accounts. Atproto argues that, in fact, this a problem to solve, and enough of one to justify creating an entire protocol to compete with activitypub. I am just not convinced of that pitch.
- agentgumshoe 3y agoThis all seems to be missing the point. What does using DNS for your identity do for your actual data? Your data is still going to be on whichever platform you log on to, and otherwise wouldn't we want to be able to make a unique ID for each service? Really, if you want a consistent, permanent ID, we might as well use our government IDs everywhere...
- paulgb 3y agoAn explicit goal of AT protocol is data portability. DNS gives you identity portability, since otherwise you’d still be locked in to the platform that owned your identity.
- jusoren 3y agoThats cool and all, but give me my invite already. Been on the waitlist since they first announced last year and still waiting for it till this day. I've tried the selfhostable pds and its definitely looking good, the ability to selfhost our data ourselves. Plus like the article promoted, the ability to link username to our own domain name.
- tonetheman 3y ago[dead]
- 65 3y agoSomewhat unrelated, but blueskyweb.xyz is the ugliest domain name I've ever seen for a legitimate tech company. Feels like a spam domain.
- pwpw 3y agoMy peer texted me his personal blog that is an xyz domain three separate times. Finally, he got frustrated and asked why I was ignoring his article he wrote that he was really proud of and was only responding to his other texts. It turns out T-Mobile blocks xyz domains outright over sms, which led to our awkward moment. We had a good laugh about it, but it made me realize that xyz domains are not reliable for even a personal blog (and also reaffirmed sms is a very poor medium for text communication).
- rchaud 3y agoIt's blocked on most corporate VPNs as well .
- rchaud 3y agoThe stench of "Web3" really ruined the .xyz TLD.
- case 3y agoFrom the blog post: > Bluesky offers an additional layer of privacy protection by acting as your domain registrar agent. We do not register your personal information with the WHOIS directory, which is a searchable database that holds information on domain ownership. So is Bluesky the registrant of these domains, not the end-user?
- Terretta 3y agoThat way, copyright holders or the government only have one letter to send to take you offline, not two.
- leach 3y agoBluesky is currently better than threads, technically. The content on Bluesky is lacking, i know it’s because of the invite only system, and that has its advantages and disadvantages but Bluesky is going to run into a problem soon. They obviously need content and users to stay alive, and the content is lacking. Currently it’s a very niche group of users who have a very distinct culture. They don’t leave much room for differing ideas. It will be interesting watching this play out. They are positioned in a way that can beat threads, but they need to drop the invite ASAP and manage their onboarding of new users. That means the culture will inevitably change, I’m not sure I see a way of it staying the same as normal people and more fringe people sign up. IMO they should prioritize content creators. Engaging content on the platform that’s rich will be a huge leg up when they open up. Helps too that currently i can’t even post a picture on threads without it crashing. Blue sky is definitely the more delightful sop to use.