15 ms·

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable decentralized social media

245 points by lawgimenez 3y ago

jes5199 3y ago
things you still can't do on Bluesky that you can do on Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon: * pin a post to your profile * disable reposts from an account you follow * edit a post
- josephg 3y ago
  True, but it’s only just publicly launched. Give them some time.
Ericson2314 3y ago
I'm always contrasting this with Matrix in my head. E.g reading https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2023/ https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... A lot of sort of economics/approach stuff contrasts to mull over in the background.
- Arathorn 3y ago
  I'd love to know what your line of thought is on this (from my pov as the author of that matrix blogpost). For instance, we tried to propose Matrix as the basis of bluesky (hence https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/) - but obviously they went and built atproto instead. Meanwhile, both projects have effectively taken VC funding (Element, founded by the core Matrix team has raised from VCs - although Matrix itself is governed by the independent non-profit Matrix.org Foundation). I'm honestly entirely sure how they contrast together :D
  - indigochill 3y ago
    TBH I'd be 100% more interested in Bluesky had they built it on Matrix since Matrix's decentralization makes a lot more sense to me and has more history behind it and battle-testing in real-world use cases like German government and military than AT.
    - josephg 3y ago
      Eh - they solve different problems. Bluesky is optimised to be able to aggregate likes across billions of tweets happening in a as-federated-as-possible way. That’s a hard technical problem. I don’t believe any existing federated solution can be “dropped in” to solve it. It’s tricky even in an entirely centralised system.
      - indigochill 3y ago
        > Bluesky is optimised to be able to aggregate likes across billions of tweets That might be part of the problem. It's self-evident why you need to do that if you're building Facebook or Twitter (a single platform where all the communication happens across a single graph), but that seems counter to how federation works (where everyone's social graph is different).
  - Ericson2314 3y ago
    A few things: - I think the revenue streams you all have from a Federated EU make an actually federated Matrix ecosystem much more likely :). - It's a pity that EU economic policy is so terrible, and constitutionally so. I bet Matrix's finances would be a in a much better position if European countries could run healthy deficits like the US does. - AFIAK their excuse was that Matrix didn't have account migration. I wonder if Matrix having had that would have made them use it, or they were looking for an excuse for NiH anyways. - Conversely, now that they *do* have it, it does make Matrix at some point getting it a bit more important.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      Transparent account migration is one of the most interesting parts of AT to me, as a user, so I for one am glad they went their own way. That said I don't really know Matrix at the protocol level, so I can't really speak to it, but just based off of what you said.
      - Arathorn 3y ago
        So Matrix also has account portability (almost) - https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/kegan/pseudo-ids/proposals/4014-pseudonymous-identities.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/keg... and https://github.com/devonh/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/cryptoIDs/proposals/4080-cryptographic-identities.md https://github.com/devonh/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/cryptoI..., implemented in Dendrite. Unfortunately dev is paused on it currently thanks to lack of $ though. The AP approach (prioritising portable identities over portable account data) is cute though, and perhaps we should have prioritised that as an alternative to fullblown cryptographic IDs & account portability.
        steveklabnik 3y ago
        Thanks for the context! I use Matrix daily, so I am interested in these details, I just haven't found the time to dig into things yet.
        Ericson2314 3y ago
- apitman 3y ago
  I've tried to love Matrix multiple times in the past 8 years or so. Sadly my current feeling is that the spec is simply too complicated to build reliable and performant systems on. Hopefully that feeling changes at some point. I really want it to be good.
  - Arathorn 3y ago
    i’d have been in danger of agreeing a year ago, but thankfully we proved otherwise with Element X: https://element.io/labs/element-x https://element.io/labs/element-x. Bit embarassing that we didn’t get there sooner, but human fallibility and all that.
kissgyorgy 3y ago
> to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. I think this is the most important factor that Fediverse (and Mastodon) got wrong. My prediction is that Bluesky will be successful because of ease of use, not because of the distributed nature. Most users don't care about being distributed at all.
- TylerE 3y ago
  I’ll go farther: for most users being distributed is actually worse. They don’t care about copyleft or “information wants to be free”. They want a feed that isn’t full of Nazis and that all their friends post on They don’t want to think about platforms, peering, distribution, server mutes, or any of that faff.
  - psionides 3y ago
    Personally, I haven't really seen any "Nazis" on Twitter that I keep hearing about (though that probably depends on the definition), I'm just excited about Bluesky because it has an open API that's not controlled by one dumb guy who can shut down whole businesses like Tapbots with a flip of a switch or decide that $100 per month is a fair price for "hobbyists" to use it... but I guess I'm probably an outlier.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      There a tons of truly vile fediverse instances.
      - hypocrticalCons 3y ago
        But fediverse isn't run by one man that personally uses his position to push those opinions.
      - runarberg 3y ago
        I think the difference is that moderation is easier on the fediverse (as well as on Bluesky). If you want that vile content you kind of have to either be in that circle your self, or you have to explicitly look for it. On Bluesky there are popular mute and blocklists, hateful accounts get mass blocked, and engagements around hateful content is diminished (not proliferated like on Twitter). The Fediverse is even more so, where whole servers are mass blocked by because hateful content is allowed to fester.
deleted 3y ago
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Osmose 3y ago
Is there a good reason this is formatted like a scientific paper and submitted to arxiv besides "it makes this ad look more legit and innovative"?
- riffic 3y ago
  historically these kinds of things are submitted to the RFC editor but I suppose the team had a good reason for doing it this way.
  - josephg 3y ago
    RFCs are used by IETF. I don’t think the Bluesky team is proposing an internet standard just yet. Nor should they - that’s not quite what the IETF is for.
    - zaik 3y ago
      Why not? The IETF defines many internet standards on the application layer. SMTP and IMAP for Email, XMPP for instant messaging, CalDAV for synchronization of calendars, ...
      - josephg 3y ago
        I had a chat with one of the IETF chairs about this a few years ago. He said the value the IETF provides is giving independent teams/companies a room to talk about how a protocol should work, so they can make their implementations compatible. If a protocol only has one vendor, the IETF doesn't add any value and isn't really interested. If bluesky ends up getting implemented by multiple vendors, then the IETF might make sense. But its a bit early for that at this point. I suspect the bluesky team might also be able to make big changes to the protocol in private for the time being, so they can iterate rapidly. Iterating on a protocol at the IETF would be way slower. The IETF usually takes years to publish big, complex protocols like this. Look how long it took http3 to work its way through the pipeline.
    - riffic 3y ago
PenguinCoder 3y ago
This really doesn't belong on Arxiv. Also, the at protocol doesn't bring anything _better_ to the federation aspect. In fact it does quite a few things worse and seems to he different just for the sake of not being ActivityPub. Like the concepts of being nomadic identity but not really. Zot protocol gets that part right. It's trying to be the solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and doing it _worse_ than AP _at least its not AP!_
- bowsamic 3y ago
  arXiv allows almost anything that isn't blatant crackpot science. If you want some kind of quality control you should look elsewhere
davidy123 3y ago
There is a good analysis here: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111885148573895886 https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111885148573895886
- pfraze 3y ago
  This analysis is incredibly incorrect. Relays are not fixed. There can be as many relays as anybody wants to run. There are backlinks. There are ways to dereference a PDS from a username.
  - davidy123 3y ago
    I don't think it is contradicting the first part, but I was wondering about the second part since it is based on DIDs. I think it adds some important notes past that.
  - usuario123 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - usenetguy 3y ago
      lmao bro, but it's underreported, wait until the average people discover what is did and that they have one which is immutable
edavis 3y ago
I have been poking around bluesky and atproto as nothing more than an interested developer since around May 2023. I certainly don't know everything, but I've exercised most aspects of the protocol by now (firehose, custom feeds, sandbox federation, etc). If you've always wondered something about this platform/protocol and want the opinion of a non-team member, ask away.
- evbogue 3y ago
  When you're developing as a third party can you interface with their protocol while also generating your own public/private keypairs?
  - whyrusleeping 3y ago
    "Kinda" and "Soon", the soon part is that interactions with the site are signed by a key thats usually held for you by your PDS (Personal Data Server), this month we are opening things up more so you can run your own PDS, and thus use your own keys. The Kinda part is that your identity by default is backed by a DID that delegates authority to specific keypairs. The keypair that your PDS uses to sign is included in there automatically, but on account creation you can currently set a backup keypair that allows you to manually sign identity operations.
    - evbogue 3y ago
      This would be very cool. Thank you to the team for exploring in this direction.
    - edavis 3y ago
      I realize this may already be on the roadmap for after open federation, but I would love some sort of "bluesky for the truly paranoid (affectionate)" guide that explained soup to nuts how to participate in the network by running your own PDS and using did:web for identity. An answer to the question: I don't trust plc.directory for my identity and I don't trust the bsky.social PDS to host my data but I want to participate — how do I do that? I have probably the least understanding of how this part of the protocol operates. Part of that has to do with the new (to me) concepts and the rest is open federation not being in place. I think something like this would be really useful and would prove your bonafides to others that Bluesky PBC is serious about being billionaire-proof. Congrats on opening up registration!
steveklabnik 3y ago
I am still tremendously bullish on AT, as well as BlueSky. I think AT solves a lot of problems that have plagued federated systems, and I think BlueSky’s focus on product concerns first and technical concerns second, while somehow still nailing the tech, is the right way to go.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  When it comes to federation, you really need to focus on the technical concerns first...
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    Right, which is why the separation here is important. The user-facing app can focus on product concerns, the protocol it's built on top of can focus on technical concerns. The two can then feed back into each other in a virtuous cycle.
  - btbuildem 3y ago
    I think that's a narrow perspective. When Twitter was sabotaged, lots of people made noise about moving to Mastodon - but even with all that momentum, the adoption was less than lukewarm. The issues were not technical, but of usability. The average person is less than interested in the inner workings of a thing, what make a service "better" in their eyes is how easy it is to use. Federated social media is not it.
    - Xerox9213 3y ago
      I think what matters even more to most people is not even how easy it is to use, but who else is using it.
      - steveklabnik 3y ago
        These two things are connected: if something is easier to use, it is more likely that the others you want using the thing are going to be on there. Doesn't mean they will be, of course.
danso 3y ago
Bluesky seems to operate pretty well with 3M+ users and 140M posts [0], but I'm fascinated to learn how the decentralized systems would scale if even just the Bluesky reaches within an order of magnitude of Twitter's scale (~500M tweets per day). Or from a behavioral perspective, what kind of ecosystem will evolve when the API has (afaik) no gatekeeping. The fact that anyone can see any other user's blocklist (both who they're blocking AND who's blocking them) probably has had at least a slight effect on interactions. [0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
- behindsight 3y ago
  Minor heads up for that site admin, typo of posters at the bottom: > Top 25 Poasters
  - wmf 3y ago
    That may not be a typo.
someone4958923 3y ago
BlueSky is also now open for public [0], in case someone missed it. [0] https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-06-2024-join-bluesky https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-06-2024-join-bluesky
- secondcoming 3y ago
  Unfortunately requires a mobile phone number to register
IvyMike 3y ago
The AT protocol? Gonna start typing Hayes modem commands into this thing and see what happens.
- guyzero 3y ago
  Exactly! I know naming is hard, but there had to be a better choice here. +++ ATH
  - davidw 3y ago
    I think we're just old... that's what came to mind for me, too.
jes5199 3y ago
I would love a side-by-side comparison of AT and ActivityPub. Shouldn't it be possible to build a translator between them?
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  It's not exactly what you're asking about, but there's been good discussion on this on HN before, like the sub-threads of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35881905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35881905
dartharva 3y ago
Why does no social network try to take the HN route towards post ranking and moderation where bad posts simply get faded and eventually [dead] by user votes and moderator flagging? HN's way of bestowing user privileges based on engagement and ensuring high quality of content is so awesome I earnestly wish all other social networks were like it. It incentivizes all the right things and prevents abuse so effortlessly with such a tiny team that it's remarkable.
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  because said social network would have 0 posts that are at all controversial.
- organsnyder 3y ago
  HN relies on a very engaged professional moderation team. I don't see how that could scale as large as the major social networks. Reddit has a similar approach, with varying degrees of success (often depending on the community and moderation team of the particular subreddit).
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    It actually has only one: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... Though one who does a stellar job and is amazingly helpful when you contact him. I think he's the main reason why this community still teaches me something new every day. I agree crowdsourcing reports like on HN won't work on more mainstream platforms though. Because it only works if the vast majority of the community is sane, helpful and caring. Unfortunately the cross-section of general society doesn't match that profile anymore. Speaking as a citizen of a country where 24% voted for right-wing extremists in the last election... :'( I'm pleasantly surprised HN is still so nice and inspiring to curiosity in this adverse societal climate.
    - dartharva 3y ago
      I don't understand how HN's community is distinct from the community on any other social network. This is a public site, and anyone can make an account and post whatever they want. You do see several attempted spam comments on many posts here, it's just that they rapidly get faded to obscurity.
swozey 3y ago
I just made my bsky account, and I know I shouldn't be surprised I guess but.. I can't believe it looks exactly like twitter. I don't know what it'd be like but I expected some newer different ui/ux.
- danabramov 3y ago
  We'd like to experiment with novel UX approaches in the future, but for now there is a lot of value in being familiar to at least one audience, and in reaching parity with the workflows they're used to. Bluesky is still quite a bit behind Twitter in terms of features. People in the community can already experiment with building novel UX in third-party clients — see https://www.docs.bsky.app/ https://www.docs.bsky.app/ for how to build one. Historically, most Twitter UX innovations were codifying existing user behavior (e.g. RT and QT) so I wonder if a similar careful approach could work here.
zamalek 3y ago
It's bizarre that this is an arxiv post instead of a IEEE-style RFC (or an actual RFC, why not). In my experience, the RFC format makes implementation extremely simple - where this comes across as a borderline useless PR stunt. Their official spec is also pretty bad - I remember walking away from it a while back, and a brief skim reminded me why (beyond the style of the document): > These specifications cover most details as implemented in Bluesky's reference implementation.
- riffic 3y ago
  > IEEE-style RFC IETF, and they do have a process for independent submissions: https://www.rfc-editor.org/about/independent/ https://www.rfc-editor.org/about/independent/
russdpale 3y ago
Ill pass, it's difficult to trust and give my time to something with Dorsey at the helm. Coming from mastodon, Im also confused, does bluesky have servers like mastodon? Because honestly being able to join a server that is aligned with my personal beliefs and actively blocks harmful users and servers is really awesome. Like I don't care about your freedom of speech, I really just want to be able to block trolls and fascists from my feed.
- wmf 3y ago
  Dorsey isn't involved in Bluesky. Bluesky has servers (PDSes) but they're nothing like Mastodon. You can curate a community on Bluesky by following people or using custom feeds.
  - russdpale 3y ago
    It says on wikipedia that he sits on the board.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  To add on what the sibling said, here's BlueSky's moderation report for last year: https://bsky.social/about/blog/01-16-2024-moderation-2023 https://bsky.social/about/blog/01-16-2024-moderation-2023 The verge reported that about half of their 40 employees are on moderation and user support. BlueSky absolutely gives you tools to block fascists. Including things like "I want to use this moderation list another user who I trust created so I don't even have to do the work myself."
  - russdpale 3y ago
    Cool, thanks, I appreciate the information. Perhaps I will give it a go.
epaulson 3y ago
One of the long-standing challenges in the federated identity space has been that most of the solutions are built around domain names, which are a pain for most users to create on their own. There's a sense that people would prefer email addresses as their identifiers, but without some server help that's hard to do. The WebFinger protocol works well for translating email addresses into something that could be used for federated data servers, but alas most of the big email providers (ala gmail) don't participate in WebFinger. A while back Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick built out a protocol called 'Web FistBump' that could bring WebFinger to people who's email providers to support it. It was a clever hack with DKIM - you emailed their webfist.org server with what you wanted to be your Webfinger info, and because Gmail signed the message with DKIM anyone could verify the message. The webfist.org server just proxied WebFinger requests into lookups for those signed emails. Even better, because it's just a signed email you can treat it as a blob and have a pool of different resolvers do the proxying, kinda like a blockchain. I think there was a post from Brad somewhere that estimated that the total data needed if everyone in the world used WebFistBump for storing a blob was in the low 100s of GB, which is pretty managable for a wider community to keep online. I need to read up on DIDs but it feels like DIDs just standardize on what the message format should be that would come back from something like WebFinger/WebFistbump, but if WebFistbump were actually up and running, it could make WebFinger more widely available. (Alas, I think the webfist.org server has been shut down but maybe they could flip it back on!) https://www.onebigfluke.com/2013/06/bootstrapping-webfinger-with-webfist.html https://www.onebigfluke.com/2013/06/bootstrapping-webfinger-...
SkyMarshal 3y ago
I'm curious whether their long closed Beta helped them or harmed them. Their invite-only beta lasted 1yr, from feb 2023 to today. My sense is that the "exclusivity" style launch that Facebook and Gmail used successfully is pretty much played out and ineffective now. All it does is kill broad interest in your platform right when a deluge of users into your new social network is most needed and valuable. My sense was Bluesky should have done a quick semi-open beta of no more than 3-months just as a last bug and scalability test, and then opened to the public. Make it invite-only, but distribute invites liberally, make sure anyone who wants one has one. Interest then was higher, other options were still in development or early stages. Every month of delay was a month people could find other alternatives, and they delayed a year. Then again I haven't been following it that closely. Any HN'ers that have been following it closely since last year have an opinion on this?
- wmf 3y ago
  IMO the point of Bluesky is to be decentralized so all the users they acquire before decentralizing don't count.
- Sikul 3y ago
  It gave Musk more time to destroy Twitter.
  - namlem 3y ago
    It gave Zuck more time to build Threads
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >Every month of delay was a month people could find other alternatives I always find it weird when people apply the product logic to what is an ecosystem / network / protocol. If BlueSky, mastodon or any other combination of open systems succeeds it's going to be like Linux. Slowly eating proprietary systems inside out, simultaneously while the old stuff keeps being around. Inherent to the entire logic of decentralization is that people switching to alternatives is not bad. That there's bridges between loosely coupled networks. If people treat BlueSky just like 'an app' that needs to be timed like an iphone launch that suggests people are missing what the alternative to closed platforms is about.
unboxingelf 3y ago
Bluesky is not decentralized. It requires a phone number to sign up and has a CEO. The only thing remotely decentralized about it is the ambition of federation. If you want a decentralized social network, checkout nostr or mastadon. And of those two, only nostr is censorship resistant.
david_shi 3y ago
Is anyone here on Farcaster? farcaster.xyz
mort96 3y ago
I will never read the words "AT protocol" and not think AT commands sent to a modem.
James_K 3y ago
I don't really understand the whole DID thing. It seems as if the same thing could be accomplished with a public/private key pair (users are identified by the public key and content is signed). What is the actual benefit of having these only hosted in a central server or over DNS? Other than that I very much like this. I have long thought that the ideal form of social media would be a combination of static hosting combined with an indexer – essentially a more accessible version of web-hosting.
myaccountonhn 3y ago
> Blocking actions are also currently public This + lack of any privacy is quite detrimental, hope they find a way to fix this.

245 points by lawgimenez 3y ago

things you still can't do on Bluesky that you can do on Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon: * pin a post to your profile * disable reposts from an account you follow * edit a post

josephg 3y ago
True, but it’s only just publicly launched. Give them some time.

Ericson2314 3y ago

I'm always contrasting this with Matrix in my head. E.g reading https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2023/ https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... A lot of sort of economics/approach stuff contrasts to mull over in the background.

Arathorn 3y ago
I'd love to know what your line of thought is on this (from my pov as the author of that matrix blogpost). For instance, we tried to propose Matrix as the basis of bluesky (hence https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/) - but obviously they went and built atproto instead. Meanwhile, both projects have effectively taken VC funding (Element, founded by the core Matrix team has raised from VCs - although Matrix itself is governed by the independent non-profit Matrix.org Foundation). I'm honestly entirely sure how they contrast together :D
- indigochill 3y ago
  TBH I'd be 100% more interested in Bluesky had they built it on Matrix since Matrix's decentralization makes a lot more sense to me and has more history behind it and battle-testing in real-world use cases like German government and military than AT.
  - josephg 3y ago
    Eh - they solve different problems. Bluesky is optimised to be able to aggregate likes across billions of tweets happening in a as-federated-as-possible way. That’s a hard technical problem. I don’t believe any existing federated solution can be “dropped in” to solve it. It’s tricky even in an entirely centralised system.
    - indigochill 3y ago
      > Bluesky is optimised to be able to aggregate likes across billions of tweets That might be part of the problem. It's self-evident why you need to do that if you're building Facebook or Twitter (a single platform where all the communication happens across a single graph), but that seems counter to how federation works (where everyone's social graph is different).
- Ericson2314 3y ago
  A few things: - I think the revenue streams you all have from a Federated EU make an actually federated Matrix ecosystem much more likely :). - It's a pity that EU economic policy is so terrible, and constitutionally so. I bet Matrix's finances would be a in a much better position if European countries could run healthy deficits like the US does. - AFIAK their excuse was that Matrix didn't have account migration. I wonder if Matrix having had that would have made them use it, or they were looking for an excuse for NiH anyways. - Conversely, now that they *do* have it, it does make Matrix at some point getting it a bit more important.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    Transparent account migration is one of the most interesting parts of AT to me, as a user, so I for one am glad they went their own way. That said I don't really know Matrix at the protocol level, so I can't really speak to it, but just based off of what you said.
    - Arathorn 3y ago
      So Matrix also has account portability (almost) - https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/kegan/pseudo-ids/proposals/4014-pseudonymous-identities.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/keg... and https://github.com/devonh/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/cryptoIDs/proposals/4080-cryptographic-identities.md https://github.com/devonh/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/cryptoI..., implemented in Dendrite. Unfortunately dev is paused on it currently thanks to lack of $ though. The AP approach (prioritising portable identities over portable account data) is cute though, and perhaps we should have prioritised that as an alternative to fullblown cryptographic IDs & account portability.
      - steveklabnik 3y ago
        Thanks for the context! I use Matrix daily, so I am interested in these details, I just haven't found the time to dig into things yet.
      - Ericson2314 3y ago
apitman 3y ago
I've tried to love Matrix multiple times in the past 8 years or so. Sadly my current feeling is that the spec is simply too complicated to build reliable and performant systems on. Hopefully that feeling changes at some point. I really want it to be good.
- Arathorn 3y ago
  i’d have been in danger of agreeing a year ago, but thankfully we proved otherwise with Element X: https://element.io/labs/element-x https://element.io/labs/element-x. Bit embarassing that we didn’t get there sooner, but human fallibility and all that.

kissgyorgy 3y ago

> to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. I think this is the most important factor that Fediverse (and Mastodon) got wrong. My prediction is that Bluesky will be successful because of ease of use, not because of the distributed nature. Most users don't care about being distributed at all.

TylerE 3y ago
I’ll go farther: for most users being distributed is actually worse. They don’t care about copyleft or “information wants to be free”. They want a feed that isn’t full of Nazis and that all their friends post on They don’t want to think about platforms, peering, distribution, server mutes, or any of that faff.
- psionides 3y ago
  Personally, I haven't really seen any "Nazis" on Twitter that I keep hearing about (though that probably depends on the definition), I'm just excited about Bluesky because it has an open API that's not controlled by one dumb guy who can shut down whole businesses like Tapbots with a flip of a switch or decide that $100 per month is a fair price for "hobbyists" to use it... but I guess I'm probably an outlier.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    There a tons of truly vile fediverse instances.
    - hypocrticalCons 3y ago
      But fediverse isn't run by one man that personally uses his position to push those opinions.
    - runarberg 3y ago
      I think the difference is that moderation is easier on the fediverse (as well as on Bluesky). If you want that vile content you kind of have to either be in that circle your self, or you have to explicitly look for it. On Bluesky there are popular mute and blocklists, hateful accounts get mass blocked, and engagements around hateful content is diminished (not proliferated like on Twitter). The Fediverse is even more so, where whole servers are mass blocked by because hateful content is allowed to fester.

deleted 3y ago

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Osmose 3y ago

Is there a good reason this is formatted like a scientific paper and submitted to arxiv besides "it makes this ad look more legit and innovative"?

riffic 3y ago
historically these kinds of things are submitted to the RFC editor but I suppose the team had a good reason for doing it this way.
- josephg 3y ago
  RFCs are used by IETF. I don’t think the Bluesky team is proposing an internet standard just yet. Nor should they - that’s not quite what the IETF is for.
  - zaik 3y ago
    Why not? The IETF defines many internet standards on the application layer. SMTP and IMAP for Email, XMPP for instant messaging, CalDAV for synchronization of calendars, ...
    - josephg 3y ago
      I had a chat with one of the IETF chairs about this a few years ago. He said the value the IETF provides is giving independent teams/companies a room to talk about how a protocol should work, so they can make their implementations compatible. If a protocol only has one vendor, the IETF doesn't add any value and isn't really interested. If bluesky ends up getting implemented by multiple vendors, then the IETF might make sense. But its a bit early for that at this point. I suspect the bluesky team might also be able to make big changes to the protocol in private for the time being, so they can iterate rapidly. Iterating on a protocol at the IETF would be way slower. The IETF usually takes years to publish big, complex protocols like this. Look how long it took http3 to work its way through the pipeline.
  - riffic 3y ago

PenguinCoder 3y ago

This really doesn't belong on Arxiv. Also, the at protocol doesn't bring anything _better_ to the federation aspect. In fact it does quite a few things worse and seems to he different just for the sake of not being ActivityPub. Like the concepts of being nomadic identity but not really. Zot protocol gets that part right. It's trying to be the solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and doing it _worse_ than AP _at least its not AP!_

bowsamic 3y ago
arXiv allows almost anything that isn't blatant crackpot science. If you want some kind of quality control you should look elsewhere

davidy123 3y ago

There is a good analysis here: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111885148573895886 https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111885148573895886

pfraze 3y ago
This analysis is incredibly incorrect. Relays are not fixed. There can be as many relays as anybody wants to run. There are backlinks. There are ways to dereference a PDS from a username.
- davidy123 3y ago
  I don't think it is contradicting the first part, but I was wondering about the second part since it is based on DIDs. I think it adds some important notes past that.
- usuario123 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - usenetguy 3y ago
    lmao bro, but it's underreported, wait until the average people discover what is did and that they have one which is immutable

edavis 3y ago

I have been poking around bluesky and atproto as nothing more than an interested developer since around May 2023. I certainly don't know everything, but I've exercised most aspects of the protocol by now (firehose, custom feeds, sandbox federation, etc). If you've always wondered something about this platform/protocol and want the opinion of a non-team member, ask away.

evbogue 3y ago
When you're developing as a third party can you interface with their protocol while also generating your own public/private keypairs?
- whyrusleeping 3y ago
  "Kinda" and "Soon", the soon part is that interactions with the site are signed by a key thats usually held for you by your PDS (Personal Data Server), this month we are opening things up more so you can run your own PDS, and thus use your own keys. The Kinda part is that your identity by default is backed by a DID that delegates authority to specific keypairs. The keypair that your PDS uses to sign is included in there automatically, but on account creation you can currently set a backup keypair that allows you to manually sign identity operations.
  - evbogue 3y ago
    This would be very cool. Thank you to the team for exploring in this direction.
  - edavis 3y ago
    I realize this may already be on the roadmap for after open federation, but I would love some sort of "bluesky for the truly paranoid (affectionate)" guide that explained soup to nuts how to participate in the network by running your own PDS and using did:web for identity. An answer to the question: I don't trust plc.directory for my identity and I don't trust the bsky.social PDS to host my data but I want to participate — how do I do that? I have probably the least understanding of how this part of the protocol operates. Part of that has to do with the new (to me) concepts and the rest is open federation not being in place. I think something like this would be really useful and would prove your bonafides to others that Bluesky PBC is serious about being billionaire-proof. Congrats on opening up registration!

steveklabnik 3y ago

I am still tremendously bullish on AT, as well as BlueSky. I think AT solves a lot of problems that have plagued federated systems, and I think BlueSky’s focus on product concerns first and technical concerns second, while somehow still nailing the tech, is the right way to go.

candiddevmike 3y ago
When it comes to federation, you really need to focus on the technical concerns first...
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  Right, which is why the separation here is important. The user-facing app can focus on product concerns, the protocol it's built on top of can focus on technical concerns. The two can then feed back into each other in a virtuous cycle.
- btbuildem 3y ago
  I think that's a narrow perspective. When Twitter was sabotaged, lots of people made noise about moving to Mastodon - but even with all that momentum, the adoption was less than lukewarm. The issues were not technical, but of usability. The average person is less than interested in the inner workings of a thing, what make a service "better" in their eyes is how easy it is to use. Federated social media is not it.
  - Xerox9213 3y ago
    I think what matters even more to most people is not even how easy it is to use, but who else is using it.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      These two things are connected: if something is easier to use, it is more likely that the others you want using the thing are going to be on there. Doesn't mean they will be, of course.

danso 3y ago

Bluesky seems to operate pretty well with 3M+ users and 140M posts [0], but I'm fascinated to learn how the decentralized systems would scale if even just the Bluesky reaches within an order of magnitude of Twitter's scale (~500M tweets per day). Or from a behavioral perspective, what kind of ecosystem will evolve when the API has (afaik) no gatekeeping. The fact that anyone can see any other user's blocklist (both who they're blocking AND who's blocking them) probably has had at least a slight effect on interactions. [0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

behindsight 3y ago
Minor heads up for that site admin, typo of posters at the bottom: > Top 25 Poasters
- wmf 3y ago
  That may not be a typo.

someone4958923 3y ago

BlueSky is also now open for public [0], in case someone missed it. [0] https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-06-2024-join-bluesky https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-06-2024-join-bluesky

secondcoming 3y ago
Unfortunately requires a mobile phone number to register

IvyMike 3y ago

The AT protocol? Gonna start typing Hayes modem commands into this thing and see what happens.

guyzero 3y ago
Exactly! I know naming is hard, but there had to be a better choice here. +++ ATH
- davidw 3y ago
  I think we're just old... that's what came to mind for me, too.

jes5199 3y ago

I would love a side-by-side comparison of AT and ActivityPub. Shouldn't it be possible to build a translator between them?

steveklabnik 3y ago
It's not exactly what you're asking about, but there's been good discussion on this on HN before, like the sub-threads of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35881905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35881905

dartharva 3y ago

Why does no social network try to take the HN route towards post ranking and moderation where bad posts simply get faded and eventually [dead] by user votes and moderator flagging? HN's way of bestowing user privileges based on engagement and ensuring high quality of content is so awesome I earnestly wish all other social networks were like it. It incentivizes all the right things and prevents abuse so effortlessly with such a tiny team that it's remarkable.

sleepybrett 3y ago
because said social network would have 0 posts that are at all controversial.
organsnyder 3y ago
HN relies on a very engaged professional moderation team. I don't see how that could scale as large as the major social networks. Reddit has a similar approach, with varying degrees of success (often depending on the community and moderation team of the particular subreddit).
- wkat4242 3y ago
  It actually has only one: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... Though one who does a stellar job and is amazingly helpful when you contact him. I think he's the main reason why this community still teaches me something new every day. I agree crowdsourcing reports like on HN won't work on more mainstream platforms though. Because it only works if the vast majority of the community is sane, helpful and caring. Unfortunately the cross-section of general society doesn't match that profile anymore. Speaking as a citizen of a country where 24% voted for right-wing extremists in the last election... :'( I'm pleasantly surprised HN is still so nice and inspiring to curiosity in this adverse societal climate.
  - dartharva 3y ago
    I don't understand how HN's community is distinct from the community on any other social network. This is a public site, and anyone can make an account and post whatever they want. You do see several attempted spam comments on many posts here, it's just that they rapidly get faded to obscurity.

swozey 3y ago

I just made my bsky account, and I know I shouldn't be surprised I guess but.. I can't believe it looks exactly like twitter. I don't know what it'd be like but I expected some newer different ui/ux.

danabramov 3y ago
We'd like to experiment with novel UX approaches in the future, but for now there is a lot of value in being familiar to at least one audience, and in reaching parity with the workflows they're used to. Bluesky is still quite a bit behind Twitter in terms of features. People in the community can already experiment with building novel UX in third-party clients — see https://www.docs.bsky.app/ https://www.docs.bsky.app/ for how to build one. Historically, most Twitter UX innovations were codifying existing user behavior (e.g. RT and QT) so I wonder if a similar careful approach could work here.

zamalek 3y ago

It's bizarre that this is an arxiv post instead of a IEEE-style RFC (or an actual RFC, why not). In my experience, the RFC format makes implementation extremely simple - where this comes across as a borderline useless PR stunt. Their official spec is also pretty bad - I remember walking away from it a while back, and a brief skim reminded me why (beyond the style of the document): > These specifications cover most details as implemented in Bluesky's reference implementation.

riffic 3y ago
> IEEE-style RFC IETF, and they do have a process for independent submissions: https://www.rfc-editor.org/about/independent/ https://www.rfc-editor.org/about/independent/

russdpale 3y ago

Ill pass, it's difficult to trust and give my time to something with Dorsey at the helm. Coming from mastodon, Im also confused, does bluesky have servers like mastodon? Because honestly being able to join a server that is aligned with my personal beliefs and actively blocks harmful users and servers is really awesome. Like I don't care about your freedom of speech, I really just want to be able to block trolls and fascists from my feed.

wmf 3y ago
Dorsey isn't involved in Bluesky. Bluesky has servers (PDSes) but they're nothing like Mastodon. You can curate a community on Bluesky by following people or using custom feeds.
- russdpale 3y ago
  It says on wikipedia that he sits on the board.
steveklabnik 3y ago
To add on what the sibling said, here's BlueSky's moderation report for last year: https://bsky.social/about/blog/01-16-2024-moderation-2023 https://bsky.social/about/blog/01-16-2024-moderation-2023 The verge reported that about half of their 40 employees are on moderation and user support. BlueSky absolutely gives you tools to block fascists. Including things like "I want to use this moderation list another user who I trust created so I don't even have to do the work myself."
- russdpale 3y ago
  Cool, thanks, I appreciate the information. Perhaps I will give it a go.

epaulson 3y ago

One of the long-standing challenges in the federated identity space has been that most of the solutions are built around domain names, which are a pain for most users to create on their own. There's a sense that people would prefer email addresses as their identifiers, but without some server help that's hard to do. The WebFinger protocol works well for translating email addresses into something that could be used for federated data servers, but alas most of the big email providers (ala gmail) don't participate in WebFinger. A while back Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick built out a protocol called 'Web FistBump' that could bring WebFinger to people who's email providers to support it. It was a clever hack with DKIM - you emailed their webfist.org server with what you wanted to be your Webfinger info, and because Gmail signed the message with DKIM anyone could verify the message. The webfist.org server just proxied WebFinger requests into lookups for those signed emails. Even better, because it's just a signed email you can treat it as a blob and have a pool of different resolvers do the proxying, kinda like a blockchain. I think there was a post from Brad somewhere that estimated that the total data needed if everyone in the world used WebFistBump for storing a blob was in the low 100s of GB, which is pretty managable for a wider community to keep online. I need to read up on DIDs but it feels like DIDs just standardize on what the message format should be that would come back from something like WebFinger/WebFistbump, but if WebFistbump were actually up and running, it could make WebFinger more widely available. (Alas, I think the webfist.org server has been shut down but maybe they could flip it back on!) https://www.onebigfluke.com/2013/06/bootstrapping-webfinger-with-webfist.html https://www.onebigfluke.com/2013/06/bootstrapping-webfinger-...

SkyMarshal 3y ago

I'm curious whether their long closed Beta helped them or harmed them. Their invite-only beta lasted 1yr, from feb 2023 to today. My sense is that the "exclusivity" style launch that Facebook and Gmail used successfully is pretty much played out and ineffective now. All it does is kill broad interest in your platform right when a deluge of users into your new social network is most needed and valuable. My sense was Bluesky should have done a quick semi-open beta of no more than 3-months just as a last bug and scalability test, and then opened to the public. Make it invite-only, but distribute invites liberally, make sure anyone who wants one has one. Interest then was higher, other options were still in development or early stages. Every month of delay was a month people could find other alternatives, and they delayed a year. Then again I haven't been following it that closely. Any HN'ers that have been following it closely since last year have an opinion on this?

wmf 3y ago
IMO the point of Bluesky is to be decentralized so all the users they acquire before decentralizing don't count.
Sikul 3y ago
It gave Musk more time to destroy Twitter.
- namlem 3y ago
  It gave Zuck more time to build Threads
Barrin92 3y ago
>Every month of delay was a month people could find other alternatives I always find it weird when people apply the product logic to what is an ecosystem / network / protocol. If BlueSky, mastodon or any other combination of open systems succeeds it's going to be like Linux. Slowly eating proprietary systems inside out, simultaneously while the old stuff keeps being around. Inherent to the entire logic of decentralization is that people switching to alternatives is not bad. That there's bridges between loosely coupled networks. If people treat BlueSky just like 'an app' that needs to be timed like an iphone launch that suggests people are missing what the alternative to closed platforms is about.

unboxingelf 3y ago

Bluesky is not decentralized. It requires a phone number to sign up and has a CEO. The only thing remotely decentralized about it is the ambition of federation. If you want a decentralized social network, checkout nostr or mastadon. And of those two, only nostr is censorship resistant.

david_shi 3y ago

Is anyone here on Farcaster? farcaster.xyz

mort96 3y ago

I will never read the words "AT protocol" and not think AT commands sent to a modem.

James_K 3y ago

I don't really understand the whole DID thing. It seems as if the same thing could be accomplished with a public/private key pair (users are identified by the public key and content is signed). What is the actual benefit of having these only hosted in a central server or over DNS? Other than that I very much like this. I have long thought that the ideal form of social media would be a combination of static hosting combined with an indexer – essentially a more accessible version of web-hosting.

myaccountonhn 3y ago

> Blocking actions are also currently public This + lack of any privacy is quite detrimental, hope they find a way to fix this.