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1. "Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudd

1. "Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements." https://atproto.com/guides/faq https://atproto.com/guides/faq 2. Jack Dorsey is on the board but has no day-to-day role in the company. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and is in control. The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil. 3. Bluesky has a different approach in many ways. One of the biggest differences is that Bluesky is (IMHO) the first decentralized social network that is highly usable by regular non-technical users.

novemp 3y ago
[dead]
shafyy 3y ago
I'm more worried about the financing of Bluesky. You have taken VC money, and we all know what that means - growth at all costs. > The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil. I feel like we have seen this movie play out a few times. There are always way to close things down the road. For example, I can imagine that even with federation there will be a power law of distribution, and there's a high chance that most users will end up on official Bluesky servers. This means that you could one they stop federating, and most users would be backed in a walled garden. Sure, the protocol would be out there in the open, but it wouldn't matter because overnight it would lose most of its users. I trust that you and the initial team has genuine motivation not to do this. Forgive me for being cynical, but history does reapeat itself. I think the only antidote against this is regulation, as we're seing now with the DMA in EU that forces WhatsApp and other gate keepers to open their platform to other clients.
- Kinrany 3y ago
  > There are always way to close things down the road. If nothing else, Bitcoin is a successful existence proof. Maintaining control may be easier, but it's safe to say that Satoshi wouldn't be able to take control back now.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - treyd 3y ago
    Bluesky is not structured the way Bitcoin was structured. It's nonsensical to make prescriptive statements based on that comparison.
- AJ007 3y ago
  The big lesson to me has been for a platform to be open, there must be both third party clients and third party servers. A service that has only one backend server that no one else can run (looking at you Signal) isn't ok anymore. Even worse, Twitter or Reddit being "open" because they have an API: that's all bullshit, and you are setting yourself up to be rug pulled. We don't need to hear these lies anymore and it's time to move on from the services making either of those claims. I'm waiting for a little more progress and third party control to make a judgement on Bluesky. Users should think of this in terms of buy in cost. If you use a particular platform for 10 years, and build a community on it, you can take advantage of that and you get a mostly free service. But at some point the bill comes, and you move on. However, I keep thinking that the reason why some of those open third party protocols - even including email - "suck" is because so much of the time and focus has been on these proprietary, commercial communications platforms. I feel so old now I went from thinking email is a terrible way of communicating to, actually Facebook is far worse. Instead of seeing updates from my friends I'm looking at a firehose of noise of things I can't control and have zero interest in. Nearly 20 years later, I use e-mail every day and Facebook 0. Veering off-topic, but seeing conversations running for many years over the standards implementation and feature parity of the clients and servers both for XMPP and Matrix (meaning each separately, not inter-operating XMPP and Matrix, but rather each protocol has many servers and many clients, all trying to keep up with a moving protocol spec without breaking backwards compatibility), I have to laugh that a piece of legislation can just magically open the doors a some potentially very convoluted and continuously changing communications platform to third parties. It could be even more self defeating and monopoly re-enforcing if those platforms are relaying to users of third party apps the features they are missing along with warnings about non-existent encryption and everyone can read their messages.
wesleytodd 3y ago
Point number three is critically important and no matter how many nerds complain it is not activity pub or some crypto thing, the company focus on delivering a product which is viable to use by normies is awesome.
AJ007 3y ago
The account portability is probably the biggest problem with the fediverse right now. I finally signed up for Mastodon despite reading little to nothing positive about it on hn. It was easy to use, and the signal to noise ratio was vastly improved from my Twitter experience. However, that lack of account portability means users can, have, and will continue to get cut off. Servers cost thousands of USD per months with no revenue and domain name ownership can magically vanish for many reasons. With no business model for server operators, these are significant issues. That confusion for users may even be the primary force that drives them over to something like Facebook's Threads. There are analogies to e-mail here for the server operator. If I said any numbers I would be making them up, but I'm assuming 1 Mastodon user costs a lot more, both in compute/bandwidth and support, than 1 e-mail user. Free servers are not going to scale. Account portability doesn't solve this, but it means if something happens to one server operator, that user doesn't churn in to the ether and never return. I've been keeping an eye on https://fedidb.org/ https://fedidb.org/ (not my site.) While total users and servers keep going up over the past year, active users keep dropping. It could be something related to how they record usage, but it isn't a promising thing. I'm less skeptical about long term adaptation. Most of the negative sentiment I've read on hn about Mastodon just was wrong. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft are all fully accelerating in to ad business models which will make much of their products less unappealing by the day. If history is any lesson, when a new competitor shows up without ads and a similar or better experience, the incumbent is in trouble.
- treyd 3y ago
  You can migrate your account between instances and take your followers and follows with you. Server shutdowns are rare, since administrators tend to proactively limit registrations when activity starts to be a financial burden. Avoiding the growth-at-all-costs mindset means that instances can stay sustainable.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > You can migrate your account between instances and take tour followers and follows with you. You can if the server is operational. If the server not operational and cooperative, you can't. And you can't migrate your posts, only your followers. > Server shutdowns are rare Not rare enough though.
dumpsterlid 3y ago
[dead]
timeon 3y ago
Can you elaborate on point 3? What do you think are the differences or pain points of Mastodon that Bluesky fixes?
remram 3y ago
We'll see whether you release portability before Mastodon. Right now, bsky.social seems to be the only place anyone can get an account, subject to your verification requirements (and there are people in the comments here that can't sign up), so you're multiple steps away from porting anything.

novemp 3y ago

[dead]

shafyy 3y ago

I'm more worried about the financing of Bluesky. You have taken VC money, and we all know what that means - growth at all costs. > The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil. I feel like we have seen this movie play out a few times. There are always way to close things down the road. For example, I can imagine that even with federation there will be a power law of distribution, and there's a high chance that most users will end up on official Bluesky servers. This means that you could one they stop federating, and most users would be backed in a walled garden. Sure, the protocol would be out there in the open, but it wouldn't matter because overnight it would lose most of its users. I trust that you and the initial team has genuine motivation not to do this. Forgive me for being cynical, but history does reapeat itself. I think the only antidote against this is regulation, as we're seing now with the DMA in EU that forces WhatsApp and other gate keepers to open their platform to other clients.

Kinrany 3y ago
> There are always way to close things down the road. If nothing else, Bitcoin is a successful existence proof. Maintaining control may be easier, but it's safe to say that Satoshi wouldn't be able to take control back now.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- treyd 3y ago
  Bluesky is not structured the way Bitcoin was structured. It's nonsensical to make prescriptive statements based on that comparison.
AJ007 3y ago
The big lesson to me has been for a platform to be open, there must be both third party clients and third party servers. A service that has only one backend server that no one else can run (looking at you Signal) isn't ok anymore. Even worse, Twitter or Reddit being "open" because they have an API: that's all bullshit, and you are setting yourself up to be rug pulled. We don't need to hear these lies anymore and it's time to move on from the services making either of those claims. I'm waiting for a little more progress and third party control to make a judgement on Bluesky. Users should think of this in terms of buy in cost. If you use a particular platform for 10 years, and build a community on it, you can take advantage of that and you get a mostly free service. But at some point the bill comes, and you move on. However, I keep thinking that the reason why some of those open third party protocols - even including email - "suck" is because so much of the time and focus has been on these proprietary, commercial communications platforms. I feel so old now I went from thinking email is a terrible way of communicating to, actually Facebook is far worse. Instead of seeing updates from my friends I'm looking at a firehose of noise of things I can't control and have zero interest in. Nearly 20 years later, I use e-mail every day and Facebook 0. Veering off-topic, but seeing conversations running for many years over the standards implementation and feature parity of the clients and servers both for XMPP and Matrix (meaning each separately, not inter-operating XMPP and Matrix, but rather each protocol has many servers and many clients, all trying to keep up with a moving protocol spec without breaking backwards compatibility), I have to laugh that a piece of legislation can just magically open the doors a some potentially very convoluted and continuously changing communications platform to third parties. It could be even more self defeating and monopoly re-enforcing if those platforms are relaying to users of third party apps the features they are missing along with warnings about non-existent encryption and everyone can read their messages.

wesleytodd 3y ago

Point number three is critically important and no matter how many nerds complain it is not activity pub or some crypto thing, the company focus on delivering a product which is viable to use by normies is awesome.

AJ007 3y ago

The account portability is probably the biggest problem with the fediverse right now. I finally signed up for Mastodon despite reading little to nothing positive about it on hn. It was easy to use, and the signal to noise ratio was vastly improved from my Twitter experience. However, that lack of account portability means users can, have, and will continue to get cut off. Servers cost thousands of USD per months with no revenue and domain name ownership can magically vanish for many reasons. With no business model for server operators, these are significant issues. That confusion for users may even be the primary force that drives them over to something like Facebook's Threads. There are analogies to e-mail here for the server operator. If I said any numbers I would be making them up, but I'm assuming 1 Mastodon user costs a lot more, both in compute/bandwidth and support, than 1 e-mail user. Free servers are not going to scale. Account portability doesn't solve this, but it means if something happens to one server operator, that user doesn't churn in to the ether and never return. I've been keeping an eye on https://fedidb.org/ https://fedidb.org/ (not my site.) While total users and servers keep going up over the past year, active users keep dropping. It could be something related to how they record usage, but it isn't a promising thing. I'm less skeptical about long term adaptation. Most of the negative sentiment I've read on hn about Mastodon just was wrong. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft are all fully accelerating in to ad business models which will make much of their products less unappealing by the day. If history is any lesson, when a new competitor shows up without ads and a similar or better experience, the incumbent is in trouble.

treyd 3y ago
You can migrate your account between instances and take your followers and follows with you. Server shutdowns are rare, since administrators tend to proactively limit registrations when activity starts to be a financial burden. Avoiding the growth-at-all-costs mindset means that instances can stay sustainable.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > You can migrate your account between instances and take tour followers and follows with you. You can if the server is operational. If the server not operational and cooperative, you can't. And you can't migrate your posts, only your followers. > Server shutdowns are rare Not rare enough though.

dumpsterlid 3y ago

[dead]

timeon 3y ago

Can you elaborate on point 3? What do you think are the differences or pain points of Mastodon that Bluesky fixes?

remram 3y ago

We'll see whether you release portability before Mastodon. Right now, bsky.social seems to be the only place anyone can get an account, subject to your verification requirements (and there are people in the comments here that can't sign up), so you're multiple steps away from porting anything.