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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 designe

by 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.

by shafyy 3y ago

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.