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Product Roadmap
- WheatMillington 2y agoIs Bluesky still relevant? They failed to capitalise on a moment, and it's hard to see another opportunity for them in the future.
- pcloadletter_ 2y agoIt's the only social network I'm really on right now. And AT protocol is pretty neat. I'm glad it's around and will keep using it until something else better comes along.
- jiveturkey 2y ago> In the past year, Bluesky has grown from 40K users to 5.6M users. It it were still relevant, they would have quoted DAU.
- yazzku 2y agoMy boy can smell the BS ten miles away.
- mrcwinn 2y agoI once helped run a website you probably never heard of and it had more than 5.6M registered users. :shruggydude:
- conroy 2y agoYou can see the latest stats here: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats Around 200,000 folks liked a post today.
- jiveturkey 2y agoamazing interactivity on those charts. anyone know what is the framework/toolkit for them? i'm not seeing any clues jump out at me in the DOM.
- jiveturkey 2y agofound it. apache echarts via echarts-for-react
- foolfoolz 2y agohonestly no, but it’s not just them. no “social network” is relevant on its own anymore. big content is cross posted everywhere. features are copied. differentiation between them is mostly lost user bases will remain separate as not everyone reads every network. but a new app on its own isnt that compelling. even ones that specialize in a niche like be real will have trouble finding large scale relevancy
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- neglesaks 2y agoAgree with this, which is why I find federated networks (fediverse and nostr) to be the most relevant into the future.
- arcalinea 2y agoBluesky is federated through the AT Protocol, and a bridge between Bluesky and Mastodon started running recently. https://fed.brid.gy/ https://fed.brid.gy/ I've seen some Nostr users bridged as well
- selectodude 2y agoIt's relevant to all the people that use it. Frankly the fact that it hasn't been overrun with DAUs is one of the benefits.
- neglesaks 2y agoThe same can be said for Mastodon/fediverse and that has been languishing apart for the first six months between late 2022 to mid 2023.
- baby 2y agoI use threads
- ejj28 2y agoSeems to me like it's not. I rarely hear about it, I've never seen anyone link to a Bluesky post, and it has weird limitations due to it being on top of a new federated protocol (which I still don't understand the purpose of when the internet's already kinda settled on Mastodon/ActivityPub as the go-to for decentralized social media). Even as they talk now about addressing the stuff that's missing from Bluesky like DMs and videos (which, no wonder it hasn't taken off when those features are absent), it still sounds like even when those features launch, they'll still be subpar. DMs not part of the AT protocol? Did they just not think of DMs when they designed the protocol? And only 90 second videos? Really? In my opinion, Bluesky isn't going to take off if this is the roadmap.
- _akhe 2y ago> I've never seen anyone link to a Bluesky post Since Twitter/X stopped making some posts public and make it so hard to view profiles you'd think Bluesky would be all over this. We had a small earthquake not too long ago in SF and I had no Twitter to check - that instant live Internet community is just gone, and it's not just that. Everything used to come out so fast on Twitter, it was a really exciting place to be. It's of course totally ruined now and has been for years, but it was once an awesome thing. Not sure why Bluesky isn't all over Hollywood and politics, in a presidential election year no less. They're just not doing this very well.
- SkyMarshal 2y ago> Not sure why Bluesky isn't all over Hollywood and politics Ugh, that would turn it into just another online cesspool.
- _akhe 2y agoAt least people would use it.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago> which I still don't understand the purpose of when the internet's already kinda settled on Mastodon/ActivityPub as the go-to for decentralized social media The things bluesky wants to do well really just don't map well onto ActivityPub. Things like: - Custom feed providers - Custom indexers/firehoses - Labellers (i.e. content filtering/flagging services) - Proper, cross-instance moderation services - Separating identity from the instance > DMs not part of the AT protocol? Currently the AT protocol is basically all public. If you want DMs you need to work out an E2EE layer that can still tolerate moderation and a propagation system that doesn't leak details of who is messaging who. That's all very hard to do right. Even signal spent years trying to get this right and they have pretty centralized infrastructure. I'd rather no DMs at first with the expectation that they'll be done properly when they actually ship. > And only 90 second videos? Really? Mastodon sets a video limit of 99MB. If you wanted to match the quality of a 1080p 30fps youtube video for example, that 99MB would buy you about 82 seconds. So the 90 second limit really isn't that unreasonable. And if you want a longer form, external video embeds have been supported in the app since the beta.
- est 2y agofrom my limited experience, it's a better choice than mstdn or nostr. mstdn's weakness is the activitypub protocol, it has many limitations, but understandably because it's designed in good o' GNU Social days. On the other hand nostr had like gazillion of NIPs ATProto fits the right spot, designed by the people who knows what they are doing, and addresses all the problems.
- ianwalter 2y agoI think so. Sure, platforms like Threads have the raw numbers and network effects, but Bluesky has an authentic community, a solid team (Dan Abramov from the React team joining was a surprise), and they are making the right product tradeoffs. I can definitely see them “coming out on top” as the spiritual successor to Twitter in a few years.
- neglesaks 2y agoNostr has an authentic community too, not least due to that users can directly tip the developers for their work, as well as tip each other for the interesting content people post.
- SkyMarshal 2y agoWell given Elon's continuing shenanigans at Twitter that moment is probably still ongoing, and the competition is still wide open. I do think Bluesky may have chose the wrong launch strategy by using the old and tired invite-only method. But hard to say for sure. If they had fully opened to the public last year or the year before, they might have gotten a large influx of users, who would then complain that it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Twitter, which had 10+ years to develop them. So who knows. At least with invites, they made sure to get people who really wanted to be there, even if it was a smaller crowd.
- roenxi 2y ago> I do think Bluesky may have chose the wrong launch strategy by using the old and tired invite-only method. But hard to say for sure. Hard to say indeed. I'm not sure how a social network bootstrap method can get "old and tired" either - humans don't change how they socialise that quickly! Facebook achieved remarkable things by starting in the Ivy League community then branching out, it really stands as a fascinating example of how curating the early community is critical in the bootstrapping process for a social network. I'm happy to bet that there is a 0.01 to 1% of the population who actually matters for getting groups of people to use something, and if a social network manages to find them then it will succeed, invites or not. It could be that there is too much dross out there for free for all signups early on. To me it looks like a core community should be established first.
- SkyMarshal 2y ago> Hard to say indeed. I'm not sure how a social network bootstrap method can get "old and tired" either - humans don't change how they socialise that quickly! But they do get wise to things like false scarcity of digital goods or artificial gatekeeping, and it puts them off. When a strategy is no longer novel or original, its loses its effect. Yes that early core community can really set the tone for a long time, and may have been worth it. On the other hand, an even bigger risk to a social network is not getting enough community to cause positive feedback effects and organic hockey-stick user growth. Failure to launch. Especially with a glut of social media competitors crowding the landscape.
- threeseed 2y agoDorsey left the Board and has seemed to be pretty critical of Bluesky. Calling X and NoStr "freedom tech". Whatever that means.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoIt's Twitter minus the bullshit and minus the eternal September. I hope it stays that way.
- omoikane 2y agoAnecdotally, some of the people I follow on Twitter have increased their usage of Bluesky, although their primary activity is still on Twitter.
- pfraze 2y agoProducts take time to build; protocol takes a lot of time. That we were able to productionize in about 4 months — having previously been a team of 4 working on the protocol for 10 months — and not collapse under the load is a pretty decent. We got up to around 15 engineers since then. We decided it wouldn’t increase our throughput enough to hire aggressively (org building alone is a major distraction) and decided it wiser to preserve our burn rate, which we did. Inevitably we get compared to Threads, and that’s just how the market works, but they had 60 people on the team when they launched, and they did so by running off of Instagram’s infra and T&S. Watching them handle 100 million signups in their first week? That’s the rubric that the market is grading on today. So, that’s what that moment looked like for us. And again, I think we captured it well. We managed to build a really strong initial userbase with it. So the challenge for us now is to create new moments, which is what the product work is about.
- _akhe 2y ago> pretty decent Nice to see you're still patting yourself on the back lol I think you took wayyy too long to release your product and it's overall not an impressive looking social media app, certainly doesn't look like the work of > 15 engineers
- ianwalter 2y agoAs a software engineering leader I can appreciate the huge amount of work it took you all to get here. It may not be super flashy because you had to start from scratch and get to feature parity with existing platforms, but IMHO Bluesky has the best app and I'm excited about all of the stuff you will add in the future. I'm rooting for you!
- yazzku 2y ago> Historically, all bluesky posts have been public. But there’s a world of interactions that are opened up when users can directly message each other. Really? Who wold have thought of that? Tell me more about it, please.
- _akhe 2y agoOh yeah Bluesky lol Took them years to launch a stripped down Twitter clone. Nostr at least had that obscurity thing going for it. Both were like "Ok? Now what?" People are over Web3 protocols. We have torrents, email, git, and other decentralized technology that was invented to solve specific problems - this idea of inventing a social media protocol is cool, but it comes with all this baggage. It's a for-profit company - wait it's not a for-profit company - it's decentralized - wait it's not decentralized. This dance never happened with a Napster or a Popcorn Time - it was very clear what the decentralized utility was, and it was really a means to an end of getting to the content. But Bluesky doesn't have any content I want, especially not badly enough to jump through those hoops, or use like a B-version of the real thing. It's like building a new restaurant to compete with the best steakhouse in town but you focus on the trays instead of the food.
- axblount 2y agoExactly. And it's hard to overstate how little the average user cares about the AT Protocol. "You can change providers!" "You mean sign up on another website? Like when I moved here from Twitter?"
- paulryanrogers 2y agoYou can take your stuff with you. Or at least that's the promise
- ssahoo 2y agoWhen we started Rittr (Plug https://rittr.club https://rittr.club), we challenged ourselves with 3 protocols, AT, ActivityPub and nostr. Everytime we went back to whiteboard on why RSS end Email inbox is better (or simpler) than all of above. We still plan to support ActivityPub eventually to be compatible with Mastodon network but sticking with RSS for now. Even RSS has 3 flavors. :)
- jimberlage 2y agoSome unsolicited advice - You run a service that serves public text updates. Why am I reading a blog post and not a series of bluesky posts? I know that different mediums serve different purposes, but it’s tough to see why this wouldn’t be bluesky-first content.
- typeofhuman 2y agoTop comment. How good is your service if you can't dog food it.
- pooper 2y agoI strongly disagree. Please use the best tool for the job. Twitter/Mastodon/Blue sky is not the place to write long form posts. Please don't give such terrible advice.
- tasuki 2y ago> Twitter/Mastodon/Blue sky is not the place to write long form posts. Twitter is not the place to write/share much of anything. The other two, why aren't they for long form posts?
- CuriousCosmic 2y agoBecause it's longer than the text cap for a post. Unlike twitter, bluesky still sets a limit on how long text posts can be. That doesn't make it worse or anything. There's a lot of arguments supporting a text limit per post. But there's no reason why you should be posting this kind of long form content in a thread when you have a website you can link to (which is what their bsky acct did).
- jimberlage 2y agoHaving read the roadmap - this could be chopped up into posts that fit with the ethos of bluesky with no real loss to the message. It’s not particularly long and is just a couple of things they’re focusing on with a blurb about each roadmap item. Given that, and given that no one needs exposure to real bluesky posts more than bluesky right now, why make it longform at all?
- JojoFatsani 2y agoIt’s a shame, Bluesky has the best interface of all the newfangled twitter competitors, but like most of the rest of them, the content is just a very specific niche of rage-bait.
- neglesaks 2y agoThat is hardly a surprise seeing how some of the most histrionic and self-assured, foulmouthed "big" posters from Twitter were the first to seek it out last year.
- CuriousCosmic 2y agoIs it? My feed is all gardening, artwork, cryptography, game dev, and posts from authors. There's maybe a political post here or there but I don't really see discourse or anything on bsky. And either way you should be able to add a labeller to your account that filters out discourse and rage-bait.
- GaryNumanVevo 2y agoReally? That's not been my experience, I follow a few smaller feeds + the Discover feed. Mostly film review, art, a gardening feed. I've seen nothing approaching "rage-bait" yet.
- JojoFatsani 2y agoYour Discover feed doesn't throw politics etc at you?
- GaryNumanVevo 2y agoNope, although I think it depends on who you follow. I see cat photos, some vacation pics, and a few "chain email" style memes being re-posted.
- Sincere6066 2y agolol no it doesn't
- KLAUSGREY 2y ago[dead]