7 ms·

Bluesky Is Building the Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants

49 points by steveklabnik 2y ago

Arnt 2y ago
I like bluesky, but how does one Discovery those fine feeds?
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  They have a link that you can share like any other link. Here's one of my favorite feeds: https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/feed/infreq https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/feed/infreq But there's also https://bsky.app/feeds https://bsky.app/feeds, which lets you search through them, and shows a list of some (I'm assuming) popular ones.
  - Arnt 2y ago
    Neat. How did you find that first feed?
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      The person who created it posted a link to it, and I saw that post.
  - jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
    Wish they had a similar discovery page for labellers too. I'd like to enable more "gimmicky" ones than I have, like "beans remover" that tags any posted photos containing beans.
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      Yeah, that would be great.
- DANmode 2y ago
  Learn, or relearn, proper search skills.
hn_acker 2y ago
The full title (too long for HN) is > Bluesky Is Building The Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It
- tedunangst 2y ago
  That does change the meaning somewhat.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    Yeah, I wasn't allowed to submit the original title, even though I tried to, and figured that dang would get to it if the thread got traction. I'm actually not 100% sure what the best course of option would be in this situation, but maybe I'm just not very imaginative with editing.
    - tedunangst 2y ago
      "Bluesky Is Building The Network Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It" fits.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
RACEWAR 2y ago
I'm at a point where I do not understand why social media is such a big deal™, with the exception of the prioritization of sharing breaking news and things like that. Otherwise, I'm at a loss trying to figure out why talk over platforms and protocols is significant. Much of it must have something to do with liberal ideals over the right to self-expression/speech and social media as the premier communications method. Yet still, I remain at a loss...
- throwaway894345 2y ago
  For me it’s that it seems increasingly absurd that a handful of companies control such a large share of speech. I’m not a leftist even by American standards, but I see the current social media landscape as a privatization of the public square and this actually is a problem space that can be solved by the right protocols. We were blessed with open networking and web protocols many decades ago; we should also have open social protocols IMHO.
  - tmottabr 2y ago
    The problem is that social media is not and was never designed to be a replacement to public square.. Social media started as tool to allow people to stay in touch after their time together came to an end and eventually evolved\merged with forums as a tool to bring people with similar interest together. The thing we have today that kind resemble a public square is a side effect of then needing to make money, that they decided to do by using ads. In order to make more money with ads they need to keep people around for longer so they started taking content and spreading around to random people. Kind like a public square but not really because you need to keep advertisers happy, so you cannot allow any speech in your platform that displeases the advertisers, or at least you need to ensure ads will not show next to speech that make advertisers unhappy or else they are going away and you now have a money problem (exactly twitter situation). Public square is a end to end relation.. You go somewhere and speak and whoever is in ear shoot listen, if they don't want to listen they get away, if a lot of people that does not want to listen get together they make you leave, but you can always come back later. The moment you add any kind of platform in the middle, specially one with an algorithm that decide what you should see, you are now bound to the platform rules and biases. And that is no longer a public square. Social media today is, in my opinion, more akin to personal ads or letters to the editor in a newspaper then to a public square. It will spread your speech further then a public square but is bound to the rules and biases of the newspaper publishing then. And I don't think any protocol can solve this. All a protocol can do is allow you to created biased silos where different types of speech live and they might or might not federate to other silos. Basically federation allow you to turn social media in glorified forums, but it will never really replace public square.
leandrod 2y ago
ActivityPub was to be the federal social network, but cancel culture balkanised it.
- mattl 2y ago
  How so?
  - meepmorp 2y ago
    "People who don't want to read my bullshit are the real Nazis."
    - immibis 2y ago
      It's a real effect. I got blocked from following Brian Krebs because someone (on a different server) said someone else couldn't be a Nazi because they were black, I said being black doesn't disqualify someone from being a Nazi, and someone on Brian Krebs's server reported it as racism. I only got this reversed two months later by making my own account on Brian Krebs's server and calling out the admin in a public toot on that server.
      - prmoustache 2y ago
        If Brian Krebs was using a mastodon server instance, you have never been blocked from following him.
        immibis 2y ago
        He is, and I was. You cannot follow people who are on a server that has blocked your server. Your follow request will be ignored, and his new toots will not be delivered to your server. If you were already following him, this follow relationship is deleted on his end, his server will deliver an unfollow notification, and then will not deliver his new toots to your server. You can still view his profile on his server using a web browser, which is not the same as following him.
hresvelgr 2y ago
I think Jack's ideal of a social square is fundamentally at odds with the reality of how these social squares actually behave past a certain scale, especially with regards to moderation. Bluesky's approach to decentralised moderation has been really interesting to watch and seems to be working quite well. Granted, I don't think users should be responsible for it to the extent that they currently are, but it seems to be effective.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
pyinstallwoes 2y ago
No it's not.
mvkel 2y ago
Calling social media a "public square," isn't a valid analogy, and is an impossible ideal to live up to. Nothing about it works the same way an actual public square does. It's a coliseum.
- rchaud 2y ago
  The "public square" talk is pure marketing from Twitter. It began in 2009 when Iranians held mass protests against their government and used Twitter as a way to share information as the state had turned off SMS texts. This led to wall-to-wall coverage on US news channels as Iran is of course denoted as an enemy state, and here was Twitter, an American social network helping spread free speech. This would happen again in 2011 during the so-called Arab Spring.
  - mvkel 2y ago
    It's wild that a one-time convenient excuse turned into the base expectation of all social media that is impossible to live up to. People are weird.
    - krapp 2y ago
      It's politics. Until relatively recently, the expectation that social media could be moderated even while acting as a "public square" (which was never a "base expectation of all social media" for anyone outside of a politically vested minority) was not controversial. Now people want to make "algorithms" illegal.
- winternett 2y ago
  There are so many sites that all follow the same template... To sell sponsorships & ads and to companies, and then slap the illusion that public participation is vibrant. The only good model for a social site these days are smaller communities specialized around a niche, like specific cars or musician communities based on genres. Even back in the day, people had extensive problems with community forums because operators usually worked based on collusion and favoritism and ad profit. There are far too many agendas involved in major "social" communities, and social is in quotes, because if you look at the tools dedicated to communication on these platforms, they barely facilitate communication and connection beyond public fandom, a lot of that is based on bot traffic. If you look at live streaming, a ton of generic comments flood celebrity sessions, many operate chat bots to make their live streaming sessions look "active" with users. I think users are now beginning to wise up to the façade that social media is not really helpful once it grows big.

49 points by steveklabnik 2y ago

Arnt 2y ago

I like bluesky, but how does one Discovery those fine feeds?

steveklabnik 2y ago
They have a link that you can share like any other link. Here's one of my favorite feeds: https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/feed/infreq https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/feed/infreq But there's also https://bsky.app/feeds https://bsky.app/feeds, which lets you search through them, and shows a list of some (I'm assuming) popular ones.
- Arnt 2y ago
  Neat. How did you find that first feed?
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    The person who created it posted a link to it, and I saw that post.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
  Wish they had a similar discovery page for labellers too. I'd like to enable more "gimmicky" ones than I have, like "beans remover" that tags any posted photos containing beans.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    Yeah, that would be great.
DANmode 2y ago
Learn, or relearn, proper search skills.

hn_acker 2y ago

The full title (too long for HN) is > Bluesky Is Building The Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It

tedunangst 2y ago
That does change the meaning somewhat.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  Yeah, I wasn't allowed to submit the original title, even though I tried to, and figured that dang would get to it if the thread got traction. I'm actually not 100% sure what the best course of option would be in this situation, but maybe I'm just not very imaginative with editing.
  - tedunangst 2y ago
    "Bluesky Is Building The Network Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It" fits.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

RACEWAR 2y ago

I'm at a point where I do not understand why social media is such a big deal™, with the exception of the prioritization of sharing breaking news and things like that. Otherwise, I'm at a loss trying to figure out why talk over platforms and protocols is significant. Much of it must have something to do with liberal ideals over the right to self-expression/speech and social media as the premier communications method. Yet still, I remain at a loss...

throwaway894345 2y ago
For me it’s that it seems increasingly absurd that a handful of companies control such a large share of speech. I’m not a leftist even by American standards, but I see the current social media landscape as a privatization of the public square and this actually is a problem space that can be solved by the right protocols. We were blessed with open networking and web protocols many decades ago; we should also have open social protocols IMHO.
- tmottabr 2y ago
  The problem is that social media is not and was never designed to be a replacement to public square.. Social media started as tool to allow people to stay in touch after their time together came to an end and eventually evolved\merged with forums as a tool to bring people with similar interest together. The thing we have today that kind resemble a public square is a side effect of then needing to make money, that they decided to do by using ads. In order to make more money with ads they need to keep people around for longer so they started taking content and spreading around to random people. Kind like a public square but not really because you need to keep advertisers happy, so you cannot allow any speech in your platform that displeases the advertisers, or at least you need to ensure ads will not show next to speech that make advertisers unhappy or else they are going away and you now have a money problem (exactly twitter situation). Public square is a end to end relation.. You go somewhere and speak and whoever is in ear shoot listen, if they don't want to listen they get away, if a lot of people that does not want to listen get together they make you leave, but you can always come back later. The moment you add any kind of platform in the middle, specially one with an algorithm that decide what you should see, you are now bound to the platform rules and biases. And that is no longer a public square. Social media today is, in my opinion, more akin to personal ads or letters to the editor in a newspaper then to a public square. It will spread your speech further then a public square but is bound to the rules and biases of the newspaper publishing then. And I don't think any protocol can solve this. All a protocol can do is allow you to created biased silos where different types of speech live and they might or might not federate to other silos. Basically federation allow you to turn social media in glorified forums, but it will never really replace public square.

leandrod 2y ago

ActivityPub was to be the federal social network, but cancel culture balkanised it.

mattl 2y ago
How so?
- meepmorp 2y ago
  "People who don't want to read my bullshit are the real Nazis."
  - immibis 2y ago
    It's a real effect. I got blocked from following Brian Krebs because someone (on a different server) said someone else couldn't be a Nazi because they were black, I said being black doesn't disqualify someone from being a Nazi, and someone on Brian Krebs's server reported it as racism. I only got this reversed two months later by making my own account on Brian Krebs's server and calling out the admin in a public toot on that server.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      If Brian Krebs was using a mastodon server instance, you have never been blocked from following him.
      - immibis 2y ago
        He is, and I was. You cannot follow people who are on a server that has blocked your server. Your follow request will be ignored, and his new toots will not be delivered to your server. If you were already following him, this follow relationship is deleted on his end, his server will deliver an unfollow notification, and then will not deliver his new toots to your server. You can still view his profile on his server using a web browser, which is not the same as following him.

hresvelgr 2y ago

I think Jack's ideal of a social square is fundamentally at odds with the reality of how these social squares actually behave past a certain scale, especially with regards to moderation. Bluesky's approach to decentralised moderation has been really interesting to watch and seems to be working quite well. Granted, I don't think users should be responsible for it to the extent that they currently are, but it seems to be effective.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

pyinstallwoes 2y ago

No it's not.

mvkel 2y ago

Calling social media a "public square," isn't a valid analogy, and is an impossible ideal to live up to. Nothing about it works the same way an actual public square does. It's a coliseum.

rchaud 2y ago
The "public square" talk is pure marketing from Twitter. It began in 2009 when Iranians held mass protests against their government and used Twitter as a way to share information as the state had turned off SMS texts. This led to wall-to-wall coverage on US news channels as Iran is of course denoted as an enemy state, and here was Twitter, an American social network helping spread free speech. This would happen again in 2011 during the so-called Arab Spring.
- mvkel 2y ago
  It's wild that a one-time convenient excuse turned into the base expectation of all social media that is impossible to live up to. People are weird.
  - krapp 2y ago
    It's politics. Until relatively recently, the expectation that social media could be moderated even while acting as a "public square" (which was never a "base expectation of all social media" for anyone outside of a politically vested minority) was not controversial. Now people want to make "algorithms" illegal.
winternett 2y ago
There are so many sites that all follow the same template... To sell sponsorships & ads and to companies, and then slap the illusion that public participation is vibrant. The only good model for a social site these days are smaller communities specialized around a niche, like specific cars or musician communities based on genres. Even back in the day, people had extensive problems with community forums because operators usually worked based on collusion and favoritism and ad profit. There are far too many agendas involved in major "social" communities, and social is in quotes, because if you look at the tools dedicated to communication on these platforms, they barely facilitate communication and connection beyond public fandom, a lot of that is based on bot traffic. If you look at live streaming, a ton of generic comments flood celebrity sessions, many operate chat bots to make their live streaming sessions look "active" with users. I think users are now beginning to wise up to the façade that social media is not really helpful once it grows big.