17 ms·

Bluesky adds direct messages

210 points by charlieok 2y ago

DerCommodore 2y ago
[flagged]
matsemann 2y ago
Impressed by the rate new features are coming. During the first twitter takeover, many migrated to mastodon in my circles, but it didn't stick. Second wave to bsky has gained enough traction that the circle has sustained there for over half a year, with most disabling their account on X. But a few have remained on X mainly to be able to DM. So this fixes that. What's lacking for me now is video. Having to share through YouTube and then embed for just small daily clips is a bit cumbersome.
- jsheard 2y ago
  Video is the killer because it's expensive. Don't they still have no ads and only one paid feature, buying a custom domain name through them directly? Which nobody actually has to pay them for because you can link a domain name registered anywhere else for free.
  - matsemann 2y ago
    True. And yeah, I'm also a bit concerned about the longevity of bsky. Hope they can figure something out, without stooping to twitter level stupid ads or lock in (like disabling api / the openness)
  - pjc50 2y ago
    They could just charge for video. Inconcievable to have end-user usage pricing, I know, rather than just give away everything, but someone should try it.
- 34546fh 2y ago
  [flagged]
edent 2y ago
It is so far behind Mastodon. Both in terms of features and in terms of communities on there. The people I interact with on BlueSky are nice, and the website is serviceable. But like Pebble / T2, I just don't see the momentum there.
- andybak 2y ago
  I have up on Mastodon when I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins. Plus realising that global search was something that many admins were fundamentally opposed to. Oh and the array of UX issues that made me suspect that many demographics would never adopt it.
  - doublerabbit 2y ago
    Decentralized just doesn't work in a centralized cyberspace. You need to recreate your own centralized cyberspace and then build the underground path to the decentralized canyon. Then provide a mothership allowing others to dock of their own standards and protocols. Yet allowing them to take off at their own accord with the data of the centralized hub.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    > I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins That seems like a positive, not a negative. If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph. I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition: Twitter is still by and large where the people are, even if the owner is an insufferable jerk.
    - Nextgrid 2y ago
      > I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition Twitter and mainstream social media is still doing well because they have a large network of people that are either non-technical and can't use the fediverse or just can't be bothered. The Musk acquisition is a storm in a teacup, for the vast majority of people (especially outside the tech circles) nothing changed. Yes it's still a cesspool, there's spam, Nazis and harassment, but that's not a significant difference from what it was before (every high profile tweet was immediately replied to by crypto scam bots even pre-Musk), and the format of the platform has always encouraged polarization, hostility and harassment, so Musk didn't change much there either. Yes it's a cesspool, but it's the same one that people know and (seemingly) love.
34546fh 2y ago
[flagged]
shadowfacts 2y ago
Not only are they not end-to-end encrypted, Bluesky's DMs seem like they're entirely centralized. From their 2024 roadmap: > We looked closely at alternatives like linking to external services, re-using an existing protocol like Matrix, or rushing out on-protocol encrypted DMs, but ultimately decided to launch a basic centralized system to take the time pressure off our team and make our user community happy. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/2024-protocol-roadmap https://docs.bsky.app/blog/2024-protocol-roadmap
- snapcaster 2y ago
  I feel for them, because even if they (and weirdos like us on this site) value decentralization and other related values the average customer just DOES NOT CARE. They're trying to compete with other platforms without this handicap and very people people are willing to give them any "credit" for it
  - TheBlight 2y ago
    I thought the entire point of Bluesky was that it was to be decentralized? Did that change?
    - ziml77 2y ago
      That was the idea with Bluesky, but people refuse to budge from Twitter without DMs integrated into the platform.
      - doublerabbit 2y ago
        Which applies to WhatsApp, TikTok too. The main issue with other platforms is that the content that exists within are too wild-west. Anime isn't a everybody thing nor are geeky Programming/Linux communities or furry artwork for that matter. Where do I find TikTok content within Matrix? That's what the current content-matter is. The corporate apply heavy exploitation; psychology and social exploits to the user. And while the other platforms don't and carry merits such as privacy and the likes; people really just don't care they are being used for systematic learning, being manipulated because some peer is influencing them. Companies pay large amount of money in R&D for developing social exploits, all the way down to the background colour of the icon of the app. A platform has to have a gimmick to catch. Privacy, decentralized isn't it. These foundations don't have corp money to pay for content producers, influencers and so you then end up with dwellings of niches which can turn urk at best.
leftcenterright 2y ago
slightly off-topic but did anyone find a way to still use Twitter/X using Firefox (without disabling strict tracking protection of course)?
- SushiHippie 2y ago
  https://nitter.poast.org/ https://nitter.poast.org/ still seems to work
- seanvelasco 2y ago
  wasn't this fixed a few days ago? https://x.com/FirefoxSupport/status/1791459697297608943 https://x.com/FirefoxSupport/status/1791459697297608943 firefox is my default browser, and i have the enhanced tracking protection to strict.
  - leftcenterright 2y ago
    actually not, I am using latest Firefox 126.0 and it is still broken.
xattt 2y ago
Bluesky is going to have the same problem as orkut. While they’re building out, keeping it exclusive and taking their sweet-ass time, something else will come along and eat their lunch. I am saying this as a bitter outsider without a Bluesky account but with FOMO.
- sweetheart 2y ago
  Its no longer invite only.
- liotier 2y ago
  > I am saying this as a bitter outsider without a Bluesky account but with FOMO You'll be pleased to learn that Bluesky sign-up has been open to all without invitation since last February.
- threeseed 2y ago
  > something else will come along and eat their lunch It already happened. Whilst Bluesy was requiring invites, Threads launched and now has the highest DAUs of all of the text social networks.
  - monknomo 2y ago
    I agree with you on this, but the Threads culture of 'no bad vibes' is very hard to take
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
DataDive 2y ago
Zawinski's Law: > Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. I think nowadays we can substitute email with chat/DM.
- bitwize 2y ago
  Nowadays it's chat, photos/videos, and online purchases thus forming an all-in-one app. Not quite popular here in the West, though that's Elon's eventual goal with X. But think WeChat in China.
  - moneywoes 2y ago
    whatsapp as well
  - numpad0 2y ago
    There is the western superapp, it's called Google Search.
- ziml77 2y ago
  It's important though because it allows you to communicate things that don't really belong in the open while remaining under your identity on that platform and avoiding the need to link that identity with your identity on a different service.
  - legutierr 2y ago
    Exactly. I often wish GitHub had a messaging capability, for these same reasons.
    - com2kid 2y ago
      GitHub used to have DMs, they removed them, presumably due to spam and harassment.
      - 2y ago
bakugo 2y ago
I pretty much haven't heard of Bluesky since it went public. Is it still a mostly cesspool of american politics-obsessed twitter refugees?
- 7573sgfj 2y ago
  pretty much, the same rational and objective (and fact based!) political views you can read on hn
- CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
  > Is it still a mostly cesspool of american politics-obsessed twitter refugees? 99% of social media on the English-speaking web is basically American politics obsessed, if you don't want that you need to branch out to other languages.
  - bishbosh 2y ago
    Are they politics obsessed in other politics, or is that particular to Americans?
    - Nextgrid 2y ago
      Unfortunately the garbage is spreading. It's less due to politics and more due to the rotten business models of all mainstream social media - it encourages engagement (algorithmically, so it doesn't even need human intention/decisions), it just turns out that political content is great at generating engagement and thus it floats to the top. Various actors take advantage of this for various reasons (including political motivations) but the underlying problem is that the platform itself will promote any content as long as it generates engagement.
- matsemann 2y ago
  My experience is that it's the opposite. My twitter timeline got filled up with blue checkmarks spamming their things. Their comments are boosted in every discussion. And since it's a certain demographic that pays for twitter blue, it completely altered everything. So at least in my circles it's to get away from all the hate and outrage that was just to gain virality, and get back to actual discussions on the topics we care about (which is far from US politics).
nikolay 2y ago
Finally! It was useless without DMs! Unfortunately, there's no E2E.
facialwipe 2y ago
Jack Dorsey out, plaintext DMs in. Slow clap for Bluesky.
- evbogue 2y ago
  My offer still stands to help the Bluesky folks implement these types of things if they can't figure it out. Call me!
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    I don’t think they want a plan to get Dorsey back — he seems to be an idiot.
  - Kye 2y ago
    From discussions with security professional friends and folks on E2E encryption of protocols: I don't think it's that they can't figure it out, it's that they know it's hard to get right and harder to fix later, so they're taking their time to do it right in the first place. They don't want to end up like Telegram or Matrix with furries doing unflattering writeups on their security.
    - evbogue 2y ago
      I agree that the furry interpretation of privacy is intimidating, but at the very least I think Bluesky could start with generating a private key on each client device, and then using a simple box algorithm to encrypt messages towards the user they want to talk to. The PDS could store these messages encrypted, so the PDS owner cannot read the messages. I don't think https://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/ https://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/ is hard to mess up. Similar to the interior of a furry suit, you won't know what is going on in there.
      - some_furry 2y ago
        > but at the very least I think Bluesky could start with generating a private key on each client device, and then using a simple box algorithm to encrypt messages towards the user they want to talk to. Furry cryptography nerd here. No. This is inadequate. > I don't think https://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/ https://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/ is hard to mess up. Yes it is! If you're doing to encrypt some things in a constrained use-case, sure, NaCl is better than hand-rolling it yourself. But it's not sufficient for end-to-end encryption. Here's a few things that TweetNaCl (and other NaCl variants) is, without further protocol design, inadequate to protect against: 1. Invisible Salamanders. NaCl uses xsalsa20poly1305, which is not key-committing. 2. Forward Secrecy. NaCl's crypto_box doesn't give you this at all. 3. Key Compromise Impersonation. See also, Toxcore, which built atop NaCl: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426 https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426 4. How do you do group messaging? If you do it as just pairwise, do you use the same public key as your p2p messaging? There's a lot of ways that can subtly go wrong. There is a damn reason end-to-end encryption involves authenticated key exchanges and forward-secure double ratchets.
kevinak 2y ago
The problem with BlueSky is that they built something specific for Twitter like experiences. Nostr is much better positioned to take on these large platforms IMO. You can build pretty much any social experience on it. Here's a selection of things folks have built on top of the protocol: https://www.nostrapps.com https://www.nostrapps.com
- al_borland 2y ago
  This could also be seen as a weakness. The lack of focus means fragmentation. Fragmentation means confusion. Users tend to want/need to know what to use and where to go. Telling someone, "go get an email account," will leave them asking more questions or giving up. It's a homework assignment for research. Telling someone, "go get a gmail account," is an actionable thing they can do. We made it there with email, but they were news anchors trying to explain it to people and a lot of friends helping friends, or simply ISPs setting it up for their customers. It's been 30 years of mainstream awareness. If someone said, "I'm on Nostr," and I wanted to join them, then I found that page you linked to... now what? What is a Zap? Is this some kind of crypto nonsense? "amount in sats"... what's a sat? I just went to what was supposed to be a reddit clone and there were 0 posts. Another one is just a chess board. What is this supposed to be, the user asked? I'm already annoyed by this. "Here are 90 sites, go find the 1 that might not be a ghost town that will also let you talk to your friends." This is a bad first impression, and it's not even my first time hearing about it. The public will never be sold on a protocol, there needs to be that one killer app that brings people in, and if the protocol is flexible to allow for more things, great.
  - lez 2y ago
    Check primal.net to find that app you are talking about.
    - al_borland 2y ago
      “The Social Bitcoin Wallet” Hard pass. Why would I ever want my wallet to be social? What does a social network have to do with Bitcoin? This sounds like social media for insufferable crypto bros.
Astrodevil 2y ago
[dead]
welder 2y ago
I'm building a Twitter/Bluesky/Mastadon/Farcaster competitor targeted at the average HN reader. Usable but not yet launched. Anyone want to beta test it?
- legutierr 2y ago
  Sure.
  - welder 2y ago
    Send me an email for an invite: alan@wakatime.com
- chainwax 2y ago
  I'd give it a spin
- written-beyond 2y ago
  Can you only access it if you have an interesting story about a company you worked for in the bay area 10 years ago.
- mrinfinity8 2y ago
  Absolutely! mrinfinity@micg.net
nwoli 2y ago
Kind of lost interest in blueskys future after they announced they hired twitters former trust and safety lead. Twitter has issues today for sure but that isn’t one aspect I’d like back (eg shadowbanning and lying about shadowbanning etc).
- threeseed 2y ago
  The only thing that has changed with Twitter is who gets banned.
srameshc 2y ago
I have a question that is not relevant to this post. Has anyone tried to implement the Bluesky federated protocol?
- monknomo 2y ago
  I know folks are hosting their own PDSs, at least in the sandbox, and I want to say in prod? I'm not sure there are any non-bluesky Relays I know folks are hosting their own labellers. and I know folks are hosting their own appviews I've seen repeated kerfuffles about people running mastodon-bluesky bridges
- Retr0id 2y ago
  Yeah, I wrote my own PDS from scratch[0], that was capable of federating with the sandbox network. Now that federation is enabled in the public network, I've been working on a slightly more production-ready rewrite[1], although it's not yet in a usable state (haven't had much time to work on it lately) [0] https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/picopds https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/picopds [1] https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/millipds https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/millipds
jwildeboer 2y ago
I’ll stick to Signal for private communications and publish my public takes with ActivityPub based Mastodon. No need for proprietary stuff anymore.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
  All of bluesky is MIT licensed (unless there's a subset I'm missing), and developed pretty openly. Heck, you could use DMs much earlier if you logged into main.bsky.dev (with an app password, ideally) rather than bsky.app. They don't have E2EE yet, and use a different system than posting does on the site. (ergo, I think they're not in the firehose)
  - jwildeboer 2y ago
    I consider ATProto, the protocol BlueSky uses, to be a proprietary thing as it is owned and maintained by BlueSky. ActivityPub is an Open Standard.
pipeline_peak 2y ago
Wake me up when the non tech people are using it.
- alex_lav 2y ago
  Where are the tech people using it? I've mostly only found bsky employees and politics doomscrollers...
- monknomo 2y ago
  at least among the people I follow, there aren't really very many tech people. It's pretty much friendly enough for anyone to use imo. I mean, sure if you want to run a PDS or labeller, that's basically technical folks only at this point, but I've seen non-technical people put together feeds, choose which labellers they want to pay attention to, etc. but for just skeeting and BMing, it's user friendly
- CobrastanJorji 2y ago
  I went to Bluesky because some of my personal favorite non-tech Twitter personalties ended up there. I'm a fan of @Popehat, who has a lot of informed political legal commentary. There are also a number of fiction writers and artists I like there. Surprisingly full of the people I happen to want to subscribe to. And surprisingly large gardening and astronomy communities. Less my thing, but if your interests include trans rights, furry porn, or romance authors, Bluesky's definitely the place for you. Signing up went really well. Mastodon absolutely fumbled the Twitter disaster because it was difficult for non-technical people to figure out what to do. Bluesky just looks like Twitter unless you're actively looking for options to be on another server.
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    Mastodon has fixed their onboarding process (a bit late) to be much more user friendly. > if your interests include trans rights, furry porn, or romance authors, Bluesky's definitely the place for you. Same could be said for Mastodon, plus retrocomputing and a lot of tech people who don’t want to be on Musk’s Nazi bar anymore. Compiler folks and John Mashey hang out on Mastodon. If you follow US politics, you do want to be on BS, though. Mastodon is better for international politics and stuff like Eurovision.
James_K 2y ago
These people are just gonna re-invent Email next.
- CobrastanJorji 2y ago
  Decentralized email, what will they think of next?
tptacek 2y ago
Use social media direct messages to establish a connection on a secure messenger designed for direct messaging, and for nothing else. When people try to initiate conversations with you in DMs, have a ready answer to pivot the conversation elsewhere. Social platforms like BlueSky have radically different design constraints than direct messaging applications. The implications range from security to social dynamics to legal concerns. Social DMs are bad. Try not to use them!
- 7bit 2y ago
  > The implications range from security to social dynamics to legal concerns. Which are...?
- GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
  E2E Encryption is on the road map for Bluesky as it requires some protocol changes. The devs are encouraging people to use the DMs to exchange Signal info, and reminding people to not use DMs for sensitive info. https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3kt457v6aq72n https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3kt457v6aq72n
  - tptacek 2y ago
    It wouldn't matter if they implemented "E2E" encryption. "E2E" is necessary but insufficient for messaging security. It would still be a terrible idea to rely on Bluesky DM's, even if they met some floor of cryptographic quality, for the same reason that it's a bad idea to use Facebook DMs, despite their cryptography being close to the gold standard for large scale social apps.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
Um... So all the money, all the development, to create Twitter² and they just added DMs? That seems an underwhelming achievement.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  The headline is that it's not a shithole ridden with ads, spam, influencers, scams, etc. That's the important part of replacing Twitter.
  - retox 2y ago
    Neither was Twitter at the equivalent point in time.
    - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
      Very true, and if Bluesky sucks 5 years down the road I'll leave for something new.
    - KerrAvon 2y ago
      There are a lot of people who would disagree with that. BlueSky already has better mod tools than Twitter circa 2014 did. Musk’s transformation may have made it exponentially worse, but for some people it was already very bad.
  - ThinkBeat 2y ago
    What are the criteria for deciding how to either stop influencers from signing up, or how to permaban them as soon as they start? It would be something no other platform has managed. Including this site.
codingclaws 2y ago
I am in the middle of implementing DMs. What are my options for making it e2e encrypted? I am using postgres if that matters.
- reustle 2y ago
  I don't think this is the right place for that, but there are generally a bunch of libraries which will help you get this sorted out. If you tweet at me your tech stack and framework(s), I might be able to help you with more info. My details are in my bio.
- TheRealNGenius 2y ago
  [dead]
atulvi 2y ago
I really want bsky to succeed. They have a promising product. Users and Content are all that matters now.
- wpietri 2y ago
  They have a product, but do they have a business? I haven't kept up with them lately; do they have anything approaching a revenue model that would sustain them and provide good returns to their investors?
ineedaj0b 2y ago
reminder for all the twitter haters: Twitter's good! Yes, I know there's plenty of reasons you'll nitpick twitter and I can nitpick bluesky as well. More competition is good and I like to see it. Go where your friends are and have a good time. If you want the edge of Ai/ML, I suggest twitter. Lots of world class accounts. Bluesky is good, has more old school... like 'harry potter' type nerds on it. They post interesting stuff. You should also have a discord. Maybe an insta if you're trying to get a gf
- jay-barronville 2y ago
  I don’t think my wife would be happy with me getting a girlfriend.
  - ineedaj0b 2y ago
    ;) she wants to see you happy
- nvy 2y ago
  >Twitter's good! It's really not. It was good for a short while, way before the Muskquisition but the quality both of the service and of discourse have declined.

210 points by charlieok 2y ago

[flagged]

Impressed by the rate new features are coming. During the first twitter takeover, many migrated to mastodon in my circles, but it didn't stick. Second wave to bsky has gained enough traction that the circle has sustained there for over half a year, with most disabling their account on X. But a few have remained on X mainly to be able to DM. So this fixes that. What's lacking for me now is video. Having to share through YouTube and then embed for just small daily clips is a bit cumbersome.

jsheard 2y ago
Video is the killer because it's expensive. Don't they still have no ads and only one paid feature, buying a custom domain name through them directly? Which nobody actually has to pay them for because you can link a domain name registered anywhere else for free.
- matsemann 2y ago
  True. And yeah, I'm also a bit concerned about the longevity of bsky. Hope they can figure something out, without stooping to twitter level stupid ads or lock in (like disabling api / the openness)
- pjc50 2y ago
  They could just charge for video. Inconcievable to have end-user usage pricing, I know, rather than just give away everything, but someone should try it.
34546fh 2y ago
[flagged]

edent 2y ago

It is so far behind Mastodon. Both in terms of features and in terms of communities on there. The people I interact with on BlueSky are nice, and the website is serviceable. But like Pebble / T2, I just don't see the momentum there.

andybak 2y ago
I have up on Mastodon when I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins. Plus realising that global search was something that many admins were fundamentally opposed to. Oh and the array of UX issues that made me suspect that many demographics would never adopt it.
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  Decentralized just doesn't work in a centralized cyberspace. You need to recreate your own centralized cyberspace and then build the underground path to the decentralized canyon. Then provide a mothership allowing others to dock of their own standards and protocols. Yet allowing them to take off at their own accord with the data of the centralized hub.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins That seems like a positive, not a negative. If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph. I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition: Twitter is still by and large where the people are, even if the owner is an insufferable jerk.
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    > I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition Twitter and mainstream social media is still doing well because they have a large network of people that are either non-technical and can't use the fediverse or just can't be bothered. The Musk acquisition is a storm in a teacup, for the vast majority of people (especially outside the tech circles) nothing changed. Yes it's still a cesspool, there's spam, Nazis and harassment, but that's not a significant difference from what it was before (every high profile tweet was immediately replied to by crypto scam bots even pre-Musk), and the format of the platform has always encouraged polarization, hostility and harassment, so Musk didn't change much there either. Yes it's a cesspool, but it's the same one that people know and (seemingly) love.

34546fh 2y ago

[flagged]

shadowfacts 2y ago

Not only are they not end-to-end encrypted, Bluesky's DMs seem like they're entirely centralized. From their 2024 roadmap: > We looked closely at alternatives like linking to external services, re-using an existing protocol like Matrix, or rushing out on-protocol encrypted DMs, but ultimately decided to launch a basic centralized system to take the time pressure off our team and make our user community happy. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/2024-protocol-roadmap https://docs.bsky.app/blog/2024-protocol-roadmap

snapcaster 2y ago
I feel for them, because even if they (and weirdos like us on this site) value decentralization and other related values the average customer just DOES NOT CARE. They're trying to compete with other platforms without this handicap and very people people are willing to give them any "credit" for it
- TheBlight 2y ago
  I thought the entire point of Bluesky was that it was to be decentralized? Did that change?
  - ziml77 2y ago
    That was the idea with Bluesky, but people refuse to budge from Twitter without DMs integrated into the platform.
    - doublerabbit 2y ago
      Which applies to WhatsApp, TikTok too. The main issue with other platforms is that the content that exists within are too wild-west. Anime isn't a everybody thing nor are geeky Programming/Linux communities or furry artwork for that matter. Where do I find TikTok content within Matrix? That's what the current content-matter is. The corporate apply heavy exploitation; psychology and social exploits to the user. And while the other platforms don't and carry merits such as privacy and the likes; people really just don't care they are being used for systematic learning, being manipulated because some peer is influencing them. Companies pay large amount of money in R&D for developing social exploits, all the way down to the background colour of the icon of the app. A platform has to have a gimmick to catch. Privacy, decentralized isn't it. These foundations don't have corp money to pay for content producers, influencers and so you then end up with dwellings of niches which can turn urk at best.

leftcenterright 2y ago

slightly off-topic but did anyone find a way to still use Twitter/X using Firefox (without disabling strict tracking protection of course)?

SushiHippie 2y ago
https://nitter.poast.org/ https://nitter.poast.org/ still seems to work
seanvelasco 2y ago
wasn't this fixed a few days ago? https://x.com/FirefoxSupport/status/1791459697297608943 https://x.com/FirefoxSupport/status/1791459697297608943 firefox is my default browser, and i have the enhanced tracking protection to strict.
- leftcenterright 2y ago
  actually not, I am using latest Firefox 126.0 and it is still broken.

xattt 2y ago

Bluesky is going to have the same problem as orkut. While they’re building out, keeping it exclusive and taking their sweet-ass time, something else will come along and eat their lunch. I am saying this as a bitter outsider without a Bluesky account but with FOMO.

sweetheart 2y ago
Its no longer invite only.
liotier 2y ago
> I am saying this as a bitter outsider without a Bluesky account but with FOMO You'll be pleased to learn that Bluesky sign-up has been open to all without invitation since last February.
threeseed 2y ago
> something else will come along and eat their lunch It already happened. Whilst Bluesy was requiring invites, Threads launched and now has the highest DAUs of all of the text social networks.
- monknomo 2y ago
  I agree with you on this, but the Threads culture of 'no bad vibes' is very hard to take
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

DataDive 2y ago

Zawinski's Law: > Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. I think nowadays we can substitute email with chat/DM.

bitwize 2y ago
Nowadays it's chat, photos/videos, and online purchases thus forming an all-in-one app. Not quite popular here in the West, though that's Elon's eventual goal with X. But think WeChat in China.
- moneywoes 2y ago
  whatsapp as well
- numpad0 2y ago
  There is the western superapp, it's called Google Search.
ziml77 2y ago
It's important though because it allows you to communicate things that don't really belong in the open while remaining under your identity on that platform and avoiding the need to link that identity with your identity on a different service.
- legutierr 2y ago
  Exactly. I often wish GitHub had a messaging capability, for these same reasons.
  - com2kid 2y ago
    GitHub used to have DMs, they removed them, presumably due to spam and harassment.
    - 2y ago

bakugo 2y ago

I pretty much haven't heard of Bluesky since it went public. Is it still a mostly cesspool of american politics-obsessed twitter refugees?

7573sgfj 2y ago
pretty much, the same rational and objective (and fact based!) political views you can read on hn
CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
> Is it still a mostly cesspool of american politics-obsessed twitter refugees? 99% of social media on the English-speaking web is basically American politics obsessed, if you don't want that you need to branch out to other languages.
- bishbosh 2y ago
  Are they politics obsessed in other politics, or is that particular to Americans?
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    Unfortunately the garbage is spreading. It's less due to politics and more due to the rotten business models of all mainstream social media - it encourages engagement (algorithmically, so it doesn't even need human intention/decisions), it just turns out that political content is great at generating engagement and thus it floats to the top. Various actors take advantage of this for various reasons (including political motivations) but the underlying problem is that the platform itself will promote any content as long as it generates engagement.
matsemann 2y ago
My experience is that it's the opposite. My twitter timeline got filled up with blue checkmarks spamming their things. Their comments are boosted in every discussion. And since it's a certain demographic that pays for twitter blue, it completely altered everything. So at least in my circles it's to get away from all the hate and outrage that was just to gain virality, and get back to actual discussions on the topics we care about (which is far from US politics).

nikolay 2y ago

Finally! It was useless without DMs! Unfortunately, there's no E2E.

facialwipe 2y ago

Jack Dorsey out, plaintext DMs in. Slow clap for Bluesky.

evbogue 2y ago
My offer still stands to help the Bluesky folks implement these types of things if they can't figure it out. Call me!
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  I don’t think they want a plan to get Dorsey back — he seems to be an idiot.
- Kye 2y ago
  From discussions with security professional friends and folks on E2E encryption of protocols: I don't think it's that they can't figure it out, it's that they know it's hard to get right and harder to fix later, so they're taking their time to do it right in the first place. They don't want to end up like Telegram or Matrix with furries doing unflattering writeups on their security.
  - evbogue 2y ago
    I agree that the furry interpretation of privacy is intimidating, but at the very least I think Bluesky could start with generating a private key on each client device, and then using a simple box algorithm to encrypt messages towards the user they want to talk to. The PDS could store these messages encrypted, so the PDS owner cannot read the messages. I don't think https://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/ https://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/ is hard to mess up. Similar to the interior of a furry suit, you won't know what is going on in there.
    - some_furry 2y ago
      > but at the very least I think Bluesky could start with generating a private key on each client device, and then using a simple box algorithm to encrypt messages towards the user they want to talk to. Furry cryptography nerd here. No. This is inadequate. > I don't think https://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/ https://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/ is hard to mess up. Yes it is! If you're doing to encrypt some things in a constrained use-case, sure, NaCl is better than hand-rolling it yourself. But it's not sufficient for end-to-end encryption. Here's a few things that TweetNaCl (and other NaCl variants) is, without further protocol design, inadequate to protect against: 1. Invisible Salamanders. NaCl uses xsalsa20poly1305, which is not key-committing. 2. Forward Secrecy. NaCl's crypto_box doesn't give you this at all. 3. Key Compromise Impersonation. See also, Toxcore, which built atop NaCl: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426 https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426 4. How do you do group messaging? If you do it as just pairwise, do you use the same public key as your p2p messaging? There's a lot of ways that can subtly go wrong. There is a damn reason end-to-end encryption involves authenticated key exchanges and forward-secure double ratchets.

kevinak 2y ago

The problem with BlueSky is that they built something specific for Twitter like experiences. Nostr is much better positioned to take on these large platforms IMO. You can build pretty much any social experience on it. Here's a selection of things folks have built on top of the protocol: https://www.nostrapps.com https://www.nostrapps.com

al_borland 2y ago
This could also be seen as a weakness. The lack of focus means fragmentation. Fragmentation means confusion. Users tend to want/need to know what to use and where to go. Telling someone, "go get an email account," will leave them asking more questions or giving up. It's a homework assignment for research. Telling someone, "go get a gmail account," is an actionable thing they can do. We made it there with email, but they were news anchors trying to explain it to people and a lot of friends helping friends, or simply ISPs setting it up for their customers. It's been 30 years of mainstream awareness. If someone said, "I'm on Nostr," and I wanted to join them, then I found that page you linked to... now what? What is a Zap? Is this some kind of crypto nonsense? "amount in sats"... what's a sat? I just went to what was supposed to be a reddit clone and there were 0 posts. Another one is just a chess board. What is this supposed to be, the user asked? I'm already annoyed by this. "Here are 90 sites, go find the 1 that might not be a ghost town that will also let you talk to your friends." This is a bad first impression, and it's not even my first time hearing about it. The public will never be sold on a protocol, there needs to be that one killer app that brings people in, and if the protocol is flexible to allow for more things, great.
- lez 2y ago
  Check primal.net to find that app you are talking about.
  - al_borland 2y ago
    “The Social Bitcoin Wallet” Hard pass. Why would I ever want my wallet to be social? What does a social network have to do with Bitcoin? This sounds like social media for insufferable crypto bros.

Astrodevil 2y ago

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welder 2y ago

I'm building a Twitter/Bluesky/Mastadon/Farcaster competitor targeted at the average HN reader. Usable but not yet launched. Anyone want to beta test it?

legutierr 2y ago
Sure.
- welder 2y ago
  Send me an email for an invite: alan@wakatime.com
chainwax 2y ago
I'd give it a spin
written-beyond 2y ago
Can you only access it if you have an interesting story about a company you worked for in the bay area 10 years ago.
mrinfinity8 2y ago
Absolutely! mrinfinity@micg.net

nwoli 2y ago

Kind of lost interest in blueskys future after they announced they hired twitters former trust and safety lead. Twitter has issues today for sure but that isn’t one aspect I’d like back (eg shadowbanning and lying about shadowbanning etc).

threeseed 2y ago
The only thing that has changed with Twitter is who gets banned.

srameshc 2y ago

I have a question that is not relevant to this post. Has anyone tried to implement the Bluesky federated protocol?

monknomo 2y ago
I know folks are hosting their own PDSs, at least in the sandbox, and I want to say in prod? I'm not sure there are any non-bluesky Relays I know folks are hosting their own labellers. and I know folks are hosting their own appviews I've seen repeated kerfuffles about people running mastodon-bluesky bridges
Retr0id 2y ago
Yeah, I wrote my own PDS from scratch[0], that was capable of federating with the sandbox network. Now that federation is enabled in the public network, I've been working on a slightly more production-ready rewrite[1], although it's not yet in a usable state (haven't had much time to work on it lately) [0] https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/picopds https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/picopds [1] https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/millipds https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/millipds

jwildeboer 2y ago

I’ll stick to Signal for private communications and publish my public takes with ActivityPub based Mastodon. No need for proprietary stuff anymore.

jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
All of bluesky is MIT licensed (unless there's a subset I'm missing), and developed pretty openly. Heck, you could use DMs much earlier if you logged into main.bsky.dev (with an app password, ideally) rather than bsky.app. They don't have E2EE yet, and use a different system than posting does on the site. (ergo, I think they're not in the firehose)
- jwildeboer 2y ago
  I consider ATProto, the protocol BlueSky uses, to be a proprietary thing as it is owned and maintained by BlueSky. ActivityPub is an Open Standard.

pipeline_peak 2y ago

Wake me up when the non tech people are using it.

alex_lav 2y ago
Where are the tech people using it? I've mostly only found bsky employees and politics doomscrollers...
monknomo 2y ago
at least among the people I follow, there aren't really very many tech people. It's pretty much friendly enough for anyone to use imo. I mean, sure if you want to run a PDS or labeller, that's basically technical folks only at this point, but I've seen non-technical people put together feeds, choose which labellers they want to pay attention to, etc. but for just skeeting and BMing, it's user friendly
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
I went to Bluesky because some of my personal favorite non-tech Twitter personalties ended up there. I'm a fan of @Popehat, who has a lot of informed political legal commentary. There are also a number of fiction writers and artists I like there. Surprisingly full of the people I happen to want to subscribe to. And surprisingly large gardening and astronomy communities. Less my thing, but if your interests include trans rights, furry porn, or romance authors, Bluesky's definitely the place for you. Signing up went really well. Mastodon absolutely fumbled the Twitter disaster because it was difficult for non-technical people to figure out what to do. Bluesky just looks like Twitter unless you're actively looking for options to be on another server.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  Mastodon has fixed their onboarding process (a bit late) to be much more user friendly. > if your interests include trans rights, furry porn, or romance authors, Bluesky's definitely the place for you. Same could be said for Mastodon, plus retrocomputing and a lot of tech people who don’t want to be on Musk’s Nazi bar anymore. Compiler folks and John Mashey hang out on Mastodon. If you follow US politics, you do want to be on BS, though. Mastodon is better for international politics and stuff like Eurovision.

James_K 2y ago

These people are just gonna re-invent Email next.

CobrastanJorji 2y ago
Decentralized email, what will they think of next?

tptacek 2y ago

Use social media direct messages to establish a connection on a secure messenger designed for direct messaging, and for nothing else. When people try to initiate conversations with you in DMs, have a ready answer to pivot the conversation elsewhere. Social platforms like BlueSky have radically different design constraints than direct messaging applications. The implications range from security to social dynamics to legal concerns. Social DMs are bad. Try not to use them!

7bit 2y ago
> The implications range from security to social dynamics to legal concerns. Which are...?
GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
E2E Encryption is on the road map for Bluesky as it requires some protocol changes. The devs are encouraging people to use the DMs to exchange Signal info, and reminding people to not use DMs for sensitive info. https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3kt457v6aq72n https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3kt457v6aq72n
- tptacek 2y ago
  It wouldn't matter if they implemented "E2E" encryption. "E2E" is necessary but insufficient for messaging security. It would still be a terrible idea to rely on Bluesky DM's, even if they met some floor of cryptographic quality, for the same reason that it's a bad idea to use Facebook DMs, despite their cryptography being close to the gold standard for large scale social apps.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

Um... So all the money, all the development, to create Twitter² and they just added DMs? That seems an underwhelming achievement.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
The headline is that it's not a shithole ridden with ads, spam, influencers, scams, etc. That's the important part of replacing Twitter.
- retox 2y ago
  Neither was Twitter at the equivalent point in time.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    Very true, and if Bluesky sucks 5 years down the road I'll leave for something new.
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    There are a lot of people who would disagree with that. BlueSky already has better mod tools than Twitter circa 2014 did. Musk’s transformation may have made it exponentially worse, but for some people it was already very bad.
- ThinkBeat 2y ago
  What are the criteria for deciding how to either stop influencers from signing up, or how to permaban them as soon as they start? It would be something no other platform has managed. Including this site.

codingclaws 2y ago

I am in the middle of implementing DMs. What are my options for making it e2e encrypted? I am using postgres if that matters.

reustle 2y ago
I don't think this is the right place for that, but there are generally a bunch of libraries which will help you get this sorted out. If you tweet at me your tech stack and framework(s), I might be able to help you with more info. My details are in my bio.
TheRealNGenius 2y ago
[dead]

atulvi 2y ago

I really want bsky to succeed. They have a promising product. Users and Content are all that matters now.

wpietri 2y ago
They have a product, but do they have a business? I haven't kept up with them lately; do they have anything approaching a revenue model that would sustain them and provide good returns to their investors?

ineedaj0b 2y ago

reminder for all the twitter haters: Twitter's good! Yes, I know there's plenty of reasons you'll nitpick twitter and I can nitpick bluesky as well. More competition is good and I like to see it. Go where your friends are and have a good time. If you want the edge of Ai/ML, I suggest twitter. Lots of world class accounts. Bluesky is good, has more old school... like 'harry potter' type nerds on it. They post interesting stuff. You should also have a discord. Maybe an insta if you're trying to get a gf

jay-barronville 2y ago
I don’t think my wife would be happy with me getting a girlfriend.
- ineedaj0b 2y ago
  ;) she wants to see you happy
nvy 2y ago
>Twitter's good! It's really not. It was good for a short while, way before the Muskquisition but the quality both of the service and of discourse have declined.