5 ms·

It’s been almost two years of Bluesky being a comprehensively better microblogging experience with stronger integrity guarantees than Twitter, and it’s still st

It’s been almost two years of Bluesky being a comprehensively better microblogging experience with stronger integrity guarantees than Twitter, and it’s still struggling to sustain 2 million DAU. The unfortunate lesson learned is that nowadays only a very small percentage of social media users will switch to an equivalent platform for ideological, ethical, or practical reasons. Disruption of the incumbent is required.

consumer451 2y ago
> Disruption of the incumbent is required. In this case, the incumbent is disrupting themself. The X/Twitter block feature change appears to be an even bigger event than being banned in Brazil, according to usage stats. [0] It's like the great Digg migration, but just 1-5% of the user base, over time. Each time, the network effects affect. [0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
- arghandugh 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - consumer451 2y ago
    > rebuilding a social graph is a huge ask. It is. I felt like the Bsky team was too focused on protocol in the beginning, and they missed MANY opportunities for user growth. I recall a comment here that said ~"you guys missed the chance of a generation by staying invite only." I had agreed with that at them time. However, X/Twitter keeps making decisions which make the small, underfunded, yet smartest team in the land look pretty darn cool. (they were cool af the whole time) I highly recommend listening to an interview with the CEO, Jay Graber. I became a huge fan of her vision after doing so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aDDKv4nPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aDDKv4nPM https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-grab...
    - nosioptar 2y ago
      Requiring a separate app was another problem. My phone already has an app for viewing web pages,it doesn't need another one.
      - eropple 2y ago
        bsky.app works absolutely fine in a web browser and I use it instead of the mobile application. (It's React Native, so they push a build to the web.)
        nosioptar 2y ago
        It works now, that wasn't the case last time I'd looked. I wouldn't call it "absolutely fine" by any means. It's way too slow to render for me to use (took about 30 seconds to render the submitted link on my phone, mastodon took about 10 seconds to render a toot). I'm beyond sick of slow web pages.
        eropple 2y ago
        The mobile web application worked about as well as it does today from at least my join date of April 27, 2023. As for performance on my iPhone 15, on a 5G (not 5GUW) network, it loads in a second and a half; I just checked. I have some complaints with what RN does in terms of affordances but performance isn't a problem.
        nosioptar 2y ago
        Admittedly, my phone (Pixel 3a) is a piece of crap. I just checked it on my Thinkpad on a gigabit connection. It still took about 10 seconds of that spinning circle to render the page content.
pessimizer 2y ago
> stronger integrity guarantees What does this even mean? Bluesky is less likely to mangle your posts? I didn't think that any of the services had issues with data loss.
- theptip 2y ago
  In the social media business, “integrity” generally means policing hate speech/abuse/bullying/…
- arghandugh 2y ago
  It is highly tamper resistant. Your account (authorized domain) resolves to your DID from a public catalog which resolves to your PDS server. Anyone can talk directly to any PDS and replay and cryptographically verify every single post, like, and asset. It’s intentionally difficult to tamper with anyone’s speech, and any identity change operations get rolled into your crypto so any malicious break in your events can be identified and rolled back.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    Has there ever been an issue with tampering with someone's speech outside of once on Reddit that got caught immediately? The only other cases would be when various accounts were hacked and used for crypto scams, which from what I understand, BlueSky doesn't solve either.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
akkartik 2y ago
The lesson to learn is that to do anything in this world it takes persistence in addition to everything else. No matter how much better you are. https://paulgraham.com/die.html https://paulgraham.com/die.html
wpm 2y ago
At this point once Twitter becomes unbearable (and its fast approaching that), I'm going to do a data export, nuke my account, and move on with my life, not rush to replace it. I likely never would replace it.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Right, the incumbent is all but trying to drive people away but can't even do it. In the 2000s, deliberate and conscientious users still made up a big enough part of the audience that they could swing a migration away from MySpace or Digg. Today the internet is made up of the whole population, period. They're overall too passive and docile to look for something better.
toofy 2y ago
there are likely tens of thousands of sites who dream of having 2 million active users. other than a few VC heads, in no world is millions of dailies a bad thing. i’d be shocked if hn had 2 million daily. and thank your god it’s not full of everyone screaming at once. it’s what makes it such a rad place to be. i moved to mastodon when the infosec community migrated there and honestly, its OmgSoMuchBetter that it has less people. it’s like here on hn, the signal to noise ratio is fucking glorious. i’ve mentioned this multiple times in the past, but in reality we (people) prefer multiple different spaces, and for very very good reasons. it i want a quiet night with a fancy dinner, i’ll go to a quiet nicer restaurant. if i want a loud night out with the friends, we go to a club. if i want a goth night i go to the goth club if i want to hear blues i go to a blues bar. etc… the big sites suffer from their own ridiculousness and still, years later haven’t figured out that trying to be everything at once is hilariously stupid. it just makes you bad at everything. blue sky is incredible, at least until eternal september hits. Mastodon’s different servers hit so much better than the last years of twitter did. the minute everyone flocks to either of them, im out. we like different spaces for different moods, it’s common sense. could you imagine how awful going out would be if you’re talkin with your friends and over and over some totally random people were constantly coming to your table and screaming shit at you? “defend yourself!” … no, because that’s not normal… bar owners would be like “bro, that guy who keeps screaming at random people has to go… fuckin weirdo.” that’s the experience these same group of VC people keep trying to tell us is normal and what we should want. no thanks. thats weird af.
- godelski 2y ago
  So much this. I wish we could embrace this more. Not everything needs to be for everyone. If you make something for everyone you've just made something for noone[0]. I fear we are just hyper focusing on being over the top, to be monopolies. It's good business, but is it good for us? I'm sure you can find some metric to say it is, but is that what the metric actually measures? We should make sure we are building the things people want, not what we think people want. To make life better for our communities, states, countries, or everyone. I have no doubt you can get rich while doing this. But if we're chasing a score harder than we're chasing a goal we'll always rationalize the former is the later. It's a great trap we've seemed to have fallen for. [0] we even have good mathematical intuition to believe this. In high dimensional systems when things are normal distributed (really just not uniformly distributed) the mean is not representative of the whole. I think it's clear that there's lots of different people with different opinions about a lot of things (high dimensions) and that there's not a smooth even distribution of opinions (they clump)
JauntTrooper 2y ago
I think Threads is disrupting Twitter fairly well... it's at 200 million+ monthly active users and growing. I switched from Twitter to Threads and have been happy with it (Bluesky was invite only at the time so I didn't bother). Threads actually got me to start using Instagram too, ironically.
stonethrowaway 2y ago
>Disruption of the incumbent is required. State your case. You have an audience here, now sell us on your idea.
godelski 2y ago
> still struggling to sustain 2 million DAU. Is this a problem? Seriously. Do we need every service to have a billion users? I'm glad there's places that are open to everyone, but at the same time I'm sad that a lot of smaller and niche places have disappeared. Those are the places I've found communities. It's possible on bigger sites but it's much harder. Your voice is one in a billion, it's not much better than having no voice. It's even happened more as HN has grown. And in any of these big places it's more likely that sensational posts rise to the top drowning out sensible or accurate messages (maximizing engagement doesn't maximize user happiness, communication, community, nor many other things). It's also harder to communicate because every community develops their own language and priors. A mutual understanding and that's what builds good faith conversations. I think if we've learned anything from these mega sites it's that even when people use their real names they still view themselves as "anonymous" (and conversely, in small sites people can hide their name, but it means something to the community, and they still have a reputation to defend) I'm not convinced we are measuring the right things. It just feels like people are measuring what they think they should, and are not thinking about what the actual goals are. These are not the same thing. But that's Goodhart's Law I guess
- Gud 2y ago
  No, not a problem at all. Quite the opposite in fact. I think the world is much better if we avoid forming authoritarian corporate media platforms with some dickhead billionaire in charge. I host my own social media platform with one active daily user plus two guys who signed up when I spam others Show HN posts. Link is in my profile. I prefer the bazaar any day. And im the guy selling my wares from a carpet on the street, don’t even have a fancy booth Sorry for rambling
  - godelski 2y ago
    > Sorry for rambling No, you're fine. I don't think you're alone and while I'm probably not going to sign up for your site, I do appreciate that you have created that space. I think there is a lot of value in doing things for the sake of doing them. It's an extremely "human" endeavor and I think there's lots of benefits, even if they are hidden. And I think there is even value in just knowing that these are things people want. Even if it isn't everyone. Personally, I thought the cool thing with the internet -- in regards to markets and economics -- is that it meant you could make products (or whatever) for very small niches and still get wealthy. Because with 6 billion people on the internet, even a very narrow niche is gonna strike the interest of at least tens of thousands (if not hundreds or a few million). It's interesting that instead we chose to build things for everybody and nobody.
pfraze 2y ago
I agree with this. I think we've managed to produce a good UX on a new protocol, which is important but not what the market measures us by. The market is looking for great products. That's going to take us improving at design execution as an org. I've said this before on HN; I'm sure you can find it in my history. We started as a protocol design company. Shifting to a product & services company has been a process, and "moving quickly" as a new org in an established market-space is a comical challenge. We got pitted against Threads, which was able to reuse the scaling and moderation infra of Insta and take on 100M signups in their first week. The only way to be competitive here is to find a differentiated & novel execution which finds PMF. The protocol work is the PBC mission, but new technologies need PMF to gain distribution. We're not trying to sell people on ideology or ethics. I do want folks to know how the technology works, however, so I will post threads like the one linked here.
39896880 2y ago
I’m not a Bluesky user, but I contend that it is time to rethink success when it comes to the web. The website I am most active on has fewer than 50k active users, is limited to about that many intentionally, runs on donations and is centered are a single set of interests. It’s almost 10 years old.
- canadianfella 2y ago
  [dead]
mplewis 2y ago
How many DAU do you think Hacker News has?
jrflowers 2y ago
> a very small percentage of social media users will switch This is a good point. All of the existing social media users are entrenched in the big 3 of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and that is why TikTok does not exist
Maxamillion96 2y ago
That’s because bluesky is built for engineers not consumers, which explains why it’s so popular on here.

consumer451 2y ago

> Disruption of the incumbent is required. In this case, the incumbent is disrupting themself. The X/Twitter block feature change appears to be an even bigger event than being banned in Brazil, according to usage stats. [0] It's like the great Digg migration, but just 1-5% of the user base, over time. Each time, the network effects affect. [0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

arghandugh 2y ago
[flagged]
- consumer451 2y ago
  > rebuilding a social graph is a huge ask. It is. I felt like the Bsky team was too focused on protocol in the beginning, and they missed MANY opportunities for user growth. I recall a comment here that said ~"you guys missed the chance of a generation by staying invite only." I had agreed with that at them time. However, X/Twitter keeps making decisions which make the small, underfunded, yet smartest team in the land look pretty darn cool. (they were cool af the whole time) I highly recommend listening to an interview with the CEO, Jay Graber. I became a huge fan of her vision after doing so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aDDKv4nPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aDDKv4nPM https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-grab...
  - nosioptar 2y ago
    Requiring a separate app was another problem. My phone already has an app for viewing web pages,it doesn't need another one.
    - eropple 2y ago
      bsky.app works absolutely fine in a web browser and I use it instead of the mobile application. (It's React Native, so they push a build to the web.)
      - nosioptar 2y ago
        It works now, that wasn't the case last time I'd looked. I wouldn't call it "absolutely fine" by any means. It's way too slow to render for me to use (took about 30 seconds to render the submitted link on my phone, mastodon took about 10 seconds to render a toot). I'm beyond sick of slow web pages.
        eropple 2y ago
        The mobile web application worked about as well as it does today from at least my join date of April 27, 2023. As for performance on my iPhone 15, on a 5G (not 5GUW) network, it loads in a second and a half; I just checked. I have some complaints with what RN does in terms of affordances but performance isn't a problem.
        nosioptar 2y ago
        Admittedly, my phone (Pixel 3a) is a piece of crap. I just checked it on my Thinkpad on a gigabit connection. It still took about 10 seconds of that spinning circle to render the page content.

pessimizer 2y ago

> stronger integrity guarantees What does this even mean? Bluesky is less likely to mangle your posts? I didn't think that any of the services had issues with data loss.

theptip 2y ago
In the social media business, “integrity” generally means policing hate speech/abuse/bullying/…
arghandugh 2y ago
It is highly tamper resistant. Your account (authorized domain) resolves to your DID from a public catalog which resolves to your PDS server. Anyone can talk directly to any PDS and replay and cryptographically verify every single post, like, and asset. It’s intentionally difficult to tamper with anyone’s speech, and any identity change operations get rolled into your crypto so any malicious break in your events can be identified and rolled back.
- sofixa 2y ago
  Has there ever been an issue with tampering with someone's speech outside of once on Reddit that got caught immediately? The only other cases would be when various accounts were hacked and used for crypto scams, which from what I understand, BlueSky doesn't solve either.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

akkartik 2y ago

The lesson to learn is that to do anything in this world it takes persistence in addition to everything else. No matter how much better you are. https://paulgraham.com/die.html https://paulgraham.com/die.html

wpm 2y ago

At this point once Twitter becomes unbearable (and its fast approaching that), I'm going to do a data export, nuke my account, and move on with my life, not rush to replace it. I likely never would replace it.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

Right, the incumbent is all but trying to drive people away but can't even do it. In the 2000s, deliberate and conscientious users still made up a big enough part of the audience that they could swing a migration away from MySpace or Digg. Today the internet is made up of the whole population, period. They're overall too passive and docile to look for something better.

toofy 2y ago

there are likely tens of thousands of sites who dream of having 2 million active users. other than a few VC heads, in no world is millions of dailies a bad thing. i’d be shocked if hn had 2 million daily. and thank your god it’s not full of everyone screaming at once. it’s what makes it such a rad place to be. i moved to mastodon when the infosec community migrated there and honestly, its OmgSoMuchBetter that it has less people. it’s like here on hn, the signal to noise ratio is fucking glorious. i’ve mentioned this multiple times in the past, but in reality we (people) prefer multiple different spaces, and for very very good reasons. it i want a quiet night with a fancy dinner, i’ll go to a quiet nicer restaurant. if i want a loud night out with the friends, we go to a club. if i want a goth night i go to the goth club if i want to hear blues i go to a blues bar. etc… the big sites suffer from their own ridiculousness and still, years later haven’t figured out that trying to be everything at once is hilariously stupid. it just makes you bad at everything. blue sky is incredible, at least until eternal september hits. Mastodon’s different servers hit so much better than the last years of twitter did. the minute everyone flocks to either of them, im out. we like different spaces for different moods, it’s common sense. could you imagine how awful going out would be if you’re talkin with your friends and over and over some totally random people were constantly coming to your table and screaming shit at you? “defend yourself!” … no, because that’s not normal… bar owners would be like “bro, that guy who keeps screaming at random people has to go… fuckin weirdo.” that’s the experience these same group of VC people keep trying to tell us is normal and what we should want. no thanks. thats weird af.

godelski 2y ago
So much this. I wish we could embrace this more. Not everything needs to be for everyone. If you make something for everyone you've just made something for noone[0]. I fear we are just hyper focusing on being over the top, to be monopolies. It's good business, but is it good for us? I'm sure you can find some metric to say it is, but is that what the metric actually measures? We should make sure we are building the things people want, not what we think people want. To make life better for our communities, states, countries, or everyone. I have no doubt you can get rich while doing this. But if we're chasing a score harder than we're chasing a goal we'll always rationalize the former is the later. It's a great trap we've seemed to have fallen for. [0] we even have good mathematical intuition to believe this. In high dimensional systems when things are normal distributed (really just not uniformly distributed) the mean is not representative of the whole. I think it's clear that there's lots of different people with different opinions about a lot of things (high dimensions) and that there's not a smooth even distribution of opinions (they clump)

JauntTrooper 2y ago

I think Threads is disrupting Twitter fairly well... it's at 200 million+ monthly active users and growing. I switched from Twitter to Threads and have been happy with it (Bluesky was invite only at the time so I didn't bother). Threads actually got me to start using Instagram too, ironically.

stonethrowaway 2y ago

>Disruption of the incumbent is required. State your case. You have an audience here, now sell us on your idea.

godelski 2y ago

> still struggling to sustain 2 million DAU. Is this a problem? Seriously. Do we need every service to have a billion users? I'm glad there's places that are open to everyone, but at the same time I'm sad that a lot of smaller and niche places have disappeared. Those are the places I've found communities. It's possible on bigger sites but it's much harder. Your voice is one in a billion, it's not much better than having no voice. It's even happened more as HN has grown. And in any of these big places it's more likely that sensational posts rise to the top drowning out sensible or accurate messages (maximizing engagement doesn't maximize user happiness, communication, community, nor many other things). It's also harder to communicate because every community develops their own language and priors. A mutual understanding and that's what builds good faith conversations. I think if we've learned anything from these mega sites it's that even when people use their real names they still view themselves as "anonymous" (and conversely, in small sites people can hide their name, but it means something to the community, and they still have a reputation to defend) I'm not convinced we are measuring the right things. It just feels like people are measuring what they think they should, and are not thinking about what the actual goals are. These are not the same thing. But that's Goodhart's Law I guess

Gud 2y ago
No, not a problem at all. Quite the opposite in fact. I think the world is much better if we avoid forming authoritarian corporate media platforms with some dickhead billionaire in charge. I host my own social media platform with one active daily user plus two guys who signed up when I spam others Show HN posts. Link is in my profile. I prefer the bazaar any day. And im the guy selling my wares from a carpet on the street, don’t even have a fancy booth Sorry for rambling
- godelski 2y ago
  > Sorry for rambling No, you're fine. I don't think you're alone and while I'm probably not going to sign up for your site, I do appreciate that you have created that space. I think there is a lot of value in doing things for the sake of doing them. It's an extremely "human" endeavor and I think there's lots of benefits, even if they are hidden. And I think there is even value in just knowing that these are things people want. Even if it isn't everyone. Personally, I thought the cool thing with the internet -- in regards to markets and economics -- is that it meant you could make products (or whatever) for very small niches and still get wealthy. Because with 6 billion people on the internet, even a very narrow niche is gonna strike the interest of at least tens of thousands (if not hundreds or a few million). It's interesting that instead we chose to build things for everybody and nobody.

pfraze 2y ago

I agree with this. I think we've managed to produce a good UX on a new protocol, which is important but not what the market measures us by. The market is looking for great products. That's going to take us improving at design execution as an org. I've said this before on HN; I'm sure you can find it in my history. We started as a protocol design company. Shifting to a product & services company has been a process, and "moving quickly" as a new org in an established market-space is a comical challenge. We got pitted against Threads, which was able to reuse the scaling and moderation infra of Insta and take on 100M signups in their first week. The only way to be competitive here is to find a differentiated & novel execution which finds PMF. The protocol work is the PBC mission, but new technologies need PMF to gain distribution. We're not trying to sell people on ideology or ethics. I do want folks to know how the technology works, however, so I will post threads like the one linked here.

39896880 2y ago

I’m not a Bluesky user, but I contend that it is time to rethink success when it comes to the web. The website I am most active on has fewer than 50k active users, is limited to about that many intentionally, runs on donations and is centered are a single set of interests. It’s almost 10 years old.

canadianfella 2y ago
[dead]

mplewis 2y ago

How many DAU do you think Hacker News has?

jrflowers 2y ago

> a very small percentage of social media users will switch This is a good point. All of the existing social media users are entrenched in the big 3 of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and that is why TikTok does not exist

Maxamillion96 2y ago

That’s because bluesky is built for engineers not consumers, which explains why it’s so popular on here.