4 ms·

It’s worth noting that twitter itself owes a lot of its popularity to its openness in the early days. In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feed

by paulgb 2y ago

It’s worth noting that twitter itself owes a lot of its popularity to its openness in the early days. In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feeds, XMPP support, etc. You could post from a curl command in a cron job, leading to all kinds of interesting automated feeds. Then they walked it all back in the early 2010s. I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did.

AshamedCaptain 2y ago
> I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did. Why would it? They can still lock everything down and few Bluesky users will even notice. This is similar to what Twitter did, or what Google Chat did, etc. Compare this to other federation platforms where a server that locks itself down loses access to a huge chunk of the network, once the other servers reciprocate.
- diggan 2y ago
  > Why would it? Since migrating your personal data was a thing they thought about since day one, migrating to another network than the current one would be way easier than any centralized service and also easier than ActivityPub. Seems there is one piece of the puzzle missing yet ("AppViews") in ATProto to be able to run completely independent, but seems they're currently working on getting that in place now.
  - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
    You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily, and most definitely you could in Google Chat. This did not change things.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily Yeah? I don't remember being able to migrate from/to Twitter and taking followers/following etc with you without having to ask/request others to do something too.
      - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
        But I'm guessing that you'll also have to request your followers to use a different AppView if Bluesky did a Twitter.
  - shafyy 2y ago
    You can host your personal data, but as long as Bluesky Social, PBC is running the main Relay and AppView, and there's no easy way for Relays to talk to each other (like e.g. it works in Mastodon), they are in reality a centralized service. Oh yes, and they are the only ones owning and developing AT Protocol, which makes it much more a currently-open-sourced protocol rather than a standard that is jointly developed by the industry.
  - rakoo 2y ago
    The big central place is still the PLC directory that effectively means all accounts are centralized at BlueSky, even if your posts are not. They haven't planned to make it any decentralized in the future.
  - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    Nothing technical is preventing any federated platform to stop sharing the content with its peer. Only thing that prevents it is if there are multiple big peer and they can't afford a network partition, which is not the case with bluesky. Eventually VC's money will run dry and they don't have any solution for this.
cma 2y ago
They are a public benefit corporation that use that as a selling point but then don't disclose their charter. That seems really shady to me, but less than what twitter has become.
glenstein 2y ago
>In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feeds, XMPP support, etc. Right. This is something I keep pointing out in threads about RSS. Some people will say RSS never left. Well, it left Twitter for one. Google News and Craigslist for others. I almost wonder, to GP's point, if people have just completely forgotten all of this, which is why they think nothing was lost.
- echelon 2y ago
  The 2000s Internet felt way more innovative than the one we have today, despite all of the WASM, WebGPU, JIT optimizations, and other technologies that have been developed in more recent years. We had torrents, open data, open protocols, and people were sharing data and remixing it freely. Mountains of stuff like this Bluesky demo was released every single day. We had link aggregators to point to the cool things that were happening, and we even had tools that let you pipe data sources between various APIs to enrich and recombine things easily. Platforms stopped this. Facebook, Google, and even Apple put an end to the wildly evolutionary behavior by delivering a canned experience to the masses. We need a return to P2P where single platform silos and their army of product managers don't shape how we interact with technology and the bulk flow of information.
  - hn72774 2y ago
    I see 2 way to do this. A company (and PM) sees demand for the feature and they include it, ot it is forced by regulation. A lot of these companies that originally had open standards formed with huge amounts of VC money and they prioritized growth over everything else. Then when they reached a certain scale, investors valued profitability and they slowly squeezed and monetized users until all of those open standards features were gone.
  - 1024core 2y ago
    > The 2000s Internet felt way more innovative than the one we have today Because it seems like this stuff is taught in Management 101 in all of the business schools: once you establish yourself with all this talk about "openness", etc. then the only way to succeed is by creating a walled garden, either through abuse of your monopoly position or by regulatory capture. Cases in point: OpenAI _and_ Anthropic both pushing for regulation of AI, now that they have a dominant position. I swear, the moment MBAs get involved, they try the same crap everywhere.
FranOntanaya 2y ago
irssi had a plugin to read and post to Twitter from IRC, it was neat.
ideashower 2y ago
I’m struggling to recall some of those early fun accounts. Do you remember any interesting automated feeds from Twitter’s early days?
- paulgb 2y ago
  I used to run a cron job that would scrape my university's daily bulletin and post every day right after it was updated. It may have been the first “presence” the university had on twitter. I remember following things like weather stations that had automated accounts, as well.
- blitzar 2y ago
  https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/12/newlywed-sex-tweets/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/12/newlywed-sex-tweets/ Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex. They’re on the job! #1 – Action commenced at 12.21GMT. Weight: 84KG. They’re off the job! #1 – Action concluded at 12.24GMT. Duration: 3 m.15 s. Frenzy Index: 8 (scary). Judge’s Comment: “Is that it?”

by paulgb 2y ago

AshamedCaptain 2y ago

> I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did. Why would it? They can still lock everything down and few Bluesky users will even notice. This is similar to what Twitter did, or what Google Chat did, etc. Compare this to other federation platforms where a server that locks itself down loses access to a huge chunk of the network, once the other servers reciprocate.

diggan 2y ago
> Why would it? Since migrating your personal data was a thing they thought about since day one, migrating to another network than the current one would be way easier than any centralized service and also easier than ActivityPub. Seems there is one piece of the puzzle missing yet ("AppViews") in ATProto to be able to run completely independent, but seems they're currently working on getting that in place now.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily, and most definitely you could in Google Chat. This did not change things.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily Yeah? I don't remember being able to migrate from/to Twitter and taking followers/following etc with you without having to ask/request others to do something too.
    - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
      But I'm guessing that you'll also have to request your followers to use a different AppView if Bluesky did a Twitter.
- shafyy 2y ago
  You can host your personal data, but as long as Bluesky Social, PBC is running the main Relay and AppView, and there's no easy way for Relays to talk to each other (like e.g. it works in Mastodon), they are in reality a centralized service. Oh yes, and they are the only ones owning and developing AT Protocol, which makes it much more a currently-open-sourced protocol rather than a standard that is jointly developed by the industry.
- rakoo 2y ago
  The big central place is still the PLC directory that effectively means all accounts are centralized at BlueSky, even if your posts are not. They haven't planned to make it any decentralized in the future.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  Nothing technical is preventing any federated platform to stop sharing the content with its peer. Only thing that prevents it is if there are multiple big peer and they can't afford a network partition, which is not the case with bluesky. Eventually VC's money will run dry and they don't have any solution for this.

cma 2y ago

They are a public benefit corporation that use that as a selling point but then don't disclose their charter. That seems really shady to me, but less than what twitter has become.

glenstein 2y ago

>In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feeds, XMPP support, etc. Right. This is something I keep pointing out in threads about RSS. Some people will say RSS never left. Well, it left Twitter for one. Google News and Craigslist for others. I almost wonder, to GP's point, if people have just completely forgotten all of this, which is why they think nothing was lost.

echelon 2y ago
The 2000s Internet felt way more innovative than the one we have today, despite all of the WASM, WebGPU, JIT optimizations, and other technologies that have been developed in more recent years. We had torrents, open data, open protocols, and people were sharing data and remixing it freely. Mountains of stuff like this Bluesky demo was released every single day. We had link aggregators to point to the cool things that were happening, and we even had tools that let you pipe data sources between various APIs to enrich and recombine things easily. Platforms stopped this. Facebook, Google, and even Apple put an end to the wildly evolutionary behavior by delivering a canned experience to the masses. We need a return to P2P where single platform silos and their army of product managers don't shape how we interact with technology and the bulk flow of information.
- hn72774 2y ago
  I see 2 way to do this. A company (and PM) sees demand for the feature and they include it, ot it is forced by regulation. A lot of these companies that originally had open standards formed with huge amounts of VC money and they prioritized growth over everything else. Then when they reached a certain scale, investors valued profitability and they slowly squeezed and monetized users until all of those open standards features were gone.
- 1024core 2y ago
  > The 2000s Internet felt way more innovative than the one we have today Because it seems like this stuff is taught in Management 101 in all of the business schools: once you establish yourself with all this talk about "openness", etc. then the only way to succeed is by creating a walled garden, either through abuse of your monopoly position or by regulatory capture. Cases in point: OpenAI _and_ Anthropic both pushing for regulation of AI, now that they have a dominant position. I swear, the moment MBAs get involved, they try the same crap everywhere.

FranOntanaya 2y ago

irssi had a plugin to read and post to Twitter from IRC, it was neat.

ideashower 2y ago

I’m struggling to recall some of those early fun accounts. Do you remember any interesting automated feeds from Twitter’s early days?

paulgb 2y ago
I used to run a cron job that would scrape my university's daily bulletin and post every day right after it was updated. It may have been the first “presence” the university had on twitter. I remember following things like weather stations that had automated accounts, as well.
blitzar 2y ago
https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/12/newlywed-sex-tweets/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/12/newlywed-sex-tweets/ Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex. They’re on the job! #1 – Action commenced at 12.21GMT. Weight: 84KG. They’re off the job! #1 – Action concluded at 12.24GMT. Duration: 3 m.15 s. Frenzy Index: 8 (scary). Judge’s Comment: “Is that it?”