5 ms·

Thoughts on Bluesky

39 points by shafyy 2y ago

Simon_ORourke 2y ago
[flagged]
fsflover 2y ago
Another good take on Bluesky: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel.... tl;dr: Lack of decentralization inevitably leads to the enshittification, intentional or not.
rvz 2y ago
> Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on. I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next. Best part is the instance they are most likely switching to is the main instance (mastodon.social) since that is the biggest one and less likely to go down, and encourages centralization. To solve this, they should close sign ups. Why haven't they done that yet?
- S0y 2y ago
  >To solve this, they should close sign ups. Why haven't they done that yet? They do periodically closes signups. >I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next. Except on bluesky, you don't even get to be confused because it doesn't support any kinds of moves! It's pretty simple really, Bluesky hasn't magically figured out how to make proper federation work. they just say they're federated but in reality they're really just centralized.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    > Except on bluesky, you don't even get to be confused because it doesn't support any kinds of moves! This is simply not true. There's hundreds of folks who have moved their stuff over. I haven't yet but will be doing so, been too busy with other stuff. But I follow a bunch of people that have moved, and there was zero disruption on my end.
- shafyy 2y ago
  The issues you describe are integral parts of decentralized protocols, and they can't be solved by technology. The reason Bluesky does not have these problems is because they are de facto centralized. No confusion of choosing servers if there's only one server, right? > having to tell your followers where to go next. On Mastodon, you can set up an automatic forwarding so your followers automatically follow your new account, they don't even notice you have switched instances if they don't look closely at your handle.
  - elfprince13 2y ago
    Mastodon migration is not atomic and requires the instance you are migrating from to remain operational (and non-adversarial) long enough for all of your friends' instances to notice you have moved and update their contacts. It doesn't preserve your follows. On Bluesky you just need to push your repo onto a new PDS and sign a new DID telling the network which PDS has your data. Everything else is seamless and atomic.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Corrado 2y ago
  I personally find Mastodon confusing and I'm always unsure if I'm on the "correct" instance or not. I understand that all the instances can talk to each other, but it still feels disjointed to me; like I'm missing part of the conversation because it's happening in the other room. Bluesky doesn't have the same problem. I understand that they don't have true federation today but that's not really a blocker for me. I'm don't want to limit my reach just because something isn't perfect right now. If they get true federation working in the future, great! If they don't then I'll just deal with moving to the next platform. Granted, I don't make money or anything from any social platforms, but it's not the end of the world if you have to start over. At least not for me.
BillFranklin 2y ago
To be fair to them, they have done a significant amount of work to design the network to be open to competing servers, and I think it would be quite tricky to unpick that. In comparison to successful networks like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ATP gives a far fairer playing field and Bluesky hasn't done anything (aside from taking funding) to suggest they're not going to run with it. You are right that they could change their architecture so that their Relay is more trusted or blocks others in some way, once they capture the market. I am not sure what guarantee they could give with the current ATP arch - perhaps a committee would help, but other social networks have no incentive to support ATP.
- shafyy 2y ago
  They have done everything to have the appearance of an open protocol and use that as a competitive advantage against incumbents. However, if you look at the reality, it's a very centralized service run by the same company which controls and develops the protocol. If they are serious about this, they should hand over ATProto to an organization like W3C. They said that they don't think ActivityPub is good enough – but why not work with the ActivityPub team to make it better instead of building their proprietary protocol? Why should we trust them?
  - pfraze 2y ago
    We looked quite closely at ActivityPub. Here's why we didn't go with it: 1. AP doesn't have the facilities for global aggregation which can power search, discovery, algorithms, and metrics. The user community has been very clear that they do not want it to be introduced. We felt the connectivity of a shared global network was extremely important to the UX, but we felt it would be wrong to fly in the face of the AP world's established norms & wishes. 2. We felt that strong account portability was an extremely important feature of the system, to ensure that users don't get locked into a specific host. AP's redirection model of account migration concerned us. 3. We're concerned about the cost structure of AP. We're concerned that self-hosters are going to pay a prohibitively high price for virality. This is why we designed the network to avoid placing heavy load on PDS. I know that the AP world is frustrated with the competition between the protocols and suspicious of how we've chosen to do things. It's a shame because I think we're after similar things, and hold similar values. We didn't set out to sabotage the AP world; we just felt like there were important changes that needed to happen for this mission to work. Note, however: Our software is not proprietary. It's open-source. The specs are open. The network firehose is open. We're working on getting every piece of the infrastructure into good governance and straightforward self-hosting. It just takes time.
Karrot_Kream 2y ago
I find the factionalism among nerds over Mastodon and Bluesky to be a fascinating display of clique dynamics at work. Perhaps the most amusing bit is the folks most focused on fighting out these clique dynamics are the ones most likely to think they're the rational types that don't get involved in social dynamics. At the end of the day, you opt-into either network. My only wish is that the networks interoperate, which is possible right now but as an opt-in thing is patchy and voluntary.
- S0y 2y ago
  I can tell you that personally, if Bluesky wasn't so miss-reported as being federated and decentralized I wouldn't be caring as much as I did. I'm happy that bluesky is successful. what I'm not happy about is that it's claiming to be something it isn't and in doing so, undermining all the work people have put into an ecosystem that is TRULY federated and decentralized.
toofy 2y ago
First, let me say, I like Bluesky. A lot. However, I also have grown to absolutely love Mastodon and its so many different communities. Whats become clear to me is, I want both, Bluesky and Mastodon. As I've said many many times before, when it comes to free time, We like different vibes at different times. Sometimes we want a discord night, or maybe an indie movie theater, sometimes we want a drunken dance night, sometimes we want a goth club, sometimes we want a quiet night around a camp fire. I'm super skeptical when this same set of VC people keep trying to jam all of us into the same place and they keep desperately trying to convince us "This is the only place you want to be! All of you. All at once!" its super weird. and a staggering lack of understanding of humans. I fell in love with big cities for these exact reasons--there is always something different to do no matter what my mood is. And this is why i fell in love with the wider internet. Always something to do depending on the vibe im hunting. No i dont want to go to the same place with every single other person night after night and no i definitely dont want to hang out with people i dont like at all--thats a weird suggestion. I want so many options depending on my mood. At the end of the day both Bluesky and Mastodon are incredible and I dont see one "erasing" the other. As the article suggests, ideally Bluesky will protect against the inevitable VC vampire suckification and finally actually truly decentralize.
toastercat 2y ago
The proprietary and for-profit always wins. Even if Mastodon had all of the feature upsides of BlueSky, it would lose the marketing war.
- shafyy 2y ago
  In the short-term, yes. In the long-term, I hope not. You are probably right, but I want to keep supporting initiatives like ActivityPub and hope that when Bluesky fucks up, Mastodon and other services are still around.
  - toastercat 2y ago
    I'm kind of being doom'n'gloom, but unfortunately, this always seems to happen, and folks who previously disavowed Twitter/X when Elon took over still stuck around for 2 years. I don't believe the whole "I don't know what server to pick" complaint about Mastodon, because the mainsite literally has a huge button that says "Join mastodon.social"[1] [1] https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
- eviks 2y ago
  What are the most popular examples where "all the feature upsides" lost?
steveklabnik 2y ago
I don't really agree with the characterization of a lot of this post, but one specific technical detail: > If Bluesky Social, PBC decided to show ads (or do something else you don’t like), it would be very hard for you to switch to a different Relay and still be able to interact with all the other folks who stayed at the Bluesky Social, PBC Relay. This is backwards, as far as I know. Relays aggregate information from PDSes. If you decide that you want a relay that ignores certain PDSes, and then use an AppView that listens to that relay, you could use it. Your posts would still end up in your PDS. The BlueSky Relay could still be told about your posts, just like your relay would be told about your posts. This doesn't require any other people to do anything. The issue to be worried about with relays is the other way around: If Bluesky's relay decides to ignore your PDS, then folks that use that relay would have issues seeing your posts. Just like how your relay would be ignoring the ads.
eviks 2y ago
> Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on. But this isn't true, there already were horror stories where users were held hostage by non-cooperating server blocking the transfer - because you can't easily switch as described here, your data doesn't belong to you, that's one big area where bluesky is architectured much better

39 points by shafyy 2y ago

[flagged]

Another good take on Bluesky: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel.... tl;dr: Lack of decentralization inevitably leads to the enshittification, intentional or not.

rvz 2y ago

> Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on. I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next. Best part is the instance they are most likely switching to is the main instance (mastodon.social) since that is the biggest one and less likely to go down, and encourages centralization. To solve this, they should close sign ups. Why haven't they done that yet?

S0y 2y ago
>To solve this, they should close sign ups. Why haven't they done that yet? They do periodically closes signups. >I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next. Except on bluesky, you don't even get to be confused because it doesn't support any kinds of moves! It's pretty simple really, Bluesky hasn't magically figured out how to make proper federation work. they just say they're federated but in reality they're really just centralized.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  > Except on bluesky, you don't even get to be confused because it doesn't support any kinds of moves! This is simply not true. There's hundreds of folks who have moved their stuff over. I haven't yet but will be doing so, been too busy with other stuff. But I follow a bunch of people that have moved, and there was zero disruption on my end.
shafyy 2y ago
The issues you describe are integral parts of decentralized protocols, and they can't be solved by technology. The reason Bluesky does not have these problems is because they are de facto centralized. No confusion of choosing servers if there's only one server, right? > having to tell your followers where to go next. On Mastodon, you can set up an automatic forwarding so your followers automatically follow your new account, they don't even notice you have switched instances if they don't look closely at your handle.
- elfprince13 2y ago
  Mastodon migration is not atomic and requires the instance you are migrating from to remain operational (and non-adversarial) long enough for all of your friends' instances to notice you have moved and update their contacts. It doesn't preserve your follows. On Bluesky you just need to push your repo onto a new PDS and sign a new DID telling the network which PDS has your data. Everything else is seamless and atomic.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Corrado 2y ago
I personally find Mastodon confusing and I'm always unsure if I'm on the "correct" instance or not. I understand that all the instances can talk to each other, but it still feels disjointed to me; like I'm missing part of the conversation because it's happening in the other room. Bluesky doesn't have the same problem. I understand that they don't have true federation today but that's not really a blocker for me. I'm don't want to limit my reach just because something isn't perfect right now. If they get true federation working in the future, great! If they don't then I'll just deal with moving to the next platform. Granted, I don't make money or anything from any social platforms, but it's not the end of the world if you have to start over. At least not for me.

BillFranklin 2y ago

To be fair to them, they have done a significant amount of work to design the network to be open to competing servers, and I think it would be quite tricky to unpick that. In comparison to successful networks like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ATP gives a far fairer playing field and Bluesky hasn't done anything (aside from taking funding) to suggest they're not going to run with it. You are right that they could change their architecture so that their Relay is more trusted or blocks others in some way, once they capture the market. I am not sure what guarantee they could give with the current ATP arch - perhaps a committee would help, but other social networks have no incentive to support ATP.

shafyy 2y ago
They have done everything to have the appearance of an open protocol and use that as a competitive advantage against incumbents. However, if you look at the reality, it's a very centralized service run by the same company which controls and develops the protocol. If they are serious about this, they should hand over ATProto to an organization like W3C. They said that they don't think ActivityPub is good enough – but why not work with the ActivityPub team to make it better instead of building their proprietary protocol? Why should we trust them?
- pfraze 2y ago
  We looked quite closely at ActivityPub. Here's why we didn't go with it: 1. AP doesn't have the facilities for global aggregation which can power search, discovery, algorithms, and metrics. The user community has been very clear that they do not want it to be introduced. We felt the connectivity of a shared global network was extremely important to the UX, but we felt it would be wrong to fly in the face of the AP world's established norms & wishes. 2. We felt that strong account portability was an extremely important feature of the system, to ensure that users don't get locked into a specific host. AP's redirection model of account migration concerned us. 3. We're concerned about the cost structure of AP. We're concerned that self-hosters are going to pay a prohibitively high price for virality. This is why we designed the network to avoid placing heavy load on PDS. I know that the AP world is frustrated with the competition between the protocols and suspicious of how we've chosen to do things. It's a shame because I think we're after similar things, and hold similar values. We didn't set out to sabotage the AP world; we just felt like there were important changes that needed to happen for this mission to work. Note, however: Our software is not proprietary. It's open-source. The specs are open. The network firehose is open. We're working on getting every piece of the infrastructure into good governance and straightforward self-hosting. It just takes time.

Karrot_Kream 2y ago

I find the factionalism among nerds over Mastodon and Bluesky to be a fascinating display of clique dynamics at work. Perhaps the most amusing bit is the folks most focused on fighting out these clique dynamics are the ones most likely to think they're the rational types that don't get involved in social dynamics. At the end of the day, you opt-into either network. My only wish is that the networks interoperate, which is possible right now but as an opt-in thing is patchy and voluntary.

S0y 2y ago
I can tell you that personally, if Bluesky wasn't so miss-reported as being federated and decentralized I wouldn't be caring as much as I did. I'm happy that bluesky is successful. what I'm not happy about is that it's claiming to be something it isn't and in doing so, undermining all the work people have put into an ecosystem that is TRULY federated and decentralized.

toofy 2y ago

First, let me say, I like Bluesky. A lot. However, I also have grown to absolutely love Mastodon and its so many different communities. Whats become clear to me is, I want both, Bluesky and Mastodon. As I've said many many times before, when it comes to free time, We like different vibes at different times. Sometimes we want a discord night, or maybe an indie movie theater, sometimes we want a drunken dance night, sometimes we want a goth club, sometimes we want a quiet night around a camp fire. I'm super skeptical when this same set of VC people keep trying to jam all of us into the same place and they keep desperately trying to convince us "This is the only place you want to be! All of you. All at once!" its super weird. and a staggering lack of understanding of humans. I fell in love with big cities for these exact reasons--there is always something different to do no matter what my mood is. And this is why i fell in love with the wider internet. Always something to do depending on the vibe im hunting. No i dont want to go to the same place with every single other person night after night and no i definitely dont want to hang out with people i dont like at all--thats a weird suggestion. I want so many options depending on my mood. At the end of the day both Bluesky and Mastodon are incredible and I dont see one "erasing" the other. As the article suggests, ideally Bluesky will protect against the inevitable VC vampire suckification and finally actually truly decentralize.

toastercat 2y ago

The proprietary and for-profit always wins. Even if Mastodon had all of the feature upsides of BlueSky, it would lose the marketing war.

shafyy 2y ago
In the short-term, yes. In the long-term, I hope not. You are probably right, but I want to keep supporting initiatives like ActivityPub and hope that when Bluesky fucks up, Mastodon and other services are still around.
- toastercat 2y ago
  I'm kind of being doom'n'gloom, but unfortunately, this always seems to happen, and folks who previously disavowed Twitter/X when Elon took over still stuck around for 2 years. I don't believe the whole "I don't know what server to pick" complaint about Mastodon, because the mainsite literally has a huge button that says "Join mastodon.social"[1] [1] https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
eviks 2y ago
What are the most popular examples where "all the feature upsides" lost?

steveklabnik 2y ago

I don't really agree with the characterization of a lot of this post, but one specific technical detail: > If Bluesky Social, PBC decided to show ads (or do something else you don’t like), it would be very hard for you to switch to a different Relay and still be able to interact with all the other folks who stayed at the Bluesky Social, PBC Relay. This is backwards, as far as I know. Relays aggregate information from PDSes. If you decide that you want a relay that ignores certain PDSes, and then use an AppView that listens to that relay, you could use it. Your posts would still end up in your PDS. The BlueSky Relay could still be told about your posts, just like your relay would be told about your posts. This doesn't require any other people to do anything. The issue to be worried about with relays is the other way around: If Bluesky's relay decides to ignore your PDS, then folks that use that relay would have issues seeing your posts. Just like how your relay would be ignoring the ads.

eviks 2y ago

> Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on. But this isn't true, there already were horror stories where users were held hostage by non-cooperating server blocking the transfer - because you can't easily switch as described here, your data doesn't belong to you, that's one big area where bluesky is architectured much better