26 ms·

Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

269 points by ianrahman 2y ago

mhh__ 2y ago
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- MisterBastahrd 2y ago
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  - dang 2y ago
    Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, or any flamewar. That's what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ggm 2y ago
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  - dang 2y ago
    Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, or any flamewar. That's what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - ggm 2y ago
      Fair.
- dang 2y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar, or any flamewar. That's what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mhh__ 2y ago
    Show me something without ideology
    - dang 2y ago
      I hear you but we're not asking anyone to be free of ideological assumptions—just to avoid denunciatory rhetoric, internet indignation tropes, name-calling, etc., in comments here. That's not hard, assuming you've read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and want to use HN in the intended spirit. Btw, the reason for asking to avoid these things is not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with them. It's just that they evoke worse from others and put the threads into a doom spiral. That's the default outcome on the internet, so we're pretty proactive about trying to avoid it. If you find HN interesting enough to be here, then it's in your interest to contribute to that intention, since the default outcome (a.k.a. scorched earth) won't be interesting to anybody.
darthrupert 2y ago
My experience is that fundamentally there's nothing better with Bluesky or Mastodon when compared to Twitter. They're all toxic doom scrolling applications and if one does use them, it will be a good idea to control your usage as if it was cocaine.
- emseetech 2y ago
  Right now Bluesky's feed is time-based (although there is a suggestions tab). This will change as advertiser needs take over, but at least for the time being it's a noticeable difference.
- daghamm 2y ago
  Yes, but hopefully it is more free speech than om twitter where Elon wants to decide what you can and can't see. It is well known that he is obsessed that things that align with his own views get more visibility while things he doesn't like is suppressed https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-twitter-engineers-boost-his-tweets-after-biden-got-more-views/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...
  - fastball 2y ago
    And that doesn't apply to the powers that be at other social networks (or management at Twitter pre-Elon)?
    - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      It certainly doesn't seem to so far.
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago
      I'm not on Twitter. And the jury is still out on BlueSky. I'm happy to abandon BlueSky though as soon as it is revealed to be a shitsocket.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      Pre-Elon moderation was (somewhat) sensible. Every online space needs a janitorial crew to keep it from turning into a wasteland (look at 4chan /b/, and even b isn't completely unmoderated). But it didn't take actions at the emotional whims of a megalomaniac ruler.
neuroelectron 2y ago
I've organically come across more mastadon instances than bluesky. But that's just me. I wish it was easier to surf mastadon though, where you have to log in to see content unlike bluesky.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  You don't need to be logged in to see content on Mastodon. There are privacy settings that could hide content from non-followers, and mastodon users may be more privacy conscious, but log in is not generally required.
  - neuroelectron 2y ago
    Must just be in the app then. Brave is supposed to block opening links in apps in iOS but it's broken lately.
emseetech 2y ago
When Bluesky announced they were taking on large amounts of capital to handle the growth that's when I knew their days were numbered. Capital requires returns, and a lot of the degradation of the user experience in the past few years is due to catering to investors and advertisers (who are the actual customers). Decentralization as is promised is one way to mitigate this, but there's no economic incentive to go through with it. Investors will encourage Bluesky to kick that can down the road until people forgot they ever promised it in the first place. That said, we will have a good amount of time with Bluesky as a more positive site before these changes kick in. But my hunch is that it'll be shorter than previous cycles. The rate of profit has fallen and investors don't have as much grace for companies that grow without revenue as they did 10-15 years ago. Of all the sites that emerged out of the internet renaissance starting in the late 90's, it seems the only one that has hung on and still provides a good value, despite all it's issues, is Wikipedia. And that has to be because it's a non-profit powered by volunteer labor with no need to optimize revenue or make a profit. I often dream of recreating the classic web using a very low cost subscription model (since cheap is better than free, because free is never truly free) and apps that are bootstrapped or crowdfunded instead of vc funded. Decentralization in that circumstance is much more achievable and way less of a threat, although it still comes with a ton of technical and political considerations.
- brightball 2y ago
  IMO Mastodon is the only real place for a truly decentralized option. BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now. It has a future, but the branding in very tainted.
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    If you think BlueSky is political, Mastodon is worse. Mastodon ends up creating significant echo chambers where admins ban communication with other instances for having people with different opinions to them (rather than just delisting in the public feed) and on can ban you and stop you moving your data to another instance. On Mastodon, admins can also be pressured into banning users by other admins under fear of having their instances blocked, and admins are usually political activists. I've avoided BlueSky because people are allowed to boast and defend being attracted to kids or spam death threats (including addresses attached), but not have differing political opinions, even when they're arguably mainstream.
CartyBoston 2y ago
Twitter sucks because it's commercial. Threads sucks because it's commercial. Bluesky will suck because it's commercial. If only there was a pattern we could detect. Learn about the Fediverse (not just "Mastodon"), it's the only solution worthy of you.
- fnord77 2y ago
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  - Klonoar 2y ago
    This is like saying “the people who run email are insufferable”.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I wonder if a tree blogs in an obscure, infrequently traveled forest will anyone read it?
- caseyy 2y ago
  > If only there was a pattern we could detect https://briefs.video/videos/i-am-leaving/ https://briefs.video/videos/i-am-leaving/
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  IDK how this applies to Bluesky. The underlying infrastructure is only loosely tethered to Bluesky the company. If you want to pull all your shit and run it separate from the bluesky stuff you can and there's really nothing they can do to try and stop you or ban you. They can limit your reach on their stuff but if you don't want to use their stuff it doesn't actually matter and you can continue to exist completely independent of them if you want.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  HackerNews is commercial. Beware of sampling bias.
- loeg 2y ago
soneca 2y ago
I understand a blog on your own domain is your land in regard to microblogging platforms. But what would be my land in regard to community software, like Telegram or Discord? Is there any software like this that I can host on my domain?
- crimsoneer 2y ago
  Matrix/Discourse? But like all self hosted solution, it's harder to use than a managed product. I think they're both excellent though, and pretty common in some circles.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    But will anyone come? Plenty of the people I follow, Jeff Geerling for example (hi!) have their own sites/kingdoms but I don't make the rounds of their personal sites every morning.
    - soneca 2y ago
      Someone will come, and, for me at least, it is ok if it’s fewer people than what would come on mass reach platform
  - soneca 2y ago
    Actually, it doesn’t have to be self-hosted for me. A managed product, hosted by a company, that I can point to my domain would work (just like some blog or website makers solutions). Discourse has managed option though, so thanks for pointing it out.
  - 998244353 2y ago
    My team uses Matrix and I must say I'm not satisfied. There are messages that I get a notification for every time I open the app, and "mark as read" buttons that do nothing, especially if you use threads. This is something that has supposedly been fixed many times, but it's one of these persistent issues that keep coming back. Also, as far as I can tell, there is no real diversity in clients even though Matrix is in principle an open protocol. Everything is either Element or a fork of it, or at least is built on matrix-react-sdk, which makes them all effectively the same.
crimsoneer 2y ago
This seems like a rather poor excuse to not try and integrate with the Fediverse/mastodon. Yes, managing your own space is more complicated than using a manager solution, but like, isn't that always going to be the case?
- gtirloni 2y ago
  Yes, especially when the author says they care about control.
- verdverm 2y ago
  For someone technical, this is certainly an option, but the other half of the argument is that you need to be where the other people are. In this respect, Mastondon is not something the average social media user finds easy, and why Bluesky is having success with this group.
keiferski 2y ago
A similar but I think simpler approach is to just act like a celebrity or a brand. When X celebrity joins a social network, their fans follow them on that platform. When the celebrity leaves and goes elsewhere, the fans follow. The value follows the celebrity because the celebrity’s value isn’t in the content on the social network, it’s in their personal brand itself. Therefore if you’re going to invest in creating valuable content on TikTok/Instagram/Bluesky/X/wherever, make sure you’re publishing it from a specific brandable name - and not generically posting good identity-less content. It doesn’t need to be your real name, as there are plenty of successful pseudonymous individuals out there. It just needs to be reasonably memorable and consistent.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  The blog post (and your comment) presumes someone is a celebrity, has a kingdom. A lot of us are just busking on the street corners.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    Not necessarily. I think it’s perfectly possible to be a random non-famous person that builds a following because they have insightful tweets/images/content. But the risk is that if you don’t give yourself a reasonably memorable publisher name, you won’t be able to transfer that audience to another platform, because no one is going to see your name and recognize it from elsewhere.
    - bookofjoe 2y ago
      I'm an exemplar of the person you describe above. I started my blog on Typepad in 2004 and am in year 21, with things pretty much as they were in the beginning. When/if Typepad collapses (there are those who say it already has, since they stopped adding new customers in 2020 after being sold and posting is VERY janky and broken since then), I'll find a new home under the same brand name. Back in the day, around 2010-2012, I averaged 15,000 page views and 10,000 visitors/day. In recent years it's been around 500 page views/day, so about 3% of where I was at maximum blog. The nice thing about being this marginal is that I can easily respond to each comment/email.
dsr_ 2y ago
>“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!” Yes, and choldgraf@gmail.com and choldgraf@ibm.com are different email-people, too. This is not a hard concept.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  Yet, people are confused by it. I think this is at least partly because there's even less to differentiate the different mastodon domains than there was to differentiate gmail and yahoo. And, of course, there are a lot of people growing up now who don't really use email, so the analogy can't be taken for granted.
  - igravious 2y ago
    they may be confused by it yet it is not a hard concept
    - conradfr 2y ago
      Therefore it's a bad concept.
      - ohhxohzohx 2y ago
        are all hard to understand concepts bad concepts? are hard concepts from math and science bad concepts? should we discard calculus? is potty training a toddler a bad concept? they initially struggle with it and some find it hard is a healthy diet a bad concept? people without prior knowledge of what's healthy and what isn't are likely to struggle
    - stavros 2y ago
      People being confused by a concept is the definition of it being hard.
      - foxglacier 2y ago
austin-cheney 2y ago
Don’t build castles in other peoples kingdoms That is why I devote my energy to enriching my home file server with custom software that I can access anywhere via domain name mapped to a IPv6 address. It is my kingdom and its not going away. I can demo on there full stack applications that would be challenging to demo otherwise. If I had a blog on there I could say what I want. I could host a personal email address on there. I am exploring how to limit access by physical device identity so that it remains private even on the public internet.
- that_guy_iain 2y ago
  I'm not trying to be rude but are you serious or being sarcastic? Because on here it could go either way. There are definitely people who would build everything themselves just because they can. And there are people who would mock someone for doing so. If you're being serious, how much time does it take and how much custom software do you actually have?
  - chickenfeed 2y ago
    Self-hosting sounds good but the security concerns are just a bind. Plus you need stability. Like having a home. Our electric grid falls over at least once a week where we live. Yes I could use batteries, but no, I can't be bothered.
    - speff 2y ago
      Batteries are a pretty set-and-forget solution though. Out of all the maintenance/thought I put towards my server, the UPS takes the least amount of attention. Though it really is only good for outages <2 or 3 hours. If it’s longer in your area, then it’s a bigger concern
    - incompatible 2y ago
      Or you die, if you are interested in long-term availability of your work. It's nice to have it hosted somewhere where others will look after it.
    - 2y ago
that_guy_iain 2y ago
It's quite interesting how much Musk's taking over Twitter damaged a lot of small businesses, where the person's personal brand on Twitter actually generated a decent amount of their business. What was even more interesting was seeing those semi-large accounts 20-100k followers move over to Bluesky post the same material on both but get more engagement on Bluesky with 1/10th of the audience.
- afro88 2y ago
  Very interesting. Do you have any links with actual data / detail?
  - asadotzler 2y ago
    Not op but I'm on Bluesky and have seen several of these decent sized accounts, including people at large newsrooms say they get far more engagement at BlueSky than Twitter. Bigger fish, smaller pond, I suspect, but also more engaged users perhaps.
  - edavis 2y ago
    this post by the team has some: https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-29-2024-engagement https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-29-2024-engagement
chickenfeed 2y ago
Bluesky has potential with the AT protocol. I think I had a flagged post on Bluesky, early on that just referenced something elsewhere - it was pretty harmless. And I remember a few X users trying the platform saying something vaguely controversial and getting a suspension. Or some such. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of censorship and free speech but you can get booted out the pub for saying something disagreeable in front of the bar hands or patrons. And I would be quite livid if I had invested in a platform and then got shut down. The AT protocol gives you the ability to produce feeds. But it's actually the consumption aggregation and discover-ability that seems to the difficult bit. I feel we need a lightweight RSS style reader in browser to really get past this. There are weird hacks on Bluesky to subscribe to feeds. But it is messy. The feeds are where the magic potentially happens. Twitter had become unpalatable before Musk bought it. And there were various crisis of confidence and herd threatening migrations, but people just couldn't be bothered. In its latest ungodly form people are still sticking around, or moving to silos and bubbles on other platforms, it's just a complete and utter mess at this point. Platforms inevitably win out with convenience. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp succeeded as people just couldn't share or publish photos or files easily. Combined with some magic discover-ability. Twitter's collapse has been painful. But weirdly it was incredibly influential though low in membership. My personal consumption of social feeds has been obliterated to nearly zero. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I published for myself rather than an audience and had used Twitter just because it was easy. I have a broken computer at the moment and my entire dev stack / environment is in chaos. And although I think the barriers to publishing and self hosting are low there are still inherent obstacles.
maelito 2y ago
This is true but still, Bluesky enables things that X just cannot. I've spend hours building a website (1) that counts which members of the French parliament still actively tweet on X, and which actively use Bluesky. The "analyse.ts" script for X did have to go through scraping, in a real browser connected to a real account. It got blocked every 30 or so profile views... The Bluesky script was a delight, using the open no-credentials API (2). Of course the Bluesky company can shut down their website or their API. But still, what this openness permits today is a significant difference from what X ever permitted. Their abstractions will stay and could be leveraged by another company with a team of 10 experimented developers. 1. The website is https://politix.top https://politix.top. Feel free to fork it for your own country. 2. Here is the Bluesky script https://github.com/laem/politix/blob/master/analyseBluesky.ts https://github.com/laem/politix/blob/master/analyseBluesky.t...
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  > a significant difference from what X ever permitted I'm glad you specified "X" there; Twitter, of course, used to have a very good API. The bar has undoubtedly lowered.
  - maelito 2y ago
    My memory fails, despite the fact that in 2012 I used the Twitter API, but I don't think it was this easy and open for Twitter before X, was it ?
    - Klonoar 2y ago
      Parts of it certainly were. I built a somewhat widely deployed feed widget back in ~2009/2010 that worked via JSON-P and public access. I assume this is all ancient history now and a distant memory to most, but there was an era where Twitter’s API was a ton of fun to work with.
- glimshe 2y ago
  "Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.
laskmi 2y ago
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laskmi 2y ago
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laskmi 2y ago
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laskmi 2y ago
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capl 2y ago
Biggest issue is the lack of free speech. It’s a platform with an agenda, which is a huge red flag.
- GlacierFox 2y ago
  That's my biggest issue with it. I didn't even have twitter to begin with, but after trying out Bluesky I've barely had the patience to use it. Most people on there seem to be ultra-left wing virtue signalling phychopaths. It's obnoxiously progressive with no space for nuanced thought.
  - ggm 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
      OR… I wonder if there could be some alternative?
      - ggm 2y ago
        Yes, one should always be wary of the false dichotomy.
    - GlacierFox 2y ago
      Awesome, as usual, put me in that box with all the right wingers. Is there space for a normal liberal nowadays or do I have to fully subscribe to this modern day lunacy? Suppose I better fall in line then. Thanks for the help!
  - louthy 2y ago
    So, to be clear, the GP was stating that their issue is a lack of free speech. You agree that that’s your biggest issue with Bluesky too. But you’re unhappy with people expressing their personal opinions, primarily because you don’t agree with them? What version of free-speech is it that you want? I assume it’s just like all ‘free speech absolutioniats’: free speech as long as it’s your own or from people you agree with.
Zak 2y ago
> “you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!” While the author has a valid point about Bluesky having more momentum and some UX advantages over Mastodon, this is silly. Most people already know that choldgraf@gmail.com and choldgraf@hotmail.com might be different people.
- Klonoar 2y ago
  Technical folks might. Non-technical folks fall for this kind of thing in phishing attempts often enough that I can see the confusing complaint having some merit.
  - Zak 2y ago
    It's a bit different when someone is being intentionally deceptive. None of the major social platforms or protocols guard effectively against someone making a deceptively similar username to impersonate someone. I bet the vast majority of non-technical people who use email would correctly answer that the two email addresses might belong to different people if asked. That doesn't mean they'll be checking closely while using email every time. Something similar is possible on Bluesky since usernames are domain names.
    - eichin 2y ago
      It looks like bluesky only just figured out (in the last couple of weeks, I think?) that even if you authenticate foo.example.com they need to keep foo.bsky.social reserved, because otherwise they immediately get snapped up for impersonation. So, yeah, possible and already happening, but at least they're trying to mitigate the worst case of it.
  - glenstein 2y ago
    >Technical folks might. Non-technical folks fall for this kind of thing Right, but at that point we're just talking about general functional literacy. These same people are going to have trouble logging into their bank from a different computer, or ordering from a Wendy's menu or getting an oil change. Most people don't, and they sign up and post their memes, and follow their people, the platform reaches is critical mass and the world keeps on turning.
ritcgab 2y ago
People with similar mindsets gather on the same platform and ultimately create an echo chamber. If that's what you want, you can do the same on X/Twitter by creating your own "network". Just don't use the recommendation system and that's it. Abolishing a platform is merely a form of performance art.
jrflowers 2y ago
> don’t build your castle in a kingdom that somebody else controls > I’ll encourage folks to drive those conversations to community-specific spaces (like Discourse, Discord, etc). Who does the author think controls Discord?
- diggan 2y ago
  > Who does the author think controls Discord? I think you misunderstand what sort of control they speak about. I think what they're getting at is "Who is doing the moderation?" rather than "Who is maintaining the servers?", so the community aspect instead of the technical details. I think Discord let people do the moderation part pretty much however they want, compared to say Twitter where there is one moderation team that controls it all. Bit similar to Reddit I suppose, although Reddit also have admins/site-wide moderators that clean up across subreddits, so not identical. Still, seems weird to drive people from one castle to another castle, when instead you can drive them to your own website (like with Discourse). But I don't think that's what the author is talking about.
  - exodust 2y ago
    The author lists a set of rules, one of which is: "always move people back to your kingdom, never to another kingdom". So he's motivated by "moving people to kingdoms", which sounds like the exact thing he's calling out the big social platforms on, but adopting himself on a smaller scale. In the end, respecting users isn't the guiding force. "Kingdom building" is. Brand building. Users herded like cattle from castle to castle. It's "trust me bro" website ethics replacing corporate social media policies.
    - diggan 2y ago
      I dunno, reading and trying to understand what the author is trying to mean, I still think they're referring to moderation and not servers/infra when they talk about "kingdoms". But I could be wrong, it has happened before so bound to happen sometime again.
anonCoffee 2y ago
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- jghn 2y ago
  Are you claiming that it's not possible to use bluesky without running into such content? I've been using it since early on in the invite era and have yet to come across it at all. Just like with Twitter, I only look at the feed showing me the people I follow. On neither site am I forced to see content I don't want to see.
bl_valance 2y ago
This is the right attitude. The amount of people who's world crumbles when they get banned and heavily depend on its engagement and income is too high. In terms of Bluesky/Threads, etc. When a platform's intrinsic value is that, "it's not the other platform", it won't last or will only track very niche and closed-off groups. What does Bluesky offer that is unique/different? Federation, as the post mentioned, is something the average user doesn't care or is beyond their comprehension. Too much friction as it is implemented, the best way is to organically and transparently implement it, if it's even possible.
Sonic656 2y ago
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the__alchemist 2y ago
I'm worried about the issues in the article (They are likely an inevitable consequence of the funding model). For now, I'm loving it! I didn't have Twitter or X. I'm using it to follow various science and engineering feeds. It's fantastic, and the people are friendly; some of the highest quality discussion (but short) I've found online. (Not to HN's level though! ) To make Discover useful, I recommend aggressively muting or blocking bottomfeeder political content. If someone is only posting tribal or identity politics, block. I bring this up, as I think it would resolve a subset of the complaints I've seen in this thread and elsewhere. I wish you could have all your feeds combined, but this appears not to be possible.
snowstormsun 2y ago
I predict Bluesky will add some form of targeted advertisements in the future once the user base has grown to a certain size. Isn't that obvious? I'd assume that's also why investors are willing to invest.
- wmf 2y ago
  Yeah, and then experts will use ad-free alternative clients and most people won't. But it will still be better than other social media systems that ban alternative clients.
  - piyuv 2y ago
    I guess then Bluesky will ban alternative clients and start charging for API, a-la Musk?
    - wmf 2y ago
      They don't need to because the normies are profitable enough.
      - amatecha 2y ago
        Could have said that at one point about Twitter or Reddit.
      - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
        Do you not understand fiduciary responsibility? If they can charge and make more money they are effectively obligated to. They would need to sell their investors against the plan that everyone uses AND propose a plan that will make more money. Reddit went through this around their IPO.
        wmf 2y ago
        Do you not understand PBLLC? Also https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...
ineedaj0b 2y ago
I’ve been very happy on X. My algo keeps showing me memes and tech stuff. Very little political grandstanding… but it did get a little warm during the election. A lot of Ai guys are X with cool stuff and still a ton of great posts in Japanese if you can read it.
- EarthMephit 2y ago
  Japanese users are migrating rapidly to Bluesky away from X. Mainly for the extra features, apps & integrations that Bluesky offers: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/11/25/companies/bluesky-social-japan/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/11/25/companies/b...
aftbit 2y ago
What ever happened to Secure Scuttlebutt? That seemed like an interesting way to approach this, similar to Nostr perhaps?
- yokem55 2y ago
  One of the people behind SSB was Paul Frazee. He's now the CTO of BlueSky.
tqwhite 2y ago
I am a huge BLuesky fan. I have switched my entire social experience to it. I get good engagement, mostly with seemingly decent people. I almost always can find interesting things to read. I have moderated the shit out of my feed. I rarely see things I do not want to (I had to give up politics and current events after the election). I use the list feature to curate separate feeds for different topics (music, programming, books, etc). I have started experimenting with graze.social to create my own algorithmic feeds. I have changed my handle to my own domain. One of these days I’m going to move my stuff to my own personal data store because it sounds like fun. Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well. There are problems, of course. It’s new and people are pressuring them to do viewpoint moderation which is a terrible idea. There are still many features that are missing. But, it’s a very fun platform with a lot less negativity than Twitter and a lot less bland stupidity than facebook. Threads is fine but it’s 100% zuckerberg’s feed. Tribal takes like four clicks to make a post. Mastodon is a bad UI and instances tend to be narrow-minded fiefdoms. Most of the comments on this thread are talking about what might happen, ‘enshitification’!! Oh My!. The actual fact is that it is a good thing presently and I hope decen people will flock to it and make sure it is supported to reach its maximum awesome potential.
- nyclounge 2y ago
  >Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well. Unless the AT Protocol split it self from the company to be something like matrix.org or SMTP. Then Bsky will always have an advantage over other indexers. [1] [1] https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/blog/bluesky-at-protocol-vs-activity-pub/ https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/blog/bluesky-at-protocol-vs-...
- 2y ago
someothherguyy 2y ago
It seems like any discussion concerning a social media or news media site is quickly filled with polarized takes on its users, editors, moderators, or the organization itself.
- ggm 2y ago
  Why do you think that is? I no longer use socials outside of this one, and I know a strong element of my continuing use is the moderators and users.
  - someothherguyy 2y ago
    Not sure, maybe its a consequence of being a social human? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_reinforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_reinforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_exposure_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_exposure_theory
marcus_holmes 2y ago
I'm really enjoying Mastodon. It's a bit like Usenet back in 1994 - only us geeks there. To be honest, I'm kinda glad that the Twitterati aren't there; I did not enjoy Twitter when it was in its prime.
Peteragain 2y ago
I imagine there is a large call-centre style barn somewhere for every social media product and the people in it are paid to dis detractors and otherwise act as fan-boys. The article is pointing out a problem with blue sky that we should attend to. Saying "bluesky is great" might be true but ignores the content of the article. (I am now going to watch my whole 24 points on hn disappear and change my name again)
lylo 2y ago
It’s an interesting point but social media (especially X and Bluesky) is largely ephemeral content. If it goes away, what have you really lost? Hot takes? Running your own blog on your own domain is a good idea and anything long-form would be on there not Bluesky, no? The vast majority of people will run their blog on a platform though, be that Wordpress or Bear or Ghost etc all of which (in theory!) could go away. Where does it end? I’ve been thinking about this a lot with my blogging platform (https://pagecord.com https://pagecord.com). It’s hard not to lock people in with a platform, but most people WANT a platform because it’s easy to use. I’ve made Pagecord open source and I’m working on an export so the whole site can be exported to Jekyll-compliant Markdown, so in theory you could leave and be up and running in a self-hosted way (fairly) easily. So maybe transportable content standards is the most important thing to solve?
- Peteragain 2y ago
  Good point. Perhaps needs a unique key so transportable content is citable.. DOIs are an example, or ISBNs for the ultimate in transportable content!
- glenstein 2y ago
  >So maybe transportable content standards is the most important thing to solve? Right, and I would suggest this is what the activitypub protocol is for.
josteink 2y ago
My interest for bluesky is practically non-existent as long as they ban people for posting commonly held views and scientific facts. I’m not going to invest in a platform where fear of banning is a thing from the get go.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  Can you give an example? It sounds like you have something specific in mind.
  - josteink 2y ago
    Things like this? https://lunduke.locals.com/post/6505039/bluesky-bans-lunduke-for-having-common-views https://lunduke.locals.com/post/6505039/bluesky-bans-lunduke... And this: https://x.com/clownworld_/status/1858194893249917377?s=46 https://x.com/clownworld_/status/1858194893249917377?s=46 And this: https://x.com/immeme0/status/1872482191869132932?s=46 https://x.com/immeme0/status/1872482191869132932?s=46 Etc. They seem REALLY ban-happy over there.
    - doshaa 2y ago
      You see it as a problem, i see it as a benefit, Main reason i dislike twitter/X is the amount of pointless grift that goes around, some for monetary reasons, Either behave like a human or leave, "I posted some dog whistle and got banned for it" is actually a great ad for Bluesky.
      - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
        I've never been able to find it again, but there was a really interesting discussion on [ATP](https://atp.fm/ https://atp.fm/) a long while back where John Siracusa was floating the idea of a 'less free' social network and I've really, really wanted one ever since. Honestly, Hacker News is pretty close to that in the sense that low-value content is unceremoniously removed, which must contribute to the overall better quality here.
ant6n 2y ago
I have tried Bluesky, but for now it seems rather bland. Tried to follow a bunch of people I know from X, but then it kept suggesting astronomy photos or photos of sun up landscapes (with a text like „have a happy new day“). Little discussion on current events, little interesting insights. It’s definitely less of a chess pool than twitter, much less random violence and less rage bait as well.
mozarella 2y ago
Related : Corey Doctrow's article (again) about how he doesn't trust Bluesky enough to move there from mastodon. Especially Bluesky's promise to allow users to migrate to another host in the fediverse. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02-ulysses-pact-tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast-b2f89bb5b4d8 https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02... Older article : https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get...
- bosswipe 2y ago
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- glenstein 2y ago
  Thanks for the links! I think this perfectly captures my frustration here. It's like people have learned nothing and are, once again, making an aesthetic choice.
  - hobs 2y ago
    When you actually look at what people do instead of what they say, it often shows that that's really the only choice people want.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      Well, yes. Bluesky offers something close to the look and feel and, crucially, community of pre-ruined twitter, plus some new community moderation tools. Realistically 99% of its users don't care about and arguably don't even want decentralization.
      - glenstein 2y ago
        Right, they want the fruits of it. They just don't want the sustainable agriculture.
- akvadrako 2y ago
nunobrito 2y ago
Would be interesting to ask the author for a review of NOSTR afterwards. At NOSTR the account functions without servers, you get private keys that certify your messages as yours no matter where or when you post them. From that perspective there isn't a private castle since you can send your messages to any of the several hundred relays existing today. It isn't VC funded but doesn't really cater to woke people and there isn't moderation of any kind. You follow what you want to read, you can't even block others from writing on your texts. At most you can only ignore their writings.
- Heliodex 2y ago
  I love Nostr and run my own personal relay, as it's much simpler to set up than a Bluesky or Mastodon instance. The idea of nonexistent moderation is untrue. The big relays get big because they only commit to the minimum necessary moderation, though there are plenty of smaller or topic-centric relays based on user allowlists, payments (regularly or per note), or admins enforcing pretty standard moderation systems. The system caters just fine to woke people. 'No moderation' isn't always the same as 'Freedom of speech'. Whatever you're posting, there will always be at least one relay willing to take your notes (if not, run your own) which you can broadcast to your followers.
  - nunobrito 2y ago
    That's the thing. I can troll you across all your relays and others. You can't really stop a targeted attacker. Sure you can always add a few "IF's" as disclaimer and nitpick all you want, reality is that moderation is defacto non-existent for the overwhelming majority of relays. As a challenge, try to see for yourself what is posted to them without any filters or WoT algorithms, then you see the unfettered amount of material getting published. Of course that is small relays you can enable whitelisting and so forth, but those are corner cases. They are not the norm.
    - Heliodex 2y ago
      Fair enough, the only way I see feasible would be to use the Nostr protocol in a "walled garden"-type app/ecosystem, to the point where few users would know they're using Nostr (which would sacrifice most of the benefits of the protocol). The global feed for me has always been generally as you say it is, with just as much unfettered content coming from Nostr-native pubkeys as from ones bridged from AT/AP/RSS etc. I thought that was just a consequence of me connecting to 30+ relays of varying sizes at all times, as nowadays I would suspect that the norm is to be subscribed to only a select few of the biggest relays. I really do hope WoT gains traction, as for users it's a great middle ground between follows (easy filtering of feed, discoverability very difficult) and the global feed (easy discoverability, feed filtering very difficult).
mrlonglong 2y ago
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lucasRW 2y ago
I'm very happy with X, once you do a bit of tuning.
- Tepix 2y ago
  The fact that replies of paid accounts come first killed it for me. Paid accounts' posts are more often than not less interesting.
SiempreViernes 2y ago
> communities have to do a lot more work to understand the idiosyncratic policies of each server [links to a github issue that is 90% internal project bureocracy, 10% "didn't read the terms"]. I think this is actually another instance of the "people don't actually want to pay for choice": the moderation policies for the big social sites are just incomprehensible, but you don't have any agency over them if you use the sites, which is simple. On Mastodon you do get to choose what moderation you subject yourself to (to some extent), but obviously making that choice requires work since there are real differences.
- glenstein 2y ago
  I had a record scratch moment at that point in the article also. For one I'm not so sure that the masses are going through server by server looking up content polices with a microscope. They're just signing up and posting. For those who need them, they are accessible enough, and in fact I think it was the population looking for those that was effectively the first movers onto Mastodon.
__alexs 2y ago
What about Bluesky prevents a Twitter situation where the board just decide to sell it to whoever will make them richest?
kalleboo 2y ago
Going more to the topic of the article rather than platform wars: In moving to Mastodon from X a few years ago, I didn't want my content to be owned by a platform, but I also just don't have it in my to write blog posts, posting threads bit by bit works better for my brain. So my solution was to write a script that took that any thread I start with a certain hashtag in it, and threadreader-style mirror it to a basic HTML page on my own website[0]. That way, if my Mastodon account ever goes away, all the threads I actually put any effort into are preserved. [0] https://kalleboo.com/microblog/ https://kalleboo.com/microblog/ I'm intro retrotech so this site is designed/constructed so aside from the videos it works fine on a Mac with a 25 MHz 68040 CPU. All the data is stored in a big JSON file so I can re-format it whenever I want.
- ikesau 2y ago
  this is really cool! thanks for sharing :)
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    Thanks! I would have released the source, but it's just a big ball of PHP since that was the easiest thing to use to just pull some JSON off of mastodon and template it into HTML.
- appplication 2y ago
  This is an interesting concept, and I mean no offense, but is this just essentially a public journal/demo concept for a low data web page? I’m having a hard time imagining folks will spend any time saving/ intentionally re-visiting such a site, except for e.g. posting on here for curious folks to browse through.
antonios 2y ago
Regarding Bluesky's decentralization: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ (hint: not that decentralized after all)
- goykasi 2y ago
  Bluesky is not decentralized. It is a reference app built on top of a decentralized, social networking protocol -- AT Protocol.
- edavis 2y ago
  For anybody else coming across this, a reply was made here: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t Bit of a side note for my fellow protocol enjoyers: this site is WhiteWind which is another app on the atproto network. Bluesky is a microblogging app on atproto while WhiteWind is a long form blogging app on the same network. It's pretty neat. And Christine replied to the reply here which I believe is the terminus of this conversation: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
LittleTimothy 2y ago
I think the entire attitude of the author coming in to this is wrong. It's zero sum. It's an assumption that you're either gaining from the platform or the platform is gaining from you. This is wrong. The platform has network effects that make everyone well off. Google owns Youtube, yes it gets enormous value from creating/owning the platform. But Youtube isn't exploiting Mr Beast, Mr Beast also gains enormous value from the platform and provides enormous value to the platform, it's a symbiotic relationship. Sure, it's true at some point that the Platform could, for whatever reason, decide it would rather suck you dry than continue the symbiotic relationship, that does happen. But here's the core of the problem - by putting yourself half out of the platform, trying to direct people off to your own website, by gating your content etc. You are damaging the platform. All that massive surplus that is created by having everyone in one place sharing in one common way? It won't exist if you're not participating in it. I can open a shop in the centre of london. I'm going to pay high rents, but I'm also going to gain massive benefits from all the people in London who can come and buy stuff from my shop. It's a win for everyone. You're going to open a shop in the centre of London and when someone walks in the front door you're going to say "Oh well here's all the stuff I sell, but to actually buy it you need to come visit my farm in Norfolk". You see how this doesn't make sense right? And laying aside whether you should do this, any platform that wants to survive is going to massively penalize your behaviour because you're freeloading, you're damaging the platform. You want surplus but you don't want to let anyone else benefit.
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  But what if Google changes the TOS for YouTube and puts Mr. Beast out of business? Should that guy just retire and be happy with what he got?
  - LittleTimothy 2y ago
    If Youtube put Mr Beast out of business today, they would still have paid him an enormous amount of money over the course of years. Not to mention the hundred million dollar Amazon Prime deal that came out this week, and his Feastables brand. This isn't an academic exercise, do we see anyone outside of the platforms gaining the success that the creators inside the platforms do? I'd be happy to note anyone I've just totally missed, but these platforms really do actually work.
epolanski 2y ago
Open question, why do people keep caring about socials that much? Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity. Boards like HN and occasionally Reddit, where it's mostly about discussing and being anonymous are the only places worth contributing on the internet other than personal blogs.
- simplyluke 2y ago
  There’s a broadly believed myth that it produces meaningful professional opportunities among certain folks in the industry. In my observations this is very rarely true, and in many more cases it’s a professional liability.
  - dom96 2y ago
    It's not a myth. I got 2 amazing offers (one of which is now my job) via Twitter. I hope Bluesky can eventually offer the same.
    - epolanski 2y ago
      I don't think Twitter was required for someone with a rather good track record/cv like yours to get good jobs.
      - madeofpalk 2y ago
        Not required, but it could present opportunities.
      - dom96 2y ago
        Thank you for the kind words, but even good CVs get lost in the great recruitment filter all the time. It's great to have a platform where you can interact directly with real engineers at various companies.
  - michaelbuckbee 2y ago
    This is highly dependent on what particular professional niche you're in. Hollywood actors are now routinely cast (in part) based on how many social media followers they have, leading to a lot of weirdness around their agents and agencies buying followers, accusing other competing actors of buying followers, etc. A bit closer to the HN crowd, there is definitely a correlation between speaking at conferences and having an "audience" and being a well-known figure online. Similarly, the "build-in-public" indie folks are active on social trying to break the build it and they will come cycle. There are ways to participate and filter through the noise that are positive, but certainly a lot of negative as well.
alfor 2y ago
Why move away from X?
mhale 2y ago
To have the best of all worlds: - your own blog on a domain you control - effortless crossposting to bluesky, mastodon, threads, linkedin, and others Then micro.blog is a great solution! It follows the POSSE principle: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. see: https://micro.blog/about/crosspost https://micro.blog/about/crosspost
jacooper 2y ago
Honestly bluesky flopped, just like threads and mastodon did. This is a fact BTW. Activity on bluesky has taken a nosedive. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats What makes Twitter, Twitter didn't move to bluesky. It's still clearly a niche platform, with only a certain group of people using it. On Twitter you can follow tech, politics (English and in other languages), sports and more almost in real time, as things are happening. It's this relevancy and variety that keeps me using Twitter, and bluesky never got this. It feels like you are within your own bubble, following a few accounts posting bad jokes here and there, and that's it. It's a shame really, bluesky was the first platform that could actually could replace Twitter, its decentralization is seamless, an important thing for new non-techie users and it didn't just want to become text based Instagram, but people are now very reluctant after two failed attempts, so it just didn't work out.
fud101 2y ago
I finally just caved and joined twitter. I've done it a few times before but this time it was surprisingly pleasant. Was able to use my google account and see posts. I find it refreshing. I don't know why we thought Musk ruined twitter (maybe he did) but as a user I am actually on board with whatever he did since I could never get into twitter in the past.
- nemo44x 2y ago
  Yeah Twitter/X has been great since many of the scolds and hall monitors were chased away. There's open discussions from all sides, even the more unsavory ones, and the communities that were not propped up by the scolds and hall monitors are as vibrant as ever. It's not perfect but I think more people feel comfortable posting there now and can speak frankly and openly. A few accounts I liked left but I guess I don't really miss them as new accounts have filled their space. It could also be the communities I use Twitter for weren't affected by the culture change at Twitter.
stiltzkin 2y ago
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269 points by ianrahman 2y ago

mhh__ 2y ago

[flagged]

MisterBastahrd 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, or any flamewar. That's what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ggm 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, or any flamewar. That's what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - ggm 2y ago
    Fair.
dang 2y ago
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar, or any flamewar. That's what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mhh__ 2y ago
  Show me something without ideology
  - dang 2y ago
    I hear you but we're not asking anyone to be free of ideological assumptions—just to avoid denunciatory rhetoric, internet indignation tropes, name-calling, etc., in comments here. That's not hard, assuming you've read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and want to use HN in the intended spirit. Btw, the reason for asking to avoid these things is not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with them. It's just that they evoke worse from others and put the threads into a doom spiral. That's the default outcome on the internet, so we're pretty proactive about trying to avoid it. If you find HN interesting enough to be here, then it's in your interest to contribute to that intention, since the default outcome (a.k.a. scorched earth) won't be interesting to anybody.

darthrupert 2y ago

My experience is that fundamentally there's nothing better with Bluesky or Mastodon when compared to Twitter. They're all toxic doom scrolling applications and if one does use them, it will be a good idea to control your usage as if it was cocaine.

emseetech 2y ago
Right now Bluesky's feed is time-based (although there is a suggestions tab). This will change as advertiser needs take over, but at least for the time being it's a noticeable difference.
daghamm 2y ago
Yes, but hopefully it is more free speech than om twitter where Elon wants to decide what you can and can't see. It is well known that he is obsessed that things that align with his own views get more visibility while things he doesn't like is suppressed https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-twitter-engineers-boost-his-tweets-after-biden-got-more-views/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...
- fastball 2y ago
  And that doesn't apply to the powers that be at other social networks (or management at Twitter pre-Elon)?
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    It certainly doesn't seem to so far.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    I'm not on Twitter. And the jury is still out on BlueSky. I'm happy to abandon BlueSky though as soon as it is revealed to be a shitsocket.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    Pre-Elon moderation was (somewhat) sensible. Every online space needs a janitorial crew to keep it from turning into a wasteland (look at 4chan /b/, and even b isn't completely unmoderated). But it didn't take actions at the emotional whims of a megalomaniac ruler.

neuroelectron 2y ago

I've organically come across more mastadon instances than bluesky. But that's just me. I wish it was easier to surf mastadon though, where you have to log in to see content unlike bluesky.

8organicbits 2y ago
You don't need to be logged in to see content on Mastodon. There are privacy settings that could hide content from non-followers, and mastodon users may be more privacy conscious, but log in is not generally required.
- neuroelectron 2y ago
  Must just be in the app then. Brave is supposed to block opening links in apps in iOS but it's broken lately.

emseetech 2y ago

When Bluesky announced they were taking on large amounts of capital to handle the growth that's when I knew their days were numbered. Capital requires returns, and a lot of the degradation of the user experience in the past few years is due to catering to investors and advertisers (who are the actual customers). Decentralization as is promised is one way to mitigate this, but there's no economic incentive to go through with it. Investors will encourage Bluesky to kick that can down the road until people forgot they ever promised it in the first place. That said, we will have a good amount of time with Bluesky as a more positive site before these changes kick in. But my hunch is that it'll be shorter than previous cycles. The rate of profit has fallen and investors don't have as much grace for companies that grow without revenue as they did 10-15 years ago. Of all the sites that emerged out of the internet renaissance starting in the late 90's, it seems the only one that has hung on and still provides a good value, despite all it's issues, is Wikipedia. And that has to be because it's a non-profit powered by volunteer labor with no need to optimize revenue or make a profit. I often dream of recreating the classic web using a very low cost subscription model (since cheap is better than free, because free is never truly free) and apps that are bootstrapped or crowdfunded instead of vc funded. Decentralization in that circumstance is much more achievable and way less of a threat, although it still comes with a ton of technical and political considerations.

brightball 2y ago
IMO Mastodon is the only real place for a truly decentralized option. BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now. It has a future, but the branding in very tainted.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  If you think BlueSky is political, Mastodon is worse. Mastodon ends up creating significant echo chambers where admins ban communication with other instances for having people with different opinions to them (rather than just delisting in the public feed) and on can ban you and stop you moving your data to another instance. On Mastodon, admins can also be pressured into banning users by other admins under fear of having their instances blocked, and admins are usually political activists. I've avoided BlueSky because people are allowed to boast and defend being attracted to kids or spam death threats (including addresses attached), but not have differing political opinions, even when they're arguably mainstream.

CartyBoston 2y ago

Twitter sucks because it's commercial. Threads sucks because it's commercial. Bluesky will suck because it's commercial. If only there was a pattern we could detect. Learn about the Fediverse (not just "Mastodon"), it's the only solution worthy of you.

fnord77 2y ago
[flagged]
- Klonoar 2y ago
  This is like saying “the people who run email are insufferable”.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
I wonder if a tree blogs in an obscure, infrequently traveled forest will anyone read it?
caseyy 2y ago
> If only there was a pattern we could detect https://briefs.video/videos/i-am-leaving/ https://briefs.video/videos/i-am-leaving/
CuriousCosmic 2y ago
IDK how this applies to Bluesky. The underlying infrastructure is only loosely tethered to Bluesky the company. If you want to pull all your shit and run it separate from the bluesky stuff you can and there's really nothing they can do to try and stop you or ban you. They can limit your reach on their stuff but if you don't want to use their stuff it doesn't actually matter and you can continue to exist completely independent of them if you want.
CaptainFever 2y ago
HackerNews is commercial. Beware of sampling bias.
loeg 2y ago

soneca 2y ago

I understand a blog on your own domain is your land in regard to microblogging platforms. But what would be my land in regard to community software, like Telegram or Discord? Is there any software like this that I can host on my domain?

crimsoneer 2y ago
Matrix/Discourse? But like all self hosted solution, it's harder to use than a managed product. I think they're both excellent though, and pretty common in some circles.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  But will anyone come? Plenty of the people I follow, Jeff Geerling for example (hi!) have their own sites/kingdoms but I don't make the rounds of their personal sites every morning.
  - soneca 2y ago
    Someone will come, and, for me at least, it is ok if it’s fewer people than what would come on mass reach platform
- soneca 2y ago
  Actually, it doesn’t have to be self-hosted for me. A managed product, hosted by a company, that I can point to my domain would work (just like some blog or website makers solutions). Discourse has managed option though, so thanks for pointing it out.
- 998244353 2y ago
  My team uses Matrix and I must say I'm not satisfied. There are messages that I get a notification for every time I open the app, and "mark as read" buttons that do nothing, especially if you use threads. This is something that has supposedly been fixed many times, but it's one of these persistent issues that keep coming back. Also, as far as I can tell, there is no real diversity in clients even though Matrix is in principle an open protocol. Everything is either Element or a fork of it, or at least is built on matrix-react-sdk, which makes them all effectively the same.

crimsoneer 2y ago

This seems like a rather poor excuse to not try and integrate with the Fediverse/mastodon. Yes, managing your own space is more complicated than using a manager solution, but like, isn't that always going to be the case?

gtirloni 2y ago
Yes, especially when the author says they care about control.
verdverm 2y ago
For someone technical, this is certainly an option, but the other half of the argument is that you need to be where the other people are. In this respect, Mastondon is not something the average social media user finds easy, and why Bluesky is having success with this group.

keiferski 2y ago

A similar but I think simpler approach is to just act like a celebrity or a brand. When X celebrity joins a social network, their fans follow them on that platform. When the celebrity leaves and goes elsewhere, the fans follow. The value follows the celebrity because the celebrity’s value isn’t in the content on the social network, it’s in their personal brand itself. Therefore if you’re going to invest in creating valuable content on TikTok/Instagram/Bluesky/X/wherever, make sure you’re publishing it from a specific brandable name - and not generically posting good identity-less content. It doesn’t need to be your real name, as there are plenty of successful pseudonymous individuals out there. It just needs to be reasonably memorable and consistent.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
The blog post (and your comment) presumes someone is a celebrity, has a kingdom. A lot of us are just busking on the street corners.
- keiferski 2y ago
  Not necessarily. I think it’s perfectly possible to be a random non-famous person that builds a following because they have insightful tweets/images/content. But the risk is that if you don’t give yourself a reasonably memorable publisher name, you won’t be able to transfer that audience to another platform, because no one is going to see your name and recognize it from elsewhere.
  - bookofjoe 2y ago
    I'm an exemplar of the person you describe above. I started my blog on Typepad in 2004 and am in year 21, with things pretty much as they were in the beginning. When/if Typepad collapses (there are those who say it already has, since they stopped adding new customers in 2020 after being sold and posting is VERY janky and broken since then), I'll find a new home under the same brand name. Back in the day, around 2010-2012, I averaged 15,000 page views and 10,000 visitors/day. In recent years it's been around 500 page views/day, so about 3% of where I was at maximum blog. The nice thing about being this marginal is that I can easily respond to each comment/email.

dsr_ 2y ago

>“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!” Yes, and choldgraf@gmail.com and choldgraf@ibm.com are different email-people, too. This is not a hard concept.

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
Yet, people are confused by it. I think this is at least partly because there's even less to differentiate the different mastodon domains than there was to differentiate gmail and yahoo. And, of course, there are a lot of people growing up now who don't really use email, so the analogy can't be taken for granted.
- igravious 2y ago
  they may be confused by it yet it is not a hard concept
  - conradfr 2y ago
    Therefore it's a bad concept.
    - ohhxohzohx 2y ago
      are all hard to understand concepts bad concepts? are hard concepts from math and science bad concepts? should we discard calculus? is potty training a toddler a bad concept? they initially struggle with it and some find it hard is a healthy diet a bad concept? people without prior knowledge of what's healthy and what isn't are likely to struggle
  - stavros 2y ago
    People being confused by a concept is the definition of it being hard.
    - foxglacier 2y ago

austin-cheney 2y ago

Don’t build castles in other peoples kingdoms That is why I devote my energy to enriching my home file server with custom software that I can access anywhere via domain name mapped to a IPv6 address. It is my kingdom and its not going away. I can demo on there full stack applications that would be challenging to demo otherwise. If I had a blog on there I could say what I want. I could host a personal email address on there. I am exploring how to limit access by physical device identity so that it remains private even on the public internet.

that_guy_iain 2y ago
I'm not trying to be rude but are you serious or being sarcastic? Because on here it could go either way. There are definitely people who would build everything themselves just because they can. And there are people who would mock someone for doing so. If you're being serious, how much time does it take and how much custom software do you actually have?
- chickenfeed 2y ago
  Self-hosting sounds good but the security concerns are just a bind. Plus you need stability. Like having a home. Our electric grid falls over at least once a week where we live. Yes I could use batteries, but no, I can't be bothered.
  - speff 2y ago
    Batteries are a pretty set-and-forget solution though. Out of all the maintenance/thought I put towards my server, the UPS takes the least amount of attention. Though it really is only good for outages <2 or 3 hours. If it’s longer in your area, then it’s a bigger concern
  - incompatible 2y ago
    Or you die, if you are interested in long-term availability of your work. It's nice to have it hosted somewhere where others will look after it.
  - 2y ago

that_guy_iain 2y ago

It's quite interesting how much Musk's taking over Twitter damaged a lot of small businesses, where the person's personal brand on Twitter actually generated a decent amount of their business. What was even more interesting was seeing those semi-large accounts 20-100k followers move over to Bluesky post the same material on both but get more engagement on Bluesky with 1/10th of the audience.

afro88 2y ago
Very interesting. Do you have any links with actual data / detail?
- asadotzler 2y ago
  Not op but I'm on Bluesky and have seen several of these decent sized accounts, including people at large newsrooms say they get far more engagement at BlueSky than Twitter. Bigger fish, smaller pond, I suspect, but also more engaged users perhaps.
- edavis 2y ago
  this post by the team has some: https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-29-2024-engagement https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-29-2024-engagement

chickenfeed 2y ago

Bluesky has potential with the AT protocol. I think I had a flagged post on Bluesky, early on that just referenced something elsewhere - it was pretty harmless. And I remember a few X users trying the platform saying something vaguely controversial and getting a suspension. Or some such. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of censorship and free speech but you can get booted out the pub for saying something disagreeable in front of the bar hands or patrons. And I would be quite livid if I had invested in a platform and then got shut down. The AT protocol gives you the ability to produce feeds. But it's actually the consumption aggregation and discover-ability that seems to the difficult bit. I feel we need a lightweight RSS style reader in browser to really get past this. There are weird hacks on Bluesky to subscribe to feeds. But it is messy. The feeds are where the magic potentially happens. Twitter had become unpalatable before Musk bought it. And there were various crisis of confidence and herd threatening migrations, but people just couldn't be bothered. In its latest ungodly form people are still sticking around, or moving to silos and bubbles on other platforms, it's just a complete and utter mess at this point. Platforms inevitably win out with convenience. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp succeeded as people just couldn't share or publish photos or files easily. Combined with some magic discover-ability. Twitter's collapse has been painful. But weirdly it was incredibly influential though low in membership. My personal consumption of social feeds has been obliterated to nearly zero. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I published for myself rather than an audience and had used Twitter just because it was easy. I have a broken computer at the moment and my entire dev stack / environment is in chaos. And although I think the barriers to publishing and self hosting are low there are still inherent obstacles.

maelito 2y ago

This is true but still, Bluesky enables things that X just cannot. I've spend hours building a website (1) that counts which members of the French parliament still actively tweet on X, and which actively use Bluesky. The "analyse.ts" script for X did have to go through scraping, in a real browser connected to a real account. It got blocked every 30 or so profile views... The Bluesky script was a delight, using the open no-credentials API (2). Of course the Bluesky company can shut down their website or their API. But still, what this openness permits today is a significant difference from what X ever permitted. Their abstractions will stay and could be leveraged by another company with a team of 10 experimented developers. 1. The website is https://politix.top https://politix.top. Feel free to fork it for your own country. 2. Here is the Bluesky script https://github.com/laem/politix/blob/master/analyseBluesky.ts https://github.com/laem/politix/blob/master/analyseBluesky.t...

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
> a significant difference from what X ever permitted I'm glad you specified "X" there; Twitter, of course, used to have a very good API. The bar has undoubtedly lowered.
- maelito 2y ago
  My memory fails, despite the fact that in 2012 I used the Twitter API, but I don't think it was this easy and open for Twitter before X, was it ?
  - Klonoar 2y ago
    Parts of it certainly were. I built a somewhat widely deployed feed widget back in ~2009/2010 that worked via JSON-P and public access. I assume this is all ancient history now and a distant memory to most, but there was an era where Twitter’s API was a ton of fun to work with.
glimshe 2y ago
"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.

laskmi 2y ago

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laskmi 2y ago

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laskmi 2y ago

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laskmi 2y ago

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capl 2y ago

Biggest issue is the lack of free speech. It’s a platform with an agenda, which is a huge red flag.

GlacierFox 2y ago
That's my biggest issue with it. I didn't even have twitter to begin with, but after trying out Bluesky I've barely had the patience to use it. Most people on there seem to be ultra-left wing virtue signalling phychopaths. It's obnoxiously progressive with no space for nuanced thought.
- ggm 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    OR… I wonder if there could be some alternative?
    - ggm 2y ago
      Yes, one should always be wary of the false dichotomy.
  - GlacierFox 2y ago
    Awesome, as usual, put me in that box with all the right wingers. Is there space for a normal liberal nowadays or do I have to fully subscribe to this modern day lunacy? Suppose I better fall in line then. Thanks for the help!
- louthy 2y ago
  So, to be clear, the GP was stating that their issue is a lack of free speech. You agree that that’s your biggest issue with Bluesky too. But you’re unhappy with people expressing their personal opinions, primarily because you don’t agree with them? What version of free-speech is it that you want? I assume it’s just like all ‘free speech absolutioniats’: free speech as long as it’s your own or from people you agree with.

Zak 2y ago

> “you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!” While the author has a valid point about Bluesky having more momentum and some UX advantages over Mastodon, this is silly. Most people already know that choldgraf@gmail.com and choldgraf@hotmail.com might be different people.

Klonoar 2y ago
Technical folks might. Non-technical folks fall for this kind of thing in phishing attempts often enough that I can see the confusing complaint having some merit.
- Zak 2y ago
  It's a bit different when someone is being intentionally deceptive. None of the major social platforms or protocols guard effectively against someone making a deceptively similar username to impersonate someone. I bet the vast majority of non-technical people who use email would correctly answer that the two email addresses might belong to different people if asked. That doesn't mean they'll be checking closely while using email every time. Something similar is possible on Bluesky since usernames are domain names.
  - eichin 2y ago
    It looks like bluesky only just figured out (in the last couple of weeks, I think?) that even if you authenticate foo.example.com they need to keep foo.bsky.social reserved, because otherwise they immediately get snapped up for impersonation. So, yeah, possible and already happening, but at least they're trying to mitigate the worst case of it.
- glenstein 2y ago
  >Technical folks might. Non-technical folks fall for this kind of thing Right, but at that point we're just talking about general functional literacy. These same people are going to have trouble logging into their bank from a different computer, or ordering from a Wendy's menu or getting an oil change. Most people don't, and they sign up and post their memes, and follow their people, the platform reaches is critical mass and the world keeps on turning.

ritcgab 2y ago

People with similar mindsets gather on the same platform and ultimately create an echo chamber. If that's what you want, you can do the same on X/Twitter by creating your own "network". Just don't use the recommendation system and that's it. Abolishing a platform is merely a form of performance art.

jrflowers 2y ago

> don’t build your castle in a kingdom that somebody else controls > I’ll encourage folks to drive those conversations to community-specific spaces (like Discourse, Discord, etc). Who does the author think controls Discord?

diggan 2y ago
> Who does the author think controls Discord? I think you misunderstand what sort of control they speak about. I think what they're getting at is "Who is doing the moderation?" rather than "Who is maintaining the servers?", so the community aspect instead of the technical details. I think Discord let people do the moderation part pretty much however they want, compared to say Twitter where there is one moderation team that controls it all. Bit similar to Reddit I suppose, although Reddit also have admins/site-wide moderators that clean up across subreddits, so not identical. Still, seems weird to drive people from one castle to another castle, when instead you can drive them to your own website (like with Discourse). But I don't think that's what the author is talking about.
- exodust 2y ago
  The author lists a set of rules, one of which is: "always move people back to your kingdom, never to another kingdom". So he's motivated by "moving people to kingdoms", which sounds like the exact thing he's calling out the big social platforms on, but adopting himself on a smaller scale. In the end, respecting users isn't the guiding force. "Kingdom building" is. Brand building. Users herded like cattle from castle to castle. It's "trust me bro" website ethics replacing corporate social media policies.
  - diggan 2y ago
    I dunno, reading and trying to understand what the author is trying to mean, I still think they're referring to moderation and not servers/infra when they talk about "kingdoms". But I could be wrong, it has happened before so bound to happen sometime again.

anonCoffee 2y ago

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jghn 2y ago
Are you claiming that it's not possible to use bluesky without running into such content? I've been using it since early on in the invite era and have yet to come across it at all. Just like with Twitter, I only look at the feed showing me the people I follow. On neither site am I forced to see content I don't want to see.

bl_valance 2y ago

This is the right attitude. The amount of people who's world crumbles when they get banned and heavily depend on its engagement and income is too high. In terms of Bluesky/Threads, etc. When a platform's intrinsic value is that, "it's not the other platform", it won't last or will only track very niche and closed-off groups. What does Bluesky offer that is unique/different? Federation, as the post mentioned, is something the average user doesn't care or is beyond their comprehension. Too much friction as it is implemented, the best way is to organically and transparently implement it, if it's even possible.

Sonic656 2y ago

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the__alchemist 2y ago

I'm worried about the issues in the article (They are likely an inevitable consequence of the funding model). For now, I'm loving it! I didn't have Twitter or X. I'm using it to follow various science and engineering feeds. It's fantastic, and the people are friendly; some of the highest quality discussion (but short) I've found online. (Not to HN's level though! ) To make Discover useful, I recommend aggressively muting or blocking bottomfeeder political content. If someone is only posting tribal or identity politics, block. I bring this up, as I think it would resolve a subset of the complaints I've seen in this thread and elsewhere. I wish you could have all your feeds combined, but this appears not to be possible.

snowstormsun 2y ago

I predict Bluesky will add some form of targeted advertisements in the future once the user base has grown to a certain size. Isn't that obvious? I'd assume that's also why investors are willing to invest.

wmf 2y ago
Yeah, and then experts will use ad-free alternative clients and most people won't. But it will still be better than other social media systems that ban alternative clients.
- piyuv 2y ago
  I guess then Bluesky will ban alternative clients and start charging for API, a-la Musk?
  - wmf 2y ago
    They don't need to because the normies are profitable enough.
    - amatecha 2y ago
      Could have said that at one point about Twitter or Reddit.
    - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
      Do you not understand fiduciary responsibility? If they can charge and make more money they are effectively obligated to. They would need to sell their investors against the plan that everyone uses AND propose a plan that will make more money. Reddit went through this around their IPO.
      - wmf 2y ago
        Do you not understand PBLLC? Also https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

ineedaj0b 2y ago

I’ve been very happy on X. My algo keeps showing me memes and tech stuff. Very little political grandstanding… but it did get a little warm during the election. A lot of Ai guys are X with cool stuff and still a ton of great posts in Japanese if you can read it.

EarthMephit 2y ago
Japanese users are migrating rapidly to Bluesky away from X. Mainly for the extra features, apps & integrations that Bluesky offers: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/11/25/companies/bluesky-social-japan/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/11/25/companies/b...

aftbit 2y ago

What ever happened to Secure Scuttlebutt? That seemed like an interesting way to approach this, similar to Nostr perhaps?

yokem55 2y ago
One of the people behind SSB was Paul Frazee. He's now the CTO of BlueSky.

tqwhite 2y ago

I am a huge BLuesky fan. I have switched my entire social experience to it. I get good engagement, mostly with seemingly decent people. I almost always can find interesting things to read. I have moderated the shit out of my feed. I rarely see things I do not want to (I had to give up politics and current events after the election). I use the list feature to curate separate feeds for different topics (music, programming, books, etc). I have started experimenting with graze.social to create my own algorithmic feeds. I have changed my handle to my own domain. One of these days I’m going to move my stuff to my own personal data store because it sounds like fun. Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well. There are problems, of course. It’s new and people are pressuring them to do viewpoint moderation which is a terrible idea. There are still many features that are missing. But, it’s a very fun platform with a lot less negativity than Twitter and a lot less bland stupidity than facebook. Threads is fine but it’s 100% zuckerberg’s feed. Tribal takes like four clicks to make a post. Mastodon is a bad UI and instances tend to be narrow-minded fiefdoms. Most of the comments on this thread are talking about what might happen, ‘enshitification’!! Oh My!. The actual fact is that it is a good thing presently and I hope decen people will flock to it and make sure it is supported to reach its maximum awesome potential.

nyclounge 2y ago
>Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well. Unless the AT Protocol split it self from the company to be something like matrix.org or SMTP. Then Bsky will always have an advantage over other indexers. [1] [1] https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/blog/bluesky-at-protocol-vs-activity-pub/ https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/blog/bluesky-at-protocol-vs-...
2y ago

someothherguyy 2y ago

It seems like any discussion concerning a social media or news media site is quickly filled with polarized takes on its users, editors, moderators, or the organization itself.

ggm 2y ago
Why do you think that is? I no longer use socials outside of this one, and I know a strong element of my continuing use is the moderators and users.
- someothherguyy 2y ago
  Not sure, maybe its a consequence of being a social human? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_reinforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_reinforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_exposure_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_exposure_theory

marcus_holmes 2y ago

I'm really enjoying Mastodon. It's a bit like Usenet back in 1994 - only us geeks there. To be honest, I'm kinda glad that the Twitterati aren't there; I did not enjoy Twitter when it was in its prime.

Peteragain 2y ago

I imagine there is a large call-centre style barn somewhere for every social media product and the people in it are paid to dis detractors and otherwise act as fan-boys. The article is pointing out a problem with blue sky that we should attend to. Saying "bluesky is great" might be true but ignores the content of the article. (I am now going to watch my whole 24 points on hn disappear and change my name again)

lylo 2y ago

It’s an interesting point but social media (especially X and Bluesky) is largely ephemeral content. If it goes away, what have you really lost? Hot takes? Running your own blog on your own domain is a good idea and anything long-form would be on there not Bluesky, no? The vast majority of people will run their blog on a platform though, be that Wordpress or Bear or Ghost etc all of which (in theory!) could go away. Where does it end? I’ve been thinking about this a lot with my blogging platform (https://pagecord.com https://pagecord.com). It’s hard not to lock people in with a platform, but most people WANT a platform because it’s easy to use. I’ve made Pagecord open source and I’m working on an export so the whole site can be exported to Jekyll-compliant Markdown, so in theory you could leave and be up and running in a self-hosted way (fairly) easily. So maybe transportable content standards is the most important thing to solve?

Peteragain 2y ago
Good point. Perhaps needs a unique key so transportable content is citable.. DOIs are an example, or ISBNs for the ultimate in transportable content!
glenstein 2y ago
>So maybe transportable content standards is the most important thing to solve? Right, and I would suggest this is what the activitypub protocol is for.

josteink 2y ago

My interest for bluesky is practically non-existent as long as they ban people for posting commonly held views and scientific facts. I’m not going to invest in a platform where fear of banning is a thing from the get go.

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
Can you give an example? It sounds like you have something specific in mind.
- josteink 2y ago
  Things like this? https://lunduke.locals.com/post/6505039/bluesky-bans-lunduke-for-having-common-views https://lunduke.locals.com/post/6505039/bluesky-bans-lunduke... And this: https://x.com/clownworld_/status/1858194893249917377?s=46 https://x.com/clownworld_/status/1858194893249917377?s=46 And this: https://x.com/immeme0/status/1872482191869132932?s=46 https://x.com/immeme0/status/1872482191869132932?s=46 Etc. They seem REALLY ban-happy over there.
  - doshaa 2y ago
    You see it as a problem, i see it as a benefit, Main reason i dislike twitter/X is the amount of pointless grift that goes around, some for monetary reasons, Either behave like a human or leave, "I posted some dog whistle and got banned for it" is actually a great ad for Bluesky.
    - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      I've never been able to find it again, but there was a really interesting discussion on [ATP](https://atp.fm/ https://atp.fm/) a long while back where John Siracusa was floating the idea of a 'less free' social network and I've really, really wanted one ever since. Honestly, Hacker News is pretty close to that in the sense that low-value content is unceremoniously removed, which must contribute to the overall better quality here.

ant6n 2y ago

I have tried Bluesky, but for now it seems rather bland. Tried to follow a bunch of people I know from X, but then it kept suggesting astronomy photos or photos of sun up landscapes (with a text like „have a happy new day“). Little discussion on current events, little interesting insights. It’s definitely less of a chess pool than twitter, much less random violence and less rage bait as well.

mozarella 2y ago

Related : Corey Doctrow's article (again) about how he doesn't trust Bluesky enough to move there from mastodon. Especially Bluesky's promise to allow users to migrate to another host in the fediverse. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02-ulysses-pact-tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast-b2f89bb5b4d8 https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02... Older article : https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get...

bosswipe 2y ago
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glenstein 2y ago
Thanks for the links! I think this perfectly captures my frustration here. It's like people have learned nothing and are, once again, making an aesthetic choice.
- hobs 2y ago
  When you actually look at what people do instead of what they say, it often shows that that's really the only choice people want.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Well, yes. Bluesky offers something close to the look and feel and, crucially, community of pre-ruined twitter, plus some new community moderation tools. Realistically 99% of its users don't care about and arguably don't even want decentralization.
    - glenstein 2y ago
      Right, they want the fruits of it. They just don't want the sustainable agriculture.
akvadrako 2y ago

nunobrito 2y ago

Would be interesting to ask the author for a review of NOSTR afterwards. At NOSTR the account functions without servers, you get private keys that certify your messages as yours no matter where or when you post them. From that perspective there isn't a private castle since you can send your messages to any of the several hundred relays existing today. It isn't VC funded but doesn't really cater to woke people and there isn't moderation of any kind. You follow what you want to read, you can't even block others from writing on your texts. At most you can only ignore their writings.

Heliodex 2y ago
I love Nostr and run my own personal relay, as it's much simpler to set up than a Bluesky or Mastodon instance. The idea of nonexistent moderation is untrue. The big relays get big because they only commit to the minimum necessary moderation, though there are plenty of smaller or topic-centric relays based on user allowlists, payments (regularly or per note), or admins enforcing pretty standard moderation systems. The system caters just fine to woke people. 'No moderation' isn't always the same as 'Freedom of speech'. Whatever you're posting, there will always be at least one relay willing to take your notes (if not, run your own) which you can broadcast to your followers.
- nunobrito 2y ago
  That's the thing. I can troll you across all your relays and others. You can't really stop a targeted attacker. Sure you can always add a few "IF's" as disclaimer and nitpick all you want, reality is that moderation is defacto non-existent for the overwhelming majority of relays. As a challenge, try to see for yourself what is posted to them without any filters or WoT algorithms, then you see the unfettered amount of material getting published. Of course that is small relays you can enable whitelisting and so forth, but those are corner cases. They are not the norm.
  - Heliodex 2y ago
    Fair enough, the only way I see feasible would be to use the Nostr protocol in a "walled garden"-type app/ecosystem, to the point where few users would know they're using Nostr (which would sacrifice most of the benefits of the protocol). The global feed for me has always been generally as you say it is, with just as much unfettered content coming from Nostr-native pubkeys as from ones bridged from AT/AP/RSS etc. I thought that was just a consequence of me connecting to 30+ relays of varying sizes at all times, as nowadays I would suspect that the norm is to be subscribed to only a select few of the biggest relays. I really do hope WoT gains traction, as for users it's a great middle ground between follows (easy filtering of feed, discoverability very difficult) and the global feed (easy discoverability, feed filtering very difficult).

mrlonglong 2y ago

[dead]

lucasRW 2y ago

I'm very happy with X, once you do a bit of tuning.

Tepix 2y ago
The fact that replies of paid accounts come first killed it for me. Paid accounts' posts are more often than not less interesting.

SiempreViernes 2y ago

> communities have to do a lot more work to understand the idiosyncratic policies of each server [links to a github issue that is 90% internal project bureocracy, 10% "didn't read the terms"]. I think this is actually another instance of the "people don't actually want to pay for choice": the moderation policies for the big social sites are just incomprehensible, but you don't have any agency over them if you use the sites, which is simple. On Mastodon you do get to choose what moderation you subject yourself to (to some extent), but obviously making that choice requires work since there are real differences.

glenstein 2y ago
I had a record scratch moment at that point in the article also. For one I'm not so sure that the masses are going through server by server looking up content polices with a microscope. They're just signing up and posting. For those who need them, they are accessible enough, and in fact I think it was the population looking for those that was effectively the first movers onto Mastodon.

__alexs 2y ago

What about Bluesky prevents a Twitter situation where the board just decide to sell it to whoever will make them richest?

kalleboo 2y ago

Going more to the topic of the article rather than platform wars: In moving to Mastodon from X a few years ago, I didn't want my content to be owned by a platform, but I also just don't have it in my to write blog posts, posting threads bit by bit works better for my brain. So my solution was to write a script that took that any thread I start with a certain hashtag in it, and threadreader-style mirror it to a basic HTML page on my own website[0]. That way, if my Mastodon account ever goes away, all the threads I actually put any effort into are preserved. [0] https://kalleboo.com/microblog/ https://kalleboo.com/microblog/ I'm intro retrotech so this site is designed/constructed so aside from the videos it works fine on a Mac with a 25 MHz 68040 CPU. All the data is stored in a big JSON file so I can re-format it whenever I want.

ikesau 2y ago
this is really cool! thanks for sharing :)
- kalleboo 2y ago
  Thanks! I would have released the source, but it's just a big ball of PHP since that was the easiest thing to use to just pull some JSON off of mastodon and template it into HTML.
appplication 2y ago
This is an interesting concept, and I mean no offense, but is this just essentially a public journal/demo concept for a low data web page? I’m having a hard time imagining folks will spend any time saving/ intentionally re-visiting such a site, except for e.g. posting on here for curious folks to browse through.

antonios 2y ago

Regarding Bluesky's decentralization: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ (hint: not that decentralized after all)

goykasi 2y ago
Bluesky is not decentralized. It is a reference app built on top of a decentralized, social networking protocol -- AT Protocol.
edavis 2y ago
For anybody else coming across this, a reply was made here: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t Bit of a side note for my fellow protocol enjoyers: this site is WhiteWind which is another app on the atproto network. Bluesky is a microblogging app on atproto while WhiteWind is a long form blogging app on the same network. It's pretty neat. And Christine replied to the reply here which I believe is the terminus of this conversation: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

LittleTimothy 2y ago

I think the entire attitude of the author coming in to this is wrong. It's zero sum. It's an assumption that you're either gaining from the platform or the platform is gaining from you. This is wrong. The platform has network effects that make everyone well off. Google owns Youtube, yes it gets enormous value from creating/owning the platform. But Youtube isn't exploiting Mr Beast, Mr Beast also gains enormous value from the platform and provides enormous value to the platform, it's a symbiotic relationship. Sure, it's true at some point that the Platform could, for whatever reason, decide it would rather suck you dry than continue the symbiotic relationship, that does happen. But here's the core of the problem - by putting yourself half out of the platform, trying to direct people off to your own website, by gating your content etc. You are damaging the platform. All that massive surplus that is created by having everyone in one place sharing in one common way? It won't exist if you're not participating in it. I can open a shop in the centre of london. I'm going to pay high rents, but I'm also going to gain massive benefits from all the people in London who can come and buy stuff from my shop. It's a win for everyone. You're going to open a shop in the centre of London and when someone walks in the front door you're going to say "Oh well here's all the stuff I sell, but to actually buy it you need to come visit my farm in Norfolk". You see how this doesn't make sense right? And laying aside whether you should do this, any platform that wants to survive is going to massively penalize your behaviour because you're freeloading, you're damaging the platform. You want surplus but you don't want to let anyone else benefit.

austin-cheney 2y ago
But what if Google changes the TOS for YouTube and puts Mr. Beast out of business? Should that guy just retire and be happy with what he got?
- LittleTimothy 2y ago
  If Youtube put Mr Beast out of business today, they would still have paid him an enormous amount of money over the course of years. Not to mention the hundred million dollar Amazon Prime deal that came out this week, and his Feastables brand. This isn't an academic exercise, do we see anyone outside of the platforms gaining the success that the creators inside the platforms do? I'd be happy to note anyone I've just totally missed, but these platforms really do actually work.

epolanski 2y ago

Open question, why do people keep caring about socials that much? Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity. Boards like HN and occasionally Reddit, where it's mostly about discussing and being anonymous are the only places worth contributing on the internet other than personal blogs.

simplyluke 2y ago
There’s a broadly believed myth that it produces meaningful professional opportunities among certain folks in the industry. In my observations this is very rarely true, and in many more cases it’s a professional liability.
- dom96 2y ago
  It's not a myth. I got 2 amazing offers (one of which is now my job) via Twitter. I hope Bluesky can eventually offer the same.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    I don't think Twitter was required for someone with a rather good track record/cv like yours to get good jobs.
    - madeofpalk 2y ago
      Not required, but it could present opportunities.
    - dom96 2y ago
      Thank you for the kind words, but even good CVs get lost in the great recruitment filter all the time. It's great to have a platform where you can interact directly with real engineers at various companies.
- michaelbuckbee 2y ago
  This is highly dependent on what particular professional niche you're in. Hollywood actors are now routinely cast (in part) based on how many social media followers they have, leading to a lot of weirdness around their agents and agencies buying followers, accusing other competing actors of buying followers, etc. A bit closer to the HN crowd, there is definitely a correlation between speaking at conferences and having an "audience" and being a well-known figure online. Similarly, the "build-in-public" indie folks are active on social trying to break the build it and they will come cycle. There are ways to participate and filter through the noise that are positive, but certainly a lot of negative as well.

alfor 2y ago

Why move away from X?

mhale 2y ago

To have the best of all worlds: - your own blog on a domain you control - effortless crossposting to bluesky, mastodon, threads, linkedin, and others Then micro.blog is a great solution! It follows the POSSE principle: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. see: https://micro.blog/about/crosspost https://micro.blog/about/crosspost

jacooper 2y ago

Honestly bluesky flopped, just like threads and mastodon did. This is a fact BTW. Activity on bluesky has taken a nosedive. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats What makes Twitter, Twitter didn't move to bluesky. It's still clearly a niche platform, with only a certain group of people using it. On Twitter you can follow tech, politics (English and in other languages), sports and more almost in real time, as things are happening. It's this relevancy and variety that keeps me using Twitter, and bluesky never got this. It feels like you are within your own bubble, following a few accounts posting bad jokes here and there, and that's it. It's a shame really, bluesky was the first platform that could actually could replace Twitter, its decentralization is seamless, an important thing for new non-techie users and it didn't just want to become text based Instagram, but people are now very reluctant after two failed attempts, so it just didn't work out.

fud101 2y ago

I finally just caved and joined twitter. I've done it a few times before but this time it was surprisingly pleasant. Was able to use my google account and see posts. I find it refreshing. I don't know why we thought Musk ruined twitter (maybe he did) but as a user I am actually on board with whatever he did since I could never get into twitter in the past.

nemo44x 2y ago
Yeah Twitter/X has been great since many of the scolds and hall monitors were chased away. There's open discussions from all sides, even the more unsavory ones, and the communities that were not propped up by the scolds and hall monitors are as vibrant as ever. It's not perfect but I think more people feel comfortable posting there now and can speak frankly and openly. A few accounts I liked left but I guess I don't really miss them as new accounts have filled their space. It could also be the communities I use Twitter for weren't affected by the culture change at Twitter.

stiltzkin 2y ago

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