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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,

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.
  - BodyCulture 2y ago
    Can you please give some more details about the pressure methods in mastodon you are writing about, this is very interesting and important. Is there any systematic study going on about the mechanism of censorship in the fediverse?
    - ChocolateGod 2y ago
      Eh, I don't have any links to hand, but I vividly remember when I used Mastodon an instance of an admin being tagged and pressured to remove an individual off their server or be blocked. was around a year ago
      - Zak 2y ago
        From what I've seen, some niche servers have very detailed and very strict rules intended to address the needs of certain marginalized groups. An example I've seen is requiring a content warning for any image where a person or animal is staring directly into the lens, appearing to make eye contact with the viewer. Of course pressuring mainstream servers to adopt such a rule is not reasonable. Automatically applying a content warning to all media from servers that don't have the same rule would be a good solution. Bluesky's labelers provide a way to do something similar, but I don't think the Bluesky appview has a way to express something like "blur all media without the 'safe for my needs' label".
    - BeetleB 2y ago
      Things like one instance banning another whole instance because that instance is not agreeing to the same moderation policies as the first. I think some instances block all Pleroma instances, because there is an association of Pleroma being used by right wing folks. Here are failed attempts to ban Pleroma instances outright: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11816 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11816 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9708 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9708 Here's an example of an instance that blocks other instances if the other instance doesn't have a code of conduct similar to theirs: https://mastodon.art/about https://mastodon.art/about Note - they partially block mastodon.social!
- igravious 2y ago
  The whole https://chrisholdgraf.com/blog/2024/bluesky#why-not-use-mastodon https://chrisholdgraf.com/blog/2024/bluesky#why-not-use-mast... section is very unconvincing ??? i'm not using it because no one else is using it > If social media is about having interesting, dynamic interactions with people, then you need to go to the place that maximizes the chance of this happening if that was the case people would stay with Twitter/X > For example, one of its core features - federated servers and identity - is actually a pretty confusing UX pattern for the vast majority of people that don’t care about that kind of thing (“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!”). how on earth is this confusing to anyone? it's a different model > Moreover, while having federated servers means that communities have more control over their norms and rules, it also means communities have to do a lot more work to understand the idiosyncratic policies of each server. These are features if you think of a social networks as a tightly-interconnected and self-contained community, but the appeal of these kinds of platforms is having global reach to people that you may otherwise never have met. people forget in real life that we aren't all in the same social network and there are different protocols for different meat-space social networks and we internalise and navigate them all the time – in fact there are genres of literature out there (comedy of manners) that exploit social misunderstandings
- dartos 2y ago
  “Political” and “decentralized” Are not mutually exclusive. In fact, any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political, as the only ones that care about decentralization are the ones who care about politics. Everyone else is just trying to see what the famous person said last week or what their friend did on vacation. Corpo social media does solve for that.
  - swed420 2y ago
    > “Political” and “decentralized” Are not mutually exclusive. > any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political This hasn't said anything of value, since everything is political. Limiting your interaction with the world to sanitized corporate/Hollywood social media is political. Using no social media at all is political. And so on.
    - threatofrain 2y ago
      Decentralization is political because even from a sniff test it is very very concerned about evading existing centers of power. Common Lisp is not political. Technical people might say it is political, but non-technical people outside would just chuckle at the conversation — nerds fighting among themselves in an unseen corner with no power, thinking that there's "politics" there and perhaps everywhere too.
    - dartos 2y ago
      > This hasn't said anything of value, since everything is political. I really disagree with this statement. Many things are political, but not everything. (Unless you’re abstracting the word political to the point of it meaning any human relationship. At which point the word isn’t useful) Some choices are just convenience. Most people with an iPhone don’t choose to text on messenger because of a political opinion, it’s just because it’s the default app on their phone. I use discord frequently because all of my friends are on there, not because I particularly care for their politics. My choice to not use social media sites like fb and Twitter was fueled by mental health concerns and the time I’d sink into them, not because they lean left or right. > Limiting your interaction with the world to sanitized corporate/Hollywood social media is political. Not necessarily. Most people don’t know they’re limiting their interaction. They just want updates about things they care about. That need not be about politics. Just because a choice may have political ramifications doesn’t mean that it was a choice made for political reasons.
- vidarh 2y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but I'd say specifically the Fediverse is the only real place for a truly decentralised option. It doesn't need to be Mastodon. You don't need to be on Mastodon to interact with the Fediverse or be part of it, and that is the key strength. Mastodon can be corrupted and the Fediverse is still there. That could include Bluesky over time - you can follow my Mastodon from Bluesky via a bridge [1] - any desirable parts of their protocol, will be copied or emulated or bolted on the side for other Fediverse projects. [1] https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/
  - tqwhite 2y ago
    This is absolutely true. Bluesky can become decentralized but it will take a fair amount of work. What BLuesky does do is keep the door open for competition. If you want, you can stand up a version of its entire system (all open source). Or, you could write your own system that uses the AT Proto DID stuff to let people access their posts and follows, etc, in any way you want. And, BLuesky also serves as a bootstrap for AT Proto writ large. The whole distributed identity thing has huge potential going forward and it’s use by Bsky is an excellent start.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  Have you used Bluesky? I’ve been on it since it was invite only and I don’t see any politics on my feed. It’s basically just posts from friends, friends of friends, and artists for me. Bluesky seems the least pushy with rage bait content of all the social media’s.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    curiosity-joined a month ago, 90% of discover feed is politics
    - Gigachad 2y ago
      Hm, maybe for a fresh account today. I just checked and my discover feed is pretty much just art and photography.
      - ziml77 2y ago
        Maybe Bluesky needs to ask a few questions the first time a new user looks at the discover feed to prime it for them. Personally I'd prefer if there was no default algorithmic feed but I know that just doesn't work. People will create an account, see nothing in their feed, and leave because the site seems dead or because they can't even fathom how to get started finding people to follow or custom feeds to add.
        bdangubic 2y ago
        they do - they ask… the “problem” is that it is too broad… I picked “science” and there were myriad of post with pictures of various galaxies… pretty but after you see 27 of them… with the new accounts it is also asking to like 10 posts and follow 7 accounts so that it can try to figure shit out. it can be trained for sure but when I first joined to try it out it was just politics - mostly left-leaning praising Dr Fauci (very confusing) and stuff like that. I don’t use social media - no X, Facebook, Insta, TikTok… all were tried but eventually discarded … bluesky will suffer the same faith :)
        2y ago
- grumbel 2y ago
  Mastodon isn't true decentralization to begin with, it's just federation like email, where every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none. I find that approach a waste of time, as it's just replicating past mistakes verbatim. On top of that, the whole Fediverse is extremely political. Email providers don't care much what you write or with whom you communicate outside of spam, so it works quite well. Meanwhile Fediverse is blocking people and servers left and right, it's completely unusable unless you follow the group-think on whatever server you are on. Real decentralization is what Nostr is doing, where serves are just dumb relays, user-ids are public-key pairs and all the intelligence is in the client. BlueSky's AT-protocol should be capable of similar stuff, though in practice is still very much focused around the main BlueSky server.
  - simonw 2y ago
    "every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none" So run your own server.
    - shwouchk 2y ago
      How many people are running their own mail outside of large orgs or privacy/security niche? How many of those have had trouble sending mail to eg gmail?
      - staunton 2y ago
        It's easier to run your own Mastodon server than your own mail server (for the exact reason you cite).
        shwouchk 2y ago
        I never ran my AP server but i did run my own mail in my late teens/early twenties. I don't recall it being particularly difficult, compared to eg setting a webserver. Just install some software from your distro PM and go through some configs. Nothing stopped some hacker from bundling configs with a point and click installer for android eg - A mail server doesnt need 100% uptime - or for servers. As for reaching others, ive never had problems because my domains had dkim and whatever else was available set up - could be easily automated like web certificates were, and i never send spam... How is that inherently more difficult? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to argue - just citing my own experience. What's to stop major servers ("gmail" and "hotmail" of AP) from blocking you? Obviously some aspects are different from mail as it is geared for wide distribution rather than directed communication, but it's not obvious to me that the decentralization problem is solved by a model that seems superficially close to email. Again, im not trying to troll you as im unfamiliar with AP - i genuinely don't know.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Isn't Truth Social a fork of Mastodon (that might or might not be compatible any more). Or am I confusing with Gab ?
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Both are non-federating Mastodon instances.
- toss1 2y ago
  And that 'truly decentralized option' comes with a problem that will permanently dissuade many serious people from using it — there is no way to prevent imposter accounts. Imposter accounts will be attempted for anyone of significant standing or authority posting anything authoritative (e.g., product or policy announcements) controversial or notable, and with no way to shut them down and maintain an authoritative presence of you, no one of note will even go there, or stay once they encounter the problem. Easier to stay somewhere else like Bluesky or Spoutible where they at least attempt moderation and authentication and declare "Any Mastodon accts purporting to be me are fake.". I've personally spoken to authors/speakers/officials who checked it out after Twitter was sold to Musk, and once they understood the no-authentication-in-principle problem, said "NFW".
- rebeccaskinner 2y ago
  > BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now. I don't see this at all. Quite the opposite in fact. From what I've seen, BlueSky is trying very hard as a company to stay apolitical in an extremely naive way that's going to ultimately drive away users. There's simply no way to to be apolitical as a general social media platform today when social media is so widely used for discussing politics and current events, is a key target for propaganda campaigns, and in a highly fractured political climate. BlueSky gained momentum primarily from people who were driven away from X as it started to move further right, with a lot of engagement driven by left and center-left leaning people, along with people who might not have been directly engaged in politics except for being the target of right-leaning hate campaigns (LGBT people in particular). If they'd doubled down on that, I think they'd be a lot more successful in the long run. Sites like Truth Social, Parler, and X have demonstrated that there's a significant market for politically aligned social media spaces for the right, and both the significant activity in left and center-left spaces in Twitter before the buy-out, and the growth in Bluesky point to there being a significant market for an unapologeticly left leaning social media site as well (I'd point to Tumblr here as another example, although I don't use it and only have a passing idea that it seems to be a predominantly left leaning space). Instead of embracing product market fit with an underserved market though, BlueSky seems to be both-sides-ing themselves into a situation where they're likely going to see an exodus. By inviting and protecting right-wing provocateurs on the platform they are driving away their core audience in order to attract people who already have their choice of established competitors (X). The only value they can add over sites like X and Truth Social is a group of users ready to be the target of trolling and bullying, but having recent experience with migrating away from Twitter I don't see them sticking around BlueSky for long in that environment. In the end, the attempt at being apolitical will doom BlueSky to being a worse less populated X or Truth Social, rather than making the most of the opportunity to be a more decidedly left-leaning social media platform for an audience that prefers to avoid a strong right-wing presence in their social media experience.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    I think Mastodon and the Fediverse is better equipped for this kind of thing. The software itself acts like a "common carrier", and the networks formed by the instance operators align according to their politics. Truth Social itself is built on Mastodon.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  can't someone just stand up another atproto AppView with different default feeds to solve this problem? BlueSky's moderation team has traditional Twitter-like biases but my understanding of the AT protocol, from reading the spec, is that they do not have a monopoly on moderation in the AT network.
  - anon7000 2y ago
    Absolutely, and users can choose custom moderation and block lists to offload the work to someone else.
igravious 2y ago
I dream of a “classic web” as well. Principles: (a) non minification and no binary code – this is so that the platform is user and dev centred and not corpo and advertiser centred (b) static only mode as default, as in a site will be considered broken if it needs dynamic scripts to work, or at least it won't be considered a "classic" site – this is for (1) accessability and (2) command line (non-GUI) browser access and (3) easier automation – push as much common dynamic stuff into CSS as possible (c) cookies are in plain text and by default can only store essential information, cookies must be versioned and have a corresponding description file on the site's server – no information can be stored on the user's computer that is opaque to the user (d) instant messaging is to be a standard of the “classic” web – it must be federated and decentralised, just like the web is – it is not a separate information space, it is part of the same information space as the “classic” web that's off the top of my head – i view the web and instant messaging (or microblogging or whatever you want to call it) as fundamentally broken and user hostile
- emseetech 2y ago
  Those are all great and I'd love to see them too. But along the lines of general user experience, the central feature I have in mind is the time-based feed. No engagement algorithms, no suggestions, just things happening as they happen. Anything that goes viral does so organically with no push from the system. The irony of all social media is they all start with an ad-free time-based feed to make people fall in love with the app, then once they reach a critical mass they switch to an engagement algorithm to addict them and pump up views for advertisers.
  - BlackjackCF 2y ago
    I think it's only feasible to go with this "classic web" approach by having it be a paid service.
    - emseetech 2y ago
      Yes as mentioned above, a very low cost subscription would be ideal. Taking investment and using the 2010 era growth model would doom the user experience as we’ve seen. A paid service, even at a comically low price, would be a hard sell at first but that could change as people see the value.
ghaff 2y ago
Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. There's just so much fragmentation or migration away generally that none of it is very interesting. I think a lot of people took the Musk Twitter takeover as an excuse to re-evaluate their whole relationship to that sort of platform which basically led to a death spiral.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  > Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. Define "alive" and "dead". As a Mastodon user, it certainly is very much alive to me. I follow a lot of well known people, and that number isn't dropping. This reminds of almost every Emacs thread here. People claiming it's dead/dying because of VSCode, whereas if you're active in the Emacs community, all you can see is growth. Mastodon is going to hit a peak - it may already have. But as long as it maintains a healthy number of users, it will always be alive. At the moment it's more resilient than Bluesky, where almost all the users are on one instance.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I don't care about well known people. I could perhaps rebuild networks but I really haven't and I like many others I've thrown my arms up in the air and said whatever.
    - mycall 2y ago
      You are but one generation and the next won't have your same baggage.
    - BeetleB 2y ago
      I understand what you're saying, but you're not addressing the concern on what is alive or dead. Just because it sucks for you doesn't mean it sucks for everyone. Even if it sucks for 90% of folks, 10% of the Internet population is probably 10-100x what's needed for a network to survive and thrive. Not everyone has the same goals as you.
- 2y ago
wmf 2y ago
How has Bluesky degraded?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- emseetech 2y ago
  Bluesky has not yet degraded. But the funding model it chose has proven to degrade the user experience of every other service.
  - tqwhite 2y ago
    Would agree except for the part where they have not said anything concrete about their funding model. If you’re talking about venture money, it’s a public benefit LLC. The demands that can be made on them are limited by that.
    - emseetech 2y ago
      For the record, I am extremely skeptical that public benefit corps can resist market forces in any considerable way and I'm not alone in that concern. We're early enough in the history of benefit corporations that I may be proven wrong based on how enforcement and methods of legal accountability play out, but for the time being I consider them indistinguishable from standard corporations. Non-profits are much more time tested and concretely structured.
Karrot_Kream 2y ago
I feel like there's a lot of appealing to prevailing HN sentiment in this post. So much so that there's little substance. What actual things are you worried about or unhappy regarding with Bluesky? It's not perfect, and if you have problems with its decentralization posture, Christine Lemmer-Webber has a fantastic post [1] detailing her problems with the protocol. Bluesky has the AT Protocol underneath it and has infrastructural components that can allow other entities to run Bluesky. So my problem with this post, and general griping like this, is that by leaning so heavily on a shared boogeyman (that of "enshittification" or whatever) that there stops being concrete actionable complaints and more just general anger. Solutions can only come when we discuss problems. At times a cynical portion of me even thinks this sort of posting is just low-key karma farming too, but I know that's too uncharitable a take, and I realize venting to the in-group can be therapeutic. [1]: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
- neilv 2y ago
  > I feel like there's a lot of appealing to prevailing HN sentiment in this post. So much so that there's little substance. IMO, there was plenty of substance, on things a lot of HNers either don't realize, or disregard. > that there stops being concrete actionable complaints and more just general anger. Good point in general (and ironic, since that too is a tired, pervasive condition that somehow still needs pointing out, even if it seems like you're just complaining ineffectually in doing so). But, since the Bluesky concerns apparently needed to be said, to inform people who appear not to understand, then saying it isn't just complaining. > At times a cynical portion of me even thinks this sort of posting is just low-key karma farming too, but I know that's too uncharitable a take, If want to verbalize uncharitable takes on HN, be careful what you start. Your own comment could've been bog-standard damage control astroturfing.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    To be clear: I'm not talking about TFA. I'm talking about OP. TFA had substance for sure. But the OP just vaguely talks about taking VC money. This is distinctive because the AT Protocol exists to specifically prevent the degradation that VC does. So I'm curious what about Bluesky and the AT Protocol are of concern here that VC capture could affect. That's why I linked Christine Lemmer-Webber's post. > If want to verbalize uncharitable takes on HN, be careful what you start. Your own comment could've been bog-standard damage control astroturfing. I find that funny that folks think Bluesky has astroturfing around it, but sure you're welcome to think that way. HN is pretty big these days.
andreilys 2y ago
I can't remember the last time I visited Wikipedia. Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.
- dheerajvs 2y ago
  > Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal. And what did they get trained on in the first place?
  - notyourwork 2y ago
    Which is funny because if Wikipedia dies, who will continue providing updated training data to these models? It's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy that consolidates without financial replacement.
    - fossislife 2y ago
      The same sources Wikipedia gets its information from. You can not even contribute to Wikipedia without providing outside sources, I think, which are usually websites or books
- Azerty9999 2y ago
  >Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal. LLMs hallucinate/confabulate. I use Wikipedia to check source info and to find additional information. Of course there are more reliable sources than Wikipedia, but it's useful, still.
- eviks 2y ago
  You favorite tool can easily answer that question
- Yizahi 2y ago
  I sometimes use neural nets for obscure compound questions (with a so so efficiency), but I can't imagine using NN in place of Wikipedia. I go to Wikipedia to find factual information (by factual I don't mean guaranteed, I mean hard data - years, names, models etc.). How can anyone rely on a random text generator to get factual data?

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.
- BodyCulture 2y ago
  Can you please give some more details about the pressure methods in mastodon you are writing about, this is very interesting and important. Is there any systematic study going on about the mechanism of censorship in the fediverse?
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    Eh, I don't have any links to hand, but I vividly remember when I used Mastodon an instance of an admin being tagged and pressured to remove an individual off their server or be blocked. was around a year ago
    - Zak 2y ago
      From what I've seen, some niche servers have very detailed and very strict rules intended to address the needs of certain marginalized groups. An example I've seen is requiring a content warning for any image where a person or animal is staring directly into the lens, appearing to make eye contact with the viewer. Of course pressuring mainstream servers to adopt such a rule is not reasonable. Automatically applying a content warning to all media from servers that don't have the same rule would be a good solution. Bluesky's labelers provide a way to do something similar, but I don't think the Bluesky appview has a way to express something like "blur all media without the 'safe for my needs' label".
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    Things like one instance banning another whole instance because that instance is not agreeing to the same moderation policies as the first. I think some instances block all Pleroma instances, because there is an association of Pleroma being used by right wing folks. Here are failed attempts to ban Pleroma instances outright: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11816 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11816 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9708 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9708 Here's an example of an instance that blocks other instances if the other instance doesn't have a code of conduct similar to theirs: https://mastodon.art/about https://mastodon.art/about Note - they partially block mastodon.social!
igravious 2y ago
The whole https://chrisholdgraf.com/blog/2024/bluesky#why-not-use-mastodon https://chrisholdgraf.com/blog/2024/bluesky#why-not-use-mast... section is very unconvincing ??? i'm not using it because no one else is using it > If social media is about having interesting, dynamic interactions with people, then you need to go to the place that maximizes the chance of this happening if that was the case people would stay with Twitter/X > For example, one of its core features - federated servers and identity - is actually a pretty confusing UX pattern for the vast majority of people that don’t care about that kind of thing (“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!”). how on earth is this confusing to anyone? it's a different model > Moreover, while having federated servers means that communities have more control over their norms and rules, it also means communities have to do a lot more work to understand the idiosyncratic policies of each server. These are features if you think of a social networks as a tightly-interconnected and self-contained community, but the appeal of these kinds of platforms is having global reach to people that you may otherwise never have met. people forget in real life that we aren't all in the same social network and there are different protocols for different meat-space social networks and we internalise and navigate them all the time – in fact there are genres of literature out there (comedy of manners) that exploit social misunderstandings
dartos 2y ago
“Political” and “decentralized” Are not mutually exclusive. In fact, any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political, as the only ones that care about decentralization are the ones who care about politics. Everyone else is just trying to see what the famous person said last week or what their friend did on vacation. Corpo social media does solve for that.
- swed420 2y ago
  > “Political” and “decentralized” Are not mutually exclusive. > any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political This hasn't said anything of value, since everything is political. Limiting your interaction with the world to sanitized corporate/Hollywood social media is political. Using no social media at all is political. And so on.
  - threatofrain 2y ago
    Decentralization is political because even from a sniff test it is very very concerned about evading existing centers of power. Common Lisp is not political. Technical people might say it is political, but non-technical people outside would just chuckle at the conversation — nerds fighting among themselves in an unseen corner with no power, thinking that there's "politics" there and perhaps everywhere too.
  - dartos 2y ago
    > This hasn't said anything of value, since everything is political. I really disagree with this statement. Many things are political, but not everything. (Unless you’re abstracting the word political to the point of it meaning any human relationship. At which point the word isn’t useful) Some choices are just convenience. Most people with an iPhone don’t choose to text on messenger because of a political opinion, it’s just because it’s the default app on their phone. I use discord frequently because all of my friends are on there, not because I particularly care for their politics. My choice to not use social media sites like fb and Twitter was fueled by mental health concerns and the time I’d sink into them, not because they lean left or right. > Limiting your interaction with the world to sanitized corporate/Hollywood social media is political. Not necessarily. Most people don’t know they’re limiting their interaction. They just want updates about things they care about. That need not be about politics. Just because a choice may have political ramifications doesn’t mean that it was a choice made for political reasons.
vidarh 2y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but I'd say specifically the Fediverse is the only real place for a truly decentralised option. It doesn't need to be Mastodon. You don't need to be on Mastodon to interact with the Fediverse or be part of it, and that is the key strength. Mastodon can be corrupted and the Fediverse is still there. That could include Bluesky over time - you can follow my Mastodon from Bluesky via a bridge [1] - any desirable parts of their protocol, will be copied or emulated or bolted on the side for other Fediverse projects. [1] https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/
- tqwhite 2y ago
  This is absolutely true. Bluesky can become decentralized but it will take a fair amount of work. What BLuesky does do is keep the door open for competition. If you want, you can stand up a version of its entire system (all open source). Or, you could write your own system that uses the AT Proto DID stuff to let people access their posts and follows, etc, in any way you want. And, BLuesky also serves as a bootstrap for AT Proto writ large. The whole distributed identity thing has huge potential going forward and it’s use by Bsky is an excellent start.
Gigachad 2y ago
Have you used Bluesky? I’ve been on it since it was invite only and I don’t see any politics on my feed. It’s basically just posts from friends, friends of friends, and artists for me. Bluesky seems the least pushy with rage bait content of all the social media’s.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  curiosity-joined a month ago, 90% of discover feed is politics
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    Hm, maybe for a fresh account today. I just checked and my discover feed is pretty much just art and photography.
    - ziml77 2y ago
      Maybe Bluesky needs to ask a few questions the first time a new user looks at the discover feed to prime it for them. Personally I'd prefer if there was no default algorithmic feed but I know that just doesn't work. People will create an account, see nothing in their feed, and leave because the site seems dead or because they can't even fathom how to get started finding people to follow or custom feeds to add.
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        they do - they ask… the “problem” is that it is too broad… I picked “science” and there were myriad of post with pictures of various galaxies… pretty but after you see 27 of them… with the new accounts it is also asking to like 10 posts and follow 7 accounts so that it can try to figure shit out. it can be trained for sure but when I first joined to try it out it was just politics - mostly left-leaning praising Dr Fauci (very confusing) and stuff like that. I don’t use social media - no X, Facebook, Insta, TikTok… all were tried but eventually discarded … bluesky will suffer the same faith :)
      - 2y ago
grumbel 2y ago
Mastodon isn't true decentralization to begin with, it's just federation like email, where every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none. I find that approach a waste of time, as it's just replicating past mistakes verbatim. On top of that, the whole Fediverse is extremely political. Email providers don't care much what you write or with whom you communicate outside of spam, so it works quite well. Meanwhile Fediverse is blocking people and servers left and right, it's completely unusable unless you follow the group-think on whatever server you are on. Real decentralization is what Nostr is doing, where serves are just dumb relays, user-ids are public-key pairs and all the intelligence is in the client. BlueSky's AT-protocol should be capable of similar stuff, though in practice is still very much focused around the main BlueSky server.
- simonw 2y ago
  "every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none" So run your own server.
  - shwouchk 2y ago
    How many people are running their own mail outside of large orgs or privacy/security niche? How many of those have had trouble sending mail to eg gmail?
    - staunton 2y ago
      It's easier to run your own Mastodon server than your own mail server (for the exact reason you cite).
      - shwouchk 2y ago
        I never ran my AP server but i did run my own mail in my late teens/early twenties. I don't recall it being particularly difficult, compared to eg setting a webserver. Just install some software from your distro PM and go through some configs. Nothing stopped some hacker from bundling configs with a point and click installer for android eg - A mail server doesnt need 100% uptime - or for servers. As for reaching others, ive never had problems because my domains had dkim and whatever else was available set up - could be easily automated like web certificates were, and i never send spam... How is that inherently more difficult? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to argue - just citing my own experience. What's to stop major servers ("gmail" and "hotmail" of AP) from blocking you? Obviously some aspects are different from mail as it is geared for wide distribution rather than directed communication, but it's not obvious to me that the decentralization problem is solved by a model that seems superficially close to email. Again, im not trying to troll you as im unfamiliar with AP - i genuinely don't know.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
Isn't Truth Social a fork of Mastodon (that might or might not be compatible any more). Or am I confusing with Gab ?
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Both are non-federating Mastodon instances.
toss1 2y ago
And that 'truly decentralized option' comes with a problem that will permanently dissuade many serious people from using it — there is no way to prevent imposter accounts. Imposter accounts will be attempted for anyone of significant standing or authority posting anything authoritative (e.g., product or policy announcements) controversial or notable, and with no way to shut them down and maintain an authoritative presence of you, no one of note will even go there, or stay once they encounter the problem. Easier to stay somewhere else like Bluesky or Spoutible where they at least attempt moderation and authentication and declare "Any Mastodon accts purporting to be me are fake.". I've personally spoken to authors/speakers/officials who checked it out after Twitter was sold to Musk, and once they understood the no-authentication-in-principle problem, said "NFW".
rebeccaskinner 2y ago
> BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now. I don't see this at all. Quite the opposite in fact. From what I've seen, BlueSky is trying very hard as a company to stay apolitical in an extremely naive way that's going to ultimately drive away users. There's simply no way to to be apolitical as a general social media platform today when social media is so widely used for discussing politics and current events, is a key target for propaganda campaigns, and in a highly fractured political climate. BlueSky gained momentum primarily from people who were driven away from X as it started to move further right, with a lot of engagement driven by left and center-left leaning people, along with people who might not have been directly engaged in politics except for being the target of right-leaning hate campaigns (LGBT people in particular). If they'd doubled down on that, I think they'd be a lot more successful in the long run. Sites like Truth Social, Parler, and X have demonstrated that there's a significant market for politically aligned social media spaces for the right, and both the significant activity in left and center-left spaces in Twitter before the buy-out, and the growth in Bluesky point to there being a significant market for an unapologeticly left leaning social media site as well (I'd point to Tumblr here as another example, although I don't use it and only have a passing idea that it seems to be a predominantly left leaning space). Instead of embracing product market fit with an underserved market though, BlueSky seems to be both-sides-ing themselves into a situation where they're likely going to see an exodus. By inviting and protecting right-wing provocateurs on the platform they are driving away their core audience in order to attract people who already have their choice of established competitors (X). The only value they can add over sites like X and Truth Social is a group of users ready to be the target of trolling and bullying, but having recent experience with migrating away from Twitter I don't see them sticking around BlueSky for long in that environment. In the end, the attempt at being apolitical will doom BlueSky to being a worse less populated X or Truth Social, rather than making the most of the opportunity to be a more decidedly left-leaning social media platform for an audience that prefers to avoid a strong right-wing presence in their social media experience.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  I think Mastodon and the Fediverse is better equipped for this kind of thing. The software itself acts like a "common carrier", and the networks formed by the instance operators align according to their politics. Truth Social itself is built on Mastodon.
dingnuts 2y ago
can't someone just stand up another atproto AppView with different default feeds to solve this problem? BlueSky's moderation team has traditional Twitter-like biases but my understanding of the AT protocol, from reading the spec, is that they do not have a monopoly on moderation in the AT network.
- anon7000 2y ago
  Absolutely, and users can choose custom moderation and block lists to offload the work to someone else.

igravious 2y ago

I dream of a “classic web” as well. Principles: (a) non minification and no binary code – this is so that the platform is user and dev centred and not corpo and advertiser centred (b) static only mode as default, as in a site will be considered broken if it needs dynamic scripts to work, or at least it won't be considered a "classic" site – this is for (1) accessability and (2) command line (non-GUI) browser access and (3) easier automation – push as much common dynamic stuff into CSS as possible (c) cookies are in plain text and by default can only store essential information, cookies must be versioned and have a corresponding description file on the site's server – no information can be stored on the user's computer that is opaque to the user (d) instant messaging is to be a standard of the “classic” web – it must be federated and decentralised, just like the web is – it is not a separate information space, it is part of the same information space as the “classic” web that's off the top of my head – i view the web and instant messaging (or microblogging or whatever you want to call it) as fundamentally broken and user hostile

emseetech 2y ago
Those are all great and I'd love to see them too. But along the lines of general user experience, the central feature I have in mind is the time-based feed. No engagement algorithms, no suggestions, just things happening as they happen. Anything that goes viral does so organically with no push from the system. The irony of all social media is they all start with an ad-free time-based feed to make people fall in love with the app, then once they reach a critical mass they switch to an engagement algorithm to addict them and pump up views for advertisers.
- BlackjackCF 2y ago
  I think it's only feasible to go with this "classic web" approach by having it be a paid service.
  - emseetech 2y ago
    Yes as mentioned above, a very low cost subscription would be ideal. Taking investment and using the 2010 era growth model would doom the user experience as we’ve seen. A paid service, even at a comically low price, would be a hard sell at first but that could change as people see the value.

ghaff 2y ago

Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. There's just so much fragmentation or migration away generally that none of it is very interesting. I think a lot of people took the Musk Twitter takeover as an excuse to re-evaluate their whole relationship to that sort of platform which basically led to a death spiral.

BeetleB 2y ago
> Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. Define "alive" and "dead". As a Mastodon user, it certainly is very much alive to me. I follow a lot of well known people, and that number isn't dropping. This reminds of almost every Emacs thread here. People claiming it's dead/dying because of VSCode, whereas if you're active in the Emacs community, all you can see is growth. Mastodon is going to hit a peak - it may already have. But as long as it maintains a healthy number of users, it will always be alive. At the moment it's more resilient than Bluesky, where almost all the users are on one instance.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I don't care about well known people. I could perhaps rebuild networks but I really haven't and I like many others I've thrown my arms up in the air and said whatever.
  - mycall 2y ago
    You are but one generation and the next won't have your same baggage.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    I understand what you're saying, but you're not addressing the concern on what is alive or dead. Just because it sucks for you doesn't mean it sucks for everyone. Even if it sucks for 90% of folks, 10% of the Internet population is probably 10-100x what's needed for a network to survive and thrive. Not everyone has the same goals as you.
2y ago

wmf 2y ago

How has Bluesky degraded?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
emseetech 2y ago
Bluesky has not yet degraded. But the funding model it chose has proven to degrade the user experience of every other service.
- tqwhite 2y ago
  Would agree except for the part where they have not said anything concrete about their funding model. If you’re talking about venture money, it’s a public benefit LLC. The demands that can be made on them are limited by that.
  - emseetech 2y ago
    For the record, I am extremely skeptical that public benefit corps can resist market forces in any considerable way and I'm not alone in that concern. We're early enough in the history of benefit corporations that I may be proven wrong based on how enforcement and methods of legal accountability play out, but for the time being I consider them indistinguishable from standard corporations. Non-profits are much more time tested and concretely structured.

Karrot_Kream 2y ago

I feel like there's a lot of appealing to prevailing HN sentiment in this post. So much so that there's little substance. What actual things are you worried about or unhappy regarding with Bluesky? It's not perfect, and if you have problems with its decentralization posture, Christine Lemmer-Webber has a fantastic post [1] detailing her problems with the protocol. Bluesky has the AT Protocol underneath it and has infrastructural components that can allow other entities to run Bluesky. So my problem with this post, and general griping like this, is that by leaning so heavily on a shared boogeyman (that of "enshittification" or whatever) that there stops being concrete actionable complaints and more just general anger. Solutions can only come when we discuss problems. At times a cynical portion of me even thinks this sort of posting is just low-key karma farming too, but I know that's too uncharitable a take, and I realize venting to the in-group can be therapeutic. [1]: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

neilv 2y ago
> I feel like there's a lot of appealing to prevailing HN sentiment in this post. So much so that there's little substance. IMO, there was plenty of substance, on things a lot of HNers either don't realize, or disregard. > that there stops being concrete actionable complaints and more just general anger. Good point in general (and ironic, since that too is a tired, pervasive condition that somehow still needs pointing out, even if it seems like you're just complaining ineffectually in doing so). But, since the Bluesky concerns apparently needed to be said, to inform people who appear not to understand, then saying it isn't just complaining. > At times a cynical portion of me even thinks this sort of posting is just low-key karma farming too, but I know that's too uncharitable a take, If want to verbalize uncharitable takes on HN, be careful what you start. Your own comment could've been bog-standard damage control astroturfing.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  To be clear: I'm not talking about TFA. I'm talking about OP. TFA had substance for sure. But the OP just vaguely talks about taking VC money. This is distinctive because the AT Protocol exists to specifically prevent the degradation that VC does. So I'm curious what about Bluesky and the AT Protocol are of concern here that VC capture could affect. That's why I linked Christine Lemmer-Webber's post. > If want to verbalize uncharitable takes on HN, be careful what you start. Your own comment could've been bog-standard damage control astroturfing. I find that funny that folks think Bluesky has astroturfing around it, but sure you're welcome to think that way. HN is pretty big these days.

andreilys 2y ago

I can't remember the last time I visited Wikipedia. Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

dheerajvs 2y ago
> Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal. And what did they get trained on in the first place?
- notyourwork 2y ago
  Which is funny because if Wikipedia dies, who will continue providing updated training data to these models? It's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy that consolidates without financial replacement.
  - fossislife 2y ago
    The same sources Wikipedia gets its information from. You can not even contribute to Wikipedia without providing outside sources, I think, which are usually websites or books
Azerty9999 2y ago
>Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal. LLMs hallucinate/confabulate. I use Wikipedia to check source info and to find additional information. Of course there are more reliable sources than Wikipedia, but it's useful, still.
eviks 2y ago
You favorite tool can easily answer that question
Yizahi 2y ago
I sometimes use neural nets for obscure compound questions (with a so so efficiency), but I can't imagine using NN in place of Wikipedia. I go to Wikipedia to find factual information (by factual I don't mean guaranteed, I mean hard data - years, names, models etc.). How can anyone rely on a random text generator to get factual data?