4 ms·

Bluesky is two completely separate things: 1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership. 2) A vastly overengine

Bluesky is two completely separate things: 1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership. 2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design. There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up sowing a lot of confusion about it. I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block, private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.

enos_feedler 2y ago
I agree and don't believe 1) is the killer app for 2) but it definitely helps make 2) viable because at least there is a production social app running on it.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
I got the impression from Christine Webber that the Blue sky protocol could not practically be federated, there's a bottleneck (relays iirc) that can only be properly implemented with huge resources, and which scales quadratically https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Bluesky is designed for the appearance of federation.
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    Also the appearance of no political baggage, but that’s not actually true either.
- dang 2y ago
  Discussed a bit here: How decentralized is Bluesky really? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215410 - Nov 2024 (16 comments)
ziml77 2y ago
Would be silly for anyone to take the other side of that bet. It's clear most people don't care. Early on I tried to explain to people why their feature requests didn't make sense in the federated design, but eventually I gave up. And to some extent Bluesky gave up as well. People were demanding DMing be a feature of the site so eventually they just added DMs that are centrally stored on their servers.
- liquidpele 2y ago
  And rightfully so, because it’s a stupid feature to not have and most people want an app not an ideology.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Email is DM and that's decentralised (despite best efforts of Microsoft and Google). So is Matrix.
JFingleton 2y ago
> Twitter clone without the political baggage I tried out Bluesky last week in hope of finding a social network which ticked this box, but my feed was full of anti Elon Musk / Trump messages. So it was very political from my initial experience. This was after the setup wizard process where I selected tech/science/entertainment preferences. Perhaps I did something wrong or didn't give it enough chance? Either way I deleted my account.
- yeahwhatever10 2y ago
  What they meant to say was the "right" kind of political.
  - ramon156 2y ago
    Nonetheless this is an issue that's still not fixed in bsky. I'll use myself as an example. I don't want to see America politics because I don't care about the nothingburger posts that surrounds Trump. There's a setting to blacklist certain words or topics. It does not work. I hope they fix it at some point, because I don't spend much time on there, and I'd like to.
    - mjmsmith 2y ago
      That's always going to be hard work using a US-based platform. Whatever its downsides, Mastodon is noticeably less US-centric and it shows in the content.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      True, avoiding all posts with "Trump" or "Elon" would be amazing. I don't live in the US either and it's just too much drama for me. It was the same with Brexit. Those 2 years I got so fed up with that constantly repeating discussion about separating goods & services which they knew was impossible from the start.
    - danielbln 2y ago
      It works though?! I've got all that US political nonsense added as mute/block words and follow a couple of notorious block lists and I rarely if ever see any of that content in my feed.
captainepoch 2y ago
> 1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership. Not the current, but the previous one when Dorsey owned Twitter. And I don't know what's worse, honestly.
pessimizer 2y ago
> 2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design. I got the impression from the Dorsey interview that this was his commitment, and that he left because they weren't interested in that. They're just trying to be a twitter clone that picks up angry twitter users who hate Musk. ----- > That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population. > Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create. https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik... ----- The problem for Bluesky is that those people aren't actually leaving twitter, they're still using twitter more than they use Bluesky. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
evbogue 2y ago
Maciej -- I disagree based on the conversations I've had IRL with normal users about Bluesky. The scuttlebutt is that many people have heard that the index, the directory, and the signing keys are centralized. The good news is the signing keys are not in the hands of the users so we could in theory rewrite all of the messages on the protocol. If you had those keys would you choose to do this?
Vaslo 2y ago
[flagged]

enos_feedler 2y ago

I agree and don't believe 1) is the killer app for 2) but it definitely helps make 2) viable because at least there is a production social app running on it.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago

I got the impression from Christine Webber that the Blue sky protocol could not practically be federated, there's a bottleneck (relays iirc) that can only be properly implemented with huge resources, and which scales quadratically https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

throwaway48476 2y ago
Bluesky is designed for the appearance of federation.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  Also the appearance of no political baggage, but that’s not actually true either.
dang 2y ago
Discussed a bit here: How decentralized is Bluesky really? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215410 - Nov 2024 (16 comments)

ziml77 2y ago

Would be silly for anyone to take the other side of that bet. It's clear most people don't care. Early on I tried to explain to people why their feature requests didn't make sense in the federated design, but eventually I gave up. And to some extent Bluesky gave up as well. People were demanding DMing be a feature of the site so eventually they just added DMs that are centrally stored on their servers.

liquidpele 2y ago
And rightfully so, because it’s a stupid feature to not have and most people want an app not an ideology.
wkat4242 2y ago
Email is DM and that's decentralised (despite best efforts of Microsoft and Google). So is Matrix.

JFingleton 2y ago

> Twitter clone without the political baggage I tried out Bluesky last week in hope of finding a social network which ticked this box, but my feed was full of anti Elon Musk / Trump messages. So it was very political from my initial experience. This was after the setup wizard process where I selected tech/science/entertainment preferences. Perhaps I did something wrong or didn't give it enough chance? Either way I deleted my account.

yeahwhatever10 2y ago
What they meant to say was the "right" kind of political.
- ramon156 2y ago
  Nonetheless this is an issue that's still not fixed in bsky. I'll use myself as an example. I don't want to see America politics because I don't care about the nothingburger posts that surrounds Trump. There's a setting to blacklist certain words or topics. It does not work. I hope they fix it at some point, because I don't spend much time on there, and I'd like to.
  - mjmsmith 2y ago
    That's always going to be hard work using a US-based platform. Whatever its downsides, Mastodon is noticeably less US-centric and it shows in the content.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    True, avoiding all posts with "Trump" or "Elon" would be amazing. I don't live in the US either and it's just too much drama for me. It was the same with Brexit. Those 2 years I got so fed up with that constantly repeating discussion about separating goods & services which they knew was impossible from the start.
  - danielbln 2y ago
    It works though?! I've got all that US political nonsense added as mute/block words and follow a couple of notorious block lists and I rarely if ever see any of that content in my feed.

captainepoch 2y ago

> 1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership. Not the current, but the previous one when Dorsey owned Twitter. And I don't know what's worse, honestly.

pessimizer 2y ago

> 2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design. I got the impression from the Dorsey interview that this was his commitment, and that he left because they weren't interested in that. They're just trying to be a twitter clone that picks up angry twitter users who hate Musk. ----- > That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population. > Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create. https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik... ----- The problem for Bluesky is that those people aren't actually leaving twitter, they're still using twitter more than they use Bluesky. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

evbogue 2y ago

Maciej -- I disagree based on the conversations I've had IRL with normal users about Bluesky. The scuttlebutt is that many people have heard that the index, the directory, and the signing keys are centralized. The good news is the signing keys are not in the hands of the users so we could in theory rewrite all of the messages on the protocol. If you had those keys would you choose to do this?

Vaslo 2y ago

[flagged]