3 ms·

I don’t understand the infatuation with blue sky. The minute they need money it’ll go the way of the Reddit and twitter.

xrisk 2y ago
People want the old Twitter, and Bluesky is close to that. It also cosplays being decentralized to people who don’t look too closely.
- dom96 2y ago
  What makes it not decentralised?
  - xrisk 2y ago
    The fact that you have to be on “the” relay to meaningfully participate on the network. If you instead claim that users can always choose to use other 3P relays, then you immediately lose all the nice things that Bluesky is able to do well today (search, discoverability, a “discover” algorithm). Indeed, you fall back to the same old problems that every other decentralized social network has. Bluesky is just a shittier version of Nostr, except that the people over at Nostr don’t pretend.
  - immibis 2y ago
    The approximately a million dollars a year that it costs to run another copy.
  - BizarroLand 2y ago
    https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Larrikin 2y ago
If everything good is assumed to eventually become bad, why not use things while they are good and then immediately move on when it becomes bad?
- treyd 2y ago
  Not everything good becomes bad. That premise is wrong. Bluesky accepted VC money. For a social platform that means its death certificate has already been signed. What you're ignoring with that framing is that we can use social media that operates outside the VC startup pipeline and doesn't have enshittification baked in from the start.
- sodality2 2y ago
  Your actions' consequences are not limited to benefiting from the thing like it would for a product - with social media, you improve the networking effect for the soon-to-be bad. (Nothing against bluesky, I don't know or think it will do so)
VectorLock 2y ago
People seem to lark on and on about how it has better "default moderation" than Mastodon.
- verdverm 2y ago
  It's not that it is "better" but that the choice is individual, not up to the mastodon server. In Mastodon, you trade Elon for some other group of individuals, so what happens if they make decision on moderation or content you do not agree with? ATProto is designed around accounts that are independent of data host, application, and moderation, all in the name of giving users individual control over these things. It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server, but without the overhead
  - VectorLock 2y ago
    >It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server No, it's like every Mastodon user used the same server, and all the coordination is done by one server that nobody can replicate.
    - verdverm 2y ago
      Every user in ATProto gets their own database that amounts to a tar file (technically sqlite with car export format) This is nothing like having a single server for every user. Perhaps you are confusing Bluesky (one app) with ATProtocol the shared network? There are already independent servers and apps operating separate from Bluesky
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    Are you suggesting the "big few" can't largely censor a given account? I don't see how ATProto is doing noticeably better than the scenario where a large ActivityPub instance blocks your external account.
    - verdverm 2y ago
      Generally, yes. Currently, because Bluesky requires the use of their labeler if you use their app, this could happen. Two points of note 1. You can participate in Bluesky without the Bluesky app, so you can remove this requirement by using an alternative app 2. The most blocked account is blocked by around 0.25% of the full network (https://clearsky.app/ https://clearsky.app/) This second point does not account for users banned from Bluesky by Bluesky for breaking the ToS or PDS abuse.
bowsamic 2y ago
My bluesky feed is somehow even more abhorrent than my twitter one, except that instead of right wing hate it's Facebook memes about "reading banned books"
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Bluesky's 'Discover' feed (the default algo feed that you get when you create your account) is based on _likes_, not follows, so if you never like anything you'll get random nonsense. You can try using other algo feeds from here: https://bsky.app/feeds https://bsky.app/feeds and remove the discover feed, or of course you could just use the chronological one.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    But when everything I see is awful, what do I like? I think that's my classic issue with feed style websites
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      You follow _people_, and ignore the 'Discover' feed, is generally my personal solution to this. YMMV.
rsynnott 2y ago
Twitter was always... not great (there's a reason it was affectionately known as the Hellsite), but it had 16 years of being _tolerable_ for most people (the real exodus only really started with Musk's changes, though there had been a couple of smaller ones previously, mostly over Twitter messing with the API). Frankly, if I get 16 years out of Bluesky before having to move onto the next one, I can live with that. Social networks _die_; it has always been so. USENET, livejournal, Tumblr, twitter... nothing lasts forever.

xrisk 2y ago

People want the old Twitter, and Bluesky is close to that. It also cosplays being decentralized to people who don’t look too closely.

dom96 2y ago
What makes it not decentralised?
- xrisk 2y ago
  The fact that you have to be on “the” relay to meaningfully participate on the network. If you instead claim that users can always choose to use other 3P relays, then you immediately lose all the nice things that Bluesky is able to do well today (search, discoverability, a “discover” algorithm). Indeed, you fall back to the same old problems that every other decentralized social network has. Bluesky is just a shittier version of Nostr, except that the people over at Nostr don’t pretend.
- immibis 2y ago
  The approximately a million dollars a year that it costs to run another copy.
- BizarroLand 2y ago
  https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Larrikin 2y ago

If everything good is assumed to eventually become bad, why not use things while they are good and then immediately move on when it becomes bad?

treyd 2y ago
Not everything good becomes bad. That premise is wrong. Bluesky accepted VC money. For a social platform that means its death certificate has already been signed. What you're ignoring with that framing is that we can use social media that operates outside the VC startup pipeline and doesn't have enshittification baked in from the start.
sodality2 2y ago
Your actions' consequences are not limited to benefiting from the thing like it would for a product - with social media, you improve the networking effect for the soon-to-be bad. (Nothing against bluesky, I don't know or think it will do so)

VectorLock 2y ago

People seem to lark on and on about how it has better "default moderation" than Mastodon.

verdverm 2y ago
It's not that it is "better" but that the choice is individual, not up to the mastodon server. In Mastodon, you trade Elon for some other group of individuals, so what happens if they make decision on moderation or content you do not agree with? ATProto is designed around accounts that are independent of data host, application, and moderation, all in the name of giving users individual control over these things. It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server, but without the overhead
- VectorLock 2y ago
  >It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server No, it's like every Mastodon user used the same server, and all the coordination is done by one server that nobody can replicate.
  - verdverm 2y ago
    Every user in ATProto gets their own database that amounts to a tar file (technically sqlite with car export format) This is nothing like having a single server for every user. Perhaps you are confusing Bluesky (one app) with ATProtocol the shared network? There are already independent servers and apps operating separate from Bluesky
- fc417fc802 2y ago
  Are you suggesting the "big few" can't largely censor a given account? I don't see how ATProto is doing noticeably better than the scenario where a large ActivityPub instance blocks your external account.
  - verdverm 2y ago
    Generally, yes. Currently, because Bluesky requires the use of their labeler if you use their app, this could happen. Two points of note 1. You can participate in Bluesky without the Bluesky app, so you can remove this requirement by using an alternative app 2. The most blocked account is blocked by around 0.25% of the full network (https://clearsky.app/ https://clearsky.app/) This second point does not account for users banned from Bluesky by Bluesky for breaking the ToS or PDS abuse.

bowsamic 2y ago

My bluesky feed is somehow even more abhorrent than my twitter one, except that instead of right wing hate it's Facebook memes about "reading banned books"

rsynnott 2y ago
Bluesky's 'Discover' feed (the default algo feed that you get when you create your account) is based on _likes_, not follows, so if you never like anything you'll get random nonsense. You can try using other algo feeds from here: https://bsky.app/feeds https://bsky.app/feeds and remove the discover feed, or of course you could just use the chronological one.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  But when everything I see is awful, what do I like? I think that's my classic issue with feed style websites
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    You follow _people_, and ignore the 'Discover' feed, is generally my personal solution to this. YMMV.

rsynnott 2y ago

Twitter was always... not great (there's a reason it was affectionately known as the Hellsite), but it had 16 years of being _tolerable_ for most people (the real exodus only really started with Musk's changes, though there had been a couple of smaller ones previously, mostly over Twitter messing with the API). Frankly, if I get 16 years out of Bluesky before having to move onto the next one, I can live with that. Social networks _die_; it has always been so. USENET, livejournal, Tumblr, twitter... nothing lasts forever.