11 ms·

Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

216 points by benwerd 1y ago

ChrisArchitect 1y ago
tl;dr Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky, so running on the AT Protocol that has its own infrastructure, mod team etc.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  It's fairly specifically _not_ a fork; they've re-implemented atproto (in, what else, Rust). This is important, as there are now two real in-production-use AT Protocol impls (plus a bunch of toy ones).
  - ChrisArchitect 1y ago
    Sorry I got that from the description they've put on their GitHub repo. Suppose referring to the front-end as a fork of bsky.app. Shrug
    - rsynnott 1y ago
      Yeah, I think the frontend's just a fork, but that's not really the interesting bit.
deleted 1y ago
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hn_throw_250822 1y ago
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bit1993 1y ago
Allot of people have a social media account rather than a website and allot of people use gmail rather than host their own mail. Decentralized means do it yourself, but most people just want something with batteries included that works well and don't really care about centralization.
- alexisread 1y ago
  Decentralised here means keeping companies honest by avoiding lock-in. It's fine to have the centralisation if it's easy to switch. BlackSky users don't need to care about the details, but if they don't like the community they can move their data elsewhere. Try doing that with Instagram.
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    They can also liberate their identity, which is the real innovation of the AT protocol
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - jazzyjackson 1y ago
      Didn’t they just adopt DNS? I mean I guess you have a DID people can follow ( tho afaik there’s no other identity server for resolving DIDs besides bsky app), but the way to tell that someone is who you think they are is their handle being connected to their domain
      - johnecheck 1y ago
        did:web (DNS) is just one option for identity. did:plc is what you want, it's not reliant on ICANN or BlueSky. Any PDS should be able to resolve a did:web or did:plc. https://atproto.com/specs/did https://atproto.com/specs/did
        1y ago
kosolam 1y ago
I didn’t understand what are these Black users that blacksky is made for? Is it about skin color wtf?
- seltzered_ 1y ago
  Start here perhaps: https://theemancipator.org/2025/06/05/topics/books/in-we-tried-to-tell-yall-black-twitter-is-a-case-study-in-digital-resistance/ https://theemancipator.org/2025/06/05/topics/books/in-we-tri... - it's an interview about 'black twitter' which arguably was before blacksky. Largely about surfacing stories & perspectives that don't typically get covered.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - quesera 1y ago
    > "Black users" isn't about skin color, it's about a group of people who came from US slavery (I am having trouble phrasing this question to be unambiguously sincere and without intention of provocation, so please bear with me...) I read your statement above as saying that "Black" means "descended from US chattel slavery". Is that your intention? Is this a big-B vs small-b distinction? What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery? Please assume ignorance and not malice. I really do not know what I don't know here.
    - codeforafrica 1y ago
      What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery? Africans? (in Africa at least) I haven't heard anyone here around me calling anyone "black"
      - bilbo0s 1y ago
        I haven't heard anyone here around me calling anyone "black" Wait. What? Where are you that you've never heard anyone call a black person, well, "black"?
Havoc 1y ago
Haven't invested time into bluesky yet but I'm always shocked at how fast the pages load. The contrast to twitter is stunning. Lemmy is a bit more hit/miss on loads but the content posted seems so much more wholesome than other socials
- dingnuts 1y ago
  Unlike Bluesky, which is a website and community, "Lemmy" is software. There are many Lemmy instances; the content varies wildly, just like it does between Mastodon instances, or web sites. What instance is more wholesome? As written, your comment is like saying IRC is more wholesome. It is? On what server?
  - Havoc 1y ago
    I'm thinking of programming.dev in particular but suspect my wholesome comment is pretty universally true. The type of crowd that sets up their own servers like these are in my experience slightly biased towards wholesome side. Setting up software, build initial user base etc...there is a level of intent there that you don't get with the free for all that is reddit or whatever. Maybe that's just my impression but suspect there is a kernel of truth there
    - rzazueta 1y ago
      Perhaps not so much "wholesome" - because I can definitely provide a handful of historical and current examples that definitely aren't - but certainly more "community minded". In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections. When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while. I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all. The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact. This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome. I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.
devin1 1y ago
[flagged]
- rlue 1y ago
  Grassroots protected spaces for/by oppressed classes != institutionalized segregation.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  meh.. We do racial segregation offline all the time. Why wouldn't we do it online?
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    Because approximately 0.5s after you create a whites-only group, you will be savagely attacked as the world's biggest racist. And that's actually fine... but only as long as that is the case for everyone. It's not ok to have self-segregation allowed for some groups, but not others, which is where we are today.
    - bilbo0s 1y ago
      ??? Genuine question here, not trying to anger anyone. But we have Heaven only knows how many whites-only groups online. (In fact we have Heaven only knows how many Asian, Black, Native, and Latin groups online as well.) If you don't like them, you're free to ignore them. Or you're free to criticize them. Your choice. All of that is the great thing about the internet. Why would any of that be a problem for anyone?
  - ta8645 1y ago
    waterfountain.com ?
joshmarinacci 1y ago
Incidentally the size of sockets and screws (including the Allen wrench) is very much a technology. William Sellers pushed standards in the mid 1800s specifically to benefit American industry through interoperability. Standards we still use today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sellers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sellers https://www.jstor.org/stable/3102001 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3102001
- anitil 1y ago
  It's amazing how much things that seem so ho-hum today are yesterday's incredible invention
- osullivj 1y ago
  And the gauges are just as important. Obligatory ref to Brad Cox seminal 1990 paper, Planning the Software Industrial Revolution, and it's compelling analogy with Eli Whitney.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Anyone who has used a #1 Phillips on a #2 screw or vice versa knows the pain that is available - and those are pretty standardized!
echelon_musk 1y ago
Maybe someone can decentralize social media so much that it finally goes offline.
- al_borland 1y ago
  Like MyFace by TacoCorp[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/8GQrVgHh6EU https://youtu.be/8GQrVgHh6EU
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear. Seems like a ton of work to manage the separate server. (a similar refrain from fediverse/mastodon things) But if they're happy sure. A rare example of another AT protocol PDS running, since most have just stuck with the Bluesky operated central one.
- Kye 1y ago
  The whole impetus for the original project inside Twitter was the recognition that centralized moderation at scale is impossible without ignoring what makes different communities unique. Context collapses fast and well-intentioned moderation decisions spark huge, unending imbroglios.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
  It's worth noting that they are using bluesky feeds and moderation services/labellers. They just have written their own rust implementations for the tools/services and their frontend (which is largely a fork of bluesky-social upstream) changes the default experience/settings. So there's still full interop. You can use the blacksky feed and labeller from other bluesky apps and likewise for the reverse. TLDR: They wrote their own implementation of the tooling in their language of choice (Rust instead of Go) and their version of the "app"/frontend sets the defaults for their community.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Unstated, but: they don't fully trust the Bluesky admins and especially their moderators. While not wanting to, er, segregate themselves from the wider "Bluesky" community.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear. Assuming you absolutely trust Bluesky-the-company to behave itself now and in the future, it probably isn't necessary. If you don't, then this sort of step towards real decentralisation is important. This largely makes Bluesky-the-broader-network immune to the Elon Musk factor, tho; even if some idiot buys and breaks Bluesky-the-company, you'd expect more Blacksky-like thing to bud off.
adinhitlore 1y ago
I like bluesky like...a lot but too busy recently to post there and of course, lack of engagement from my part = lack of people to actually give a f@@@ about me. I'm worried though if it gets too big and their CEO Jay (sorry forgot the last name) turns into another evildoer Marvel villain like Zuck? I hope i won't live long enough to witness her replying with "concerning!!!" under a post "my neighbor speaks spanish".
- johnecheck 1y ago
  The structure of the atproto gives us the ability to ditch her and bluesky while keeping our data and connections. If your users aren't captive, why become the villain? They'll just leave.
utilize1808 1y ago
Is it just me but I feel "social" would imply centralization. After all, if I want to socialize I will want to go where other people go, using a tool/client/channel that works for most people --- this inevitably leads to centralization.
- daft_pink 1y ago
  I know right. Seems like they’re just reinventing the wordpress blog.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  I don’t agree — I can socialize with my neighbor and I can also socialize in a centralized hub, like a club. What I like about the Bluesky setup is that you’ve got the potential for neighbor socialization while having central areas be accessible. What I’m not sure about is whether they’ll still have momentum when(if?) tech-averse users understand the model enough to use it. Because if there’s one thing that definitely isn’t social, it’s a lack of active users. I think it’s far more likely to work than mastodon because there is that centralized hub for people who don’t give a shit about decentralization.
  - utilize1808 1y ago
    What if your neighbors decided it's just easier to socialize in a centralized club and go there all the time? Gradually, you "lose" neighbors to socialize with because people (and things in general) gravitate towards the path of least effort. Eventually you will have to go to the club too. Centralization can be contagious.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      This is something we lived through already, right? Centralized social media platforms are largely dominated by annoying people nowadays. The article is about a group that decided “hey, the club sucks, let’s make our own,” and they seem to be doing alright.
ConanRus 1y ago
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krapp 1y ago
The more decentralized social media platforms there are, the better, but I wonder if there's a reason they didn't go with Mastodon?
deleted 1y ago
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Pocomon 1y ago
‘Black folks have always been huge culture drivers on social media platforms and other tech products. Systemically excluded from access to capital and distribution, Black folks leverage creativity to make social media platforms their “own” without ever having true ownership.’ I really don't get it. Who has been excluding ‘black folks’ from digital spaces. Does any of the other users of social media actually own the platform.
- mrtesthah 1y ago
  Have you looked at response-Tweets on X lately?
  - Pocomon 1y ago
    I've opted out of social media so you will have to clue me in. (Mainly because of the trolling and the excessive moderation)
    - basisword 1y ago
      Twitter is a racist cesspit. I deleted my account a while ago but recently decided to give it another go to follow some sports reporters. The amount of racism, xenophobia and hateful content that gets pushed in front of you is absurd. I imagine huge amounts of racism is a turn off for people that aren't white.
      - l72 1y ago
        Allowing every drive by commentator is a huge mistake in building an actual community. Communities are built by people invested in the platform. In the early to mid aughts I was part of couch surfing. It had a lot of purpose built in friction and it created an amazing tight knit group of people that I still consider my best friends. Once the pressure from Airbnb and investment money caused them to remove that, it became terrible. Sometime never growing a community over a small group of invested people is the right choice. The same thing happened with NextDoor. When it was small and just involved a few hundred people in your immediate neighborhood there was a real community on there. Then the kept expanding the size and now you have people that live no where in your community ruining the experience for everyone.
bluefirebrand 1y ago
I really want to make a decentralizable streaming video platform Something like "the wordpress of twitch streams" Something that a person can deploy into a cloud service in a couple of clicks and it will provide chat and streaming for them, that can be extended to include payment processing for donations and other such Big task for sure, but I really think video and streaming is way too concentrated on big sites, and they take a huge cut from streamers
- wasabi991011 1y ago
  Haven't checked it out, but supposedly stream.place [1] is "the Twitch of Bluesky" (according to the HN comment I heard about it from), doing livestreaming using the AT Protocol. [1] https://bsky.app/profile/stream.place https://bsky.app/profile/stream.place
- deleted 1y ago
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- bigC5560 1y ago
  PeerTube is a project that already exists and fits some of those qualifications. Not certain if it quite meets all of your specifications, as I don't believe it has direct integration for payment processing. Most streamers, however, take third-party payment anyway, like Streamlabs, that give a much larger percentage to the creator compared to Twitch or YouTube. I am also not certain how easy it is to set up PeerTube. It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app. I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice. All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.
t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
"our users’ accounts and data are on our server" I appreciated their very thorough moderation description. Power to them if that's the product they're selling, but why pretend to be decentralised? Moderation is a highly centralising act.
- MithrilTuxedo 1y ago
  The unit of decentralization is the group, not the individual. The client-server relationship is still centralized. Joining a community is a highly centralizing act. ;-p
- anon7000 1y ago
  ATProto is decentralized in that it allows you to choose a 3rd party like Blacksky to do all kinds of things for you. You can use the social media feed this 3rd party curates, use their moderation services like block lists, and even have your data hosted on a 3rd party’s servers. All while using the same client app everyone else is using, or even a custom 3rd party client. The nature of the protocol is that everything is connected, but services of the protocol can be decentralized when a user chooses to use a 3rd party to do certain things for them.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  It is decentralised in the sense that it is not strictly dependent on Bluesky (in practice, because no-one else has really done this yet, Bluesky-the-network now consists of Bluesky-the-company, plus Blacksky). Most prior Bluesky 'decentralisation' has, in practice, been somewhat dependent on Bluesky.
alisonatwork 1y ago
There is a depressing irony about a story on an effort to decentralize social media being published on a centralized social media platform. It feels like decentralized blogging will never come back, even though we have Ghost (not to mention Wordpress) right there. With Bluesky being backed by VC it feels like only a matter of time till its inevitable enshittification, and it's not clear to me if users will be able to insulate themselves from that by moving to other instances. It would be cool if we start to see a bunch of blueskies, just like we have mastodons, lemmies etc. I haven't been too optimistic about Bluesky vs those other fediverse platforms because I wasn't aware of any other ATproto instances in the wild, but I guess someone has to be the first so I wish these folks luck.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
  I wouldn't say it's too depressing. It's just that's the platform the interviewer uses. Often bluesky adjacent blogs are posted via Leaflet (atproto based blog) nowaday. It's not always but tbh I see them more than I see substack in my circles now.
JimDabell 1y ago
I know more about this than most, but I’m still confused about how I’m supposed to deal with federated social media. I have a Threads account. I have a Mastodon account. Then Threads added federation. What am I supposed to do with each account? They have different posting histories, they can’t be merged, but if I post the same thing to both of them, I’ll be repeating myself. Am I supposed to discontinue using one of them? If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. It’s a mess.
- righthand 1y ago
  Really though is this a real world issue? Tombstone one and use the other. No reason to quit just because you don’t have perfect agency. Post both if you want, people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.
  - JimDabell 1y ago
    > Tombstone one and use the other. Like I said: > If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. > people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account. When people post the same thing to Facebook and Twitter, those posts don’t end up in the same feed. They do with federation and Threads / Mastodon.
    - em-bee 1y ago
      well, the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. and therefore if that is a concern you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. federation only works if everyone that you want to reach is in it.
      - JimDabell 1y ago
        > the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. It is federated for the people that want it. It’s a setting. > you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. But it’s federated for some people and not for others, so there isn’t a single behaviour I can take that consistently works.
mhh__ 1y ago
I might just be projecting from a certain phase of my life but if I had to bet on what social media will look like: TikTok for an infinite content/drug experience Twitter+offline meetups for everything else. Look at Reddit today for example. Any utility has basically arbitraged away outside of very niche subreddits. Almost no one I know has any energy for online community anymore.
- al_borland 1y ago
  Why Twitter? Every time I go on there it seems like people who are seeking an argument as a way to connect. Those aren’t happy people.
  - mhh__ 1y ago
    Everyone I've met in person from twitter has been very well adjusted, smart, and surprisingly good looking.
spiritplumber 1y ago
Social media's next evolution: state-owned, built by politically connected firms, and working poorly but there's no alternative....
- EarlKing 1y ago
  And everyone must present ID to post, of course... to "protect the children".
dyauspitr 1y ago
I definitely don’t think this is the next evolution. Decentralized just means you have to do work to find places to post to and no one is doing that. The only decentralized social media is going to be stuff that is too gruesome, illegal and hateful to post in regular spaces.
- NickNaraghi 1y ago
  [flagged]
Zaylan 1y ago
A lot of decentralized projects focus on the philosophy, but most people just want something that works smoothly. Platforms like Blacksky probably grew not because of cutting-edge tech, but because they made it feel easy to use without overthinking.
- echelon 1y ago
  And yet Threads pushed past that number in half the time. Bluesky and Mastodon are still the fringe of human community.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    That's because Blacksky and Threads address wildly different markets. Blacksky's market is literally orders of magnitude smaller. That's quite a growth curve when adjusted for market size.
  - vinyl7 1y ago
    Meta essentially forces every instagram user to install threads....so it's more forced growth than natural growth
    - badc0ffee 1y ago
      No, they don't. They do heavily push suggested Threads posts in the IG feed, though.
  - krapp 1y ago
    That's fine. The mainstream is a cesspool of shit and stupidity, and the rest of the world is welcome to drown in it.
swayvil 1y ago
Decentralized must necessitate abandonment of moderators. To filter the bad stuff, to inform that algorithm, we will use a shared rating system. Rating the stuff and rating the raters too.
- anon7000 1y ago
  This is basically proof that you’re wrong: a separate entity hosts separate moderation, and anyone using a client of AT Proto (even the official app) can use this 3rd party as the moderation service for the content that they see. That’s decentralized moderation, where the user has choice over what moderation they use and what feeds they see.
  - swayvil 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - KingMob 1y ago
      I think they're saying that delegating moderation to a third-party still constitutes decentralization, since it doesn't involve Bluesky proper.
      - swayvil 1y ago
        Ok. As I see it, the primary hazard of centralization, and the concomitant moderation, is that control over our communication is given to a central authority. This hazard exists whether it's a few centers or many. Therefore any meaningful decentralization will do away with moderation. Is this not obvious?
        KingMob 1y ago
        > This hazard exists whether it's a few centers or many. I think the primary hazard to focus on is one vs many. The major danger of moderation is when you can't opt out. I would argue they're not quite the same here, because 3rd-party delegation can be revoked at any time, limiting the damage. > any meaningful decentralization will do away with moderation Perhaps if LLMs get way better than they currently are. Otherwise, there's too many things to do in a day to make every possible decision in life yourself, so optional, revocable delegation feels like an acceptable compromise to me. There's many cases where we just rely on others. Do you personally check all your lettuce for e.coli? Did you check your outlets for proper grounding? Did you examine your medications with a mass spectrometer to verify the chemical composition was correct? No, we rely on institutions, fallible as they are, because there's only so many hours in the day.
skybrian 1y ago
I wonder how they came up with two million Blacksky users. Who counts as a user? Do they host that many users' accounts? Is it any Bluesky user who subscribed to their feeds? Something else? Edit: > Feed subscribers + moderation service subscribers https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-blacksky-grew-to-millions-of/comment/149170171 https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-blacksky-grew-to-millio...
- ItsHarper 1y ago
  The vast majority of Bluesky users use a Bluesky-hosted PDS.
- fouc 1y ago
  The article reads so weird. "Blacksky grew to millions of users" and "new kind of social network", when it's really just a sub-set of bluesky. Also given that there's 36 million accounts in total, it seems hard to believe that 2 million of those accounts are following blacksky (5.6% of the bluesky user count) so something is off with the count here perhaps.
joegibbs 1y ago
If it's a decentralised non-profit platform which doesn't have future plans to monetise the users somehow, isn't spending $0 on marketing the default? You'd hardly want to throw a few mil into ads for something that will never generate revenue.
fuckaj 1y ago
$0 plus spinning out of one of the world's largest social networks and news propagators. But yeah... $0.
AuthAuth 1y ago
I hate that they say public benefit corporation like it actually means anything. This is a corporate social media with a fully centeralized userbase and full control of the protocol.
- johnecheck 1y ago
  The userbase is not fully centralized. It's mostly centralized, but users who care can manage their own data independently of bluesky. While it's true that they have 'full' control over the protocol, they've stated that the goal is to hand it off to a more democratic organization once it's stable. This seems like a reasonable choice and I see no reason to distrust their motives here. Even if they did try something underhanded, it's not hard to fork the repositories and force the enshittified version to compete with the original.
  - johnecheck 1y ago
    Looks like the work to create a real standard via the IETF has begun. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-newbold-authenticated-transfer/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-newbold-authenticate...
NooneAtAll3 1y ago
I thought bluesky is simply facebook's version of twitter?
- Kiro 1y ago
  You're thinking of Threads.
bikamonki 1y ago
It's been many years without social networks for me. At gatherings, I'm often the only one without a phone in my hand, and it feels strange. Eventually, the "phoners" make eye contact and chat a bit, usually about something they all saw on a screen. But it never lasts. They always go back to the screen. It seems silence and quiet time make them uncomfortable. Even in a formal business meeting, screens are open, and attention is lost. Will decentralized social networks fix this plague? I don't think so. The only thing that works is disconnecting. Just a few weeks into it, you'll realize you have so much free time. Time for hobbies, time for loved ones, time for finding peace and joy, time for creating and sharing. You will regret the thousands of hours wasted on that useless addiction. A few months in, you'll hear the birds singing again. You'll notice the evening skies. You'll find comfort and joy. The time you get back will help you build incredible things.
- medhir 1y ago
  I agree there’s a ton of benefits from fully disconnecting. I’ve had periods completely off social media which were quite blissful, though I’ve always ended up coming back to some extent due the social aspects you described. Given the choice between apps controlled by large corporations preying on attention vs decentralized protocols, I’d much rather have the latter. I think having examples of apps that don’t demand one’s attention so fiercely, or provide better options for tailoring “the algorithm,” are an important step towards ending the mass social media addiction society is currently experiencing.
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    > provide better options for tailoring “the algorithm,” Instead of a non-obvious "algorithm" with tailoring, just have a social app with a purpose (or per group purpose), and nothing but absolute direct control. I.e. follow/link with friends, family or whatever in groups. The feed is time-weighted to recent posts or communications. Any other filtering or prioritization can be done, by selection. I.e. deprioritize reposts by default, except persons A, B and C. Etc. There could be like/dislikes that accumulate into priorities, for those who think that is convenient, but those priorities are just private settings that can be observed and changed. No hidden/obscure/unclear algorithms, no third parties, no ads, and no Zuck's with any ability to access/impact/insert into the feed. A scrapbook group, that is just a scrapbook group. Etc. When did software products/services start "needing" boogymen?
rkda 1y ago
For a brief moment I thought it’s talking about the satellite company https://www.blacksky.com https://www.blacksky.com
aitchnyu 1y ago
Does it depend on the benevolence of Bluesky for its existence?
- ItsHarper 1y ago
  I think they're hosting their own relay, so not really (besides did:plc identity resolution. Hopefully that can be made decentralized at some point)
thatgerhard 1y ago
Can I have an invite code please
camgunz 1y ago
This is very cool, I'm glad someone else is doing the relay (or whatever it's called) hosting. But that's money right? Donated money is still money.
Rakshith 1y ago
its because of liberals and democrats who hates musk because he teamed up with republicans. They will buy poop if you sell them and you also hate republicans and Trump.

216 points by benwerd 1y ago

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

tl;dr Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky, so running on the AT Protocol that has its own infrastructure, mod team etc.

rsynnott 1y ago
It's fairly specifically _not_ a fork; they've re-implemented atproto (in, what else, Rust). This is important, as there are now two real in-production-use AT Protocol impls (plus a bunch of toy ones).
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago
  Sorry I got that from the description they've put on their GitHub repo. Suppose referring to the front-end as a fork of bsky.app. Shrug
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Yeah, I think the frontend's just a fork, but that's not really the interesting bit.

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hn_throw_250822 1y ago

[dead]

bit1993 1y ago

Allot of people have a social media account rather than a website and allot of people use gmail rather than host their own mail. Decentralized means do it yourself, but most people just want something with batteries included that works well and don't really care about centralization.

alexisread 1y ago
Decentralised here means keeping companies honest by avoiding lock-in. It's fine to have the centralisation if it's easy to switch. BlackSky users don't need to care about the details, but if they don't like the community they can move their data elsewhere. Try doing that with Instagram.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  They can also liberate their identity, which is the real innovation of the AT protocol
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jazzyjackson 1y ago
    Didn’t they just adopt DNS? I mean I guess you have a DID people can follow ( tho afaik there’s no other identity server for resolving DIDs besides bsky app), but the way to tell that someone is who you think they are is their handle being connected to their domain
    - johnecheck 1y ago
      did:web (DNS) is just one option for identity. did:plc is what you want, it's not reliant on ICANN or BlueSky. Any PDS should be able to resolve a did:web or did:plc. https://atproto.com/specs/did https://atproto.com/specs/did
      - 1y ago

kosolam 1y ago

I didn’t understand what are these Black users that blacksky is made for? Is it about skin color wtf?

seltzered_ 1y ago
Start here perhaps: https://theemancipator.org/2025/06/05/topics/books/in-we-tried-to-tell-yall-black-twitter-is-a-case-study-in-digital-resistance/ https://theemancipator.org/2025/06/05/topics/books/in-we-tri... - it's an interview about 'black twitter' which arguably was before blacksky. Largely about surfacing stories & perspectives that don't typically get covered.
pessimizer 1y ago
[flagged]
- quesera 1y ago
  > "Black users" isn't about skin color, it's about a group of people who came from US slavery (I am having trouble phrasing this question to be unambiguously sincere and without intention of provocation, so please bear with me...) I read your statement above as saying that "Black" means "descended from US chattel slavery". Is that your intention? Is this a big-B vs small-b distinction? What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery? Please assume ignorance and not malice. I really do not know what I don't know here.
  - codeforafrica 1y ago
    What are [Bb]lack users called if they are not descended from slavery, or not from US slavery? Africans? (in Africa at least) I haven't heard anyone here around me calling anyone "black"
    - bilbo0s 1y ago
      I haven't heard anyone here around me calling anyone "black" Wait. What? Where are you that you've never heard anyone call a black person, well, "black"?

Havoc 1y ago

Haven't invested time into bluesky yet but I'm always shocked at how fast the pages load. The contrast to twitter is stunning. Lemmy is a bit more hit/miss on loads but the content posted seems so much more wholesome than other socials

dingnuts 1y ago
Unlike Bluesky, which is a website and community, "Lemmy" is software. There are many Lemmy instances; the content varies wildly, just like it does between Mastodon instances, or web sites. What instance is more wholesome? As written, your comment is like saying IRC is more wholesome. It is? On what server?
- Havoc 1y ago
  I'm thinking of programming.dev in particular but suspect my wholesome comment is pretty universally true. The type of crowd that sets up their own servers like these are in my experience slightly biased towards wholesome side. Setting up software, build initial user base etc...there is a level of intent there that you don't get with the free for all that is reddit or whatever. Maybe that's just my impression but suspect there is a kernel of truth there
  - rzazueta 1y ago
    Perhaps not so much "wholesome" - because I can definitely provide a handful of historical and current examples that definitely aren't - but certainly more "community minded". In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections. When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while. I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all. The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact. This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome. I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.

devin1 1y ago

[flagged]

rlue 1y ago
Grassroots protected spaces for/by oppressed classes != institutionalized segregation.
bilbo0s 1y ago
meh.. We do racial segregation offline all the time. Why wouldn't we do it online?
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  Because approximately 0.5s after you create a whites-only group, you will be savagely attacked as the world's biggest racist. And that's actually fine... but only as long as that is the case for everyone. It's not ok to have self-segregation allowed for some groups, but not others, which is where we are today.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    ??? Genuine question here, not trying to anger anyone. But we have Heaven only knows how many whites-only groups online. (In fact we have Heaven only knows how many Asian, Black, Native, and Latin groups online as well.) If you don't like them, you're free to ignore them. Or you're free to criticize them. Your choice. All of that is the great thing about the internet. Why would any of that be a problem for anyone?
- ta8645 1y ago
  waterfountain.com ?

joshmarinacci 1y ago

Incidentally the size of sockets and screws (including the Allen wrench) is very much a technology. William Sellers pushed standards in the mid 1800s specifically to benefit American industry through interoperability. Standards we still use today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sellers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sellers https://www.jstor.org/stable/3102001 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3102001

anitil 1y ago
It's amazing how much things that seem so ho-hum today are yesterday's incredible invention
osullivj 1y ago
And the gauges are just as important. Obligatory ref to Brad Cox seminal 1990 paper, Planning the Software Industrial Revolution, and it's compelling analogy with Eli Whitney.
bombcar 1y ago
Anyone who has used a #1 Phillips on a #2 screw or vice versa knows the pain that is available - and those are pretty standardized!

echelon_musk 1y ago

Maybe someone can decentralize social media so much that it finally goes offline.

al_borland 1y ago
Like MyFace by TacoCorp[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/8GQrVgHh6EU https://youtu.be/8GQrVgHh6EU

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear. Seems like a ton of work to manage the separate server. (a similar refrain from fediverse/mastodon things) But if they're happy sure. A rare example of another AT protocol PDS running, since most have just stuck with the Bluesky operated central one.

Kye 1y ago
The whole impetus for the original project inside Twitter was the recognition that centralized moderation at scale is impossible without ignoring what makes different communities unique. Context collapses fast and well-intentioned moderation decisions spark huge, unending imbroglios.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
It's worth noting that they are using bluesky feeds and moderation services/labellers. They just have written their own rust implementations for the tools/services and their frontend (which is largely a fork of bluesky-social upstream) changes the default experience/settings. So there's still full interop. You can use the blacksky feed and labeller from other bluesky apps and likewise for the reverse. TLDR: They wrote their own implementation of the tooling in their language of choice (Rust instead of Go) and their version of the "app"/frontend sets the defaults for their community.
pjc50 1y ago
Unstated, but: they don't fully trust the Bluesky admins and especially their moderators. While not wanting to, er, segregate themselves from the wider "Bluesky" community.
rsynnott 1y ago
> Why any of this was necessary instead of using the built-in Feeds and moderation capabilities on Bluesky is unclear. Assuming you absolutely trust Bluesky-the-company to behave itself now and in the future, it probably isn't necessary. If you don't, then this sort of step towards real decentralisation is important. This largely makes Bluesky-the-broader-network immune to the Elon Musk factor, tho; even if some idiot buys and breaks Bluesky-the-company, you'd expect more Blacksky-like thing to bud off.

adinhitlore 1y ago

I like bluesky like...a lot but too busy recently to post there and of course, lack of engagement from my part = lack of people to actually give a f@@@ about me. I'm worried though if it gets too big and their CEO Jay (sorry forgot the last name) turns into another evildoer Marvel villain like Zuck? I hope i won't live long enough to witness her replying with "concerning!!!" under a post "my neighbor speaks spanish".

johnecheck 1y ago
The structure of the atproto gives us the ability to ditch her and bluesky while keeping our data and connections. If your users aren't captive, why become the villain? They'll just leave.

utilize1808 1y ago

Is it just me but I feel "social" would imply centralization. After all, if I want to socialize I will want to go where other people go, using a tool/client/channel that works for most people --- this inevitably leads to centralization.

daft_pink 1y ago
I know right. Seems like they’re just reinventing the wordpress blog.
DrewADesign 1y ago
I don’t agree — I can socialize with my neighbor and I can also socialize in a centralized hub, like a club. What I like about the Bluesky setup is that you’ve got the potential for neighbor socialization while having central areas be accessible. What I’m not sure about is whether they’ll still have momentum when(if?) tech-averse users understand the model enough to use it. Because if there’s one thing that definitely isn’t social, it’s a lack of active users. I think it’s far more likely to work than mastodon because there is that centralized hub for people who don’t give a shit about decentralization.
- utilize1808 1y ago
  What if your neighbors decided it's just easier to socialize in a centralized club and go there all the time? Gradually, you "lose" neighbors to socialize with because people (and things in general) gravitate towards the path of least effort. Eventually you will have to go to the club too. Centralization can be contagious.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    This is something we lived through already, right? Centralized social media platforms are largely dominated by annoying people nowadays. The article is about a group that decided “hey, the club sucks, let’s make our own,” and they seem to be doing alright.

ConanRus 1y ago

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krapp 1y ago

The more decentralized social media platforms there are, the better, but I wonder if there's a reason they didn't go with Mastodon?

deleted 1y ago

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Pocomon 1y ago

‘Black folks have always been huge culture drivers on social media platforms and other tech products. Systemically excluded from access to capital and distribution, Black folks leverage creativity to make social media platforms their “own” without ever having true ownership.’ I really don't get it. Who has been excluding ‘black folks’ from digital spaces. Does any of the other users of social media actually own the platform.

mrtesthah 1y ago
Have you looked at response-Tweets on X lately?
- Pocomon 1y ago
  I've opted out of social media so you will have to clue me in. (Mainly because of the trolling and the excessive moderation)
  - basisword 1y ago
    Twitter is a racist cesspit. I deleted my account a while ago but recently decided to give it another go to follow some sports reporters. The amount of racism, xenophobia and hateful content that gets pushed in front of you is absurd. I imagine huge amounts of racism is a turn off for people that aren't white.
    - l72 1y ago
      Allowing every drive by commentator is a huge mistake in building an actual community. Communities are built by people invested in the platform. In the early to mid aughts I was part of couch surfing. It had a lot of purpose built in friction and it created an amazing tight knit group of people that I still consider my best friends. Once the pressure from Airbnb and investment money caused them to remove that, it became terrible. Sometime never growing a community over a small group of invested people is the right choice. The same thing happened with NextDoor. When it was small and just involved a few hundred people in your immediate neighborhood there was a real community on there. Then the kept expanding the size and now you have people that live no where in your community ruining the experience for everyone.

bluefirebrand 1y ago

I really want to make a decentralizable streaming video platform Something like "the wordpress of twitch streams" Something that a person can deploy into a cloud service in a couple of clicks and it will provide chat and streaming for them, that can be extended to include payment processing for donations and other such Big task for sure, but I really think video and streaming is way too concentrated on big sites, and they take a huge cut from streamers

wasabi991011 1y ago
Haven't checked it out, but supposedly stream.place [1] is "the Twitch of Bluesky" (according to the HN comment I heard about it from), doing livestreaming using the AT Protocol. [1] https://bsky.app/profile/stream.place https://bsky.app/profile/stream.place
deleted 1y ago
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bigC5560 1y ago
PeerTube is a project that already exists and fits some of those qualifications. Not certain if it quite meets all of your specifications, as I don't believe it has direct integration for payment processing. Most streamers, however, take third-party payment anyway, like Streamlabs, that give a much larger percentage to the creator compared to Twitch or YouTube. I am also not certain how easy it is to set up PeerTube. It is a decentralized platform that supports not only direct streaming from a server, but also is federated and supports P2P streaming for popular videos to reduce server load. There was also a successful donation campaign that occurred in order to create a much better mobile app. I see your vision, but the greatest cost to streaming like this is the hardware, not the software. It is very expensive to run a livestream, and putting that cost on the streamer itself is not feasible for the vast majority of the people making that content. The only reason they make it is that it is relatively convenient to do so. Who knows, a video or stream might hit the algorithm and get a lot of views. If Twitch or YouTube started to charge people money to stream, there would be significantly fewer streamers. If you could somehow make this service for free, then you would still face competition from the sheer size of these platforms. Most people visit only a couple of websites, and if they don't see a streamer online, they will just click on another one that is. That is a big problem with the modern internet as a whole. All I can hope is these platforms have some major accident that people actually wake up and demand for an alternative. Literally any competition would be nice. All that is to say, I hope I don't demotivate you. I hope that eventually, when people wake up to how bad big tech is, there will be alternatives that they can go to. Good luck if you end up deciding to take this on.

t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago

"our users’ accounts and data are on our server" I appreciated their very thorough moderation description. Power to them if that's the product they're selling, but why pretend to be decentralised? Moderation is a highly centralising act.

MithrilTuxedo 1y ago
The unit of decentralization is the group, not the individual. The client-server relationship is still centralized. Joining a community is a highly centralizing act. ;-p
anon7000 1y ago
ATProto is decentralized in that it allows you to choose a 3rd party like Blacksky to do all kinds of things for you. You can use the social media feed this 3rd party curates, use their moderation services like block lists, and even have your data hosted on a 3rd party’s servers. All while using the same client app everyone else is using, or even a custom 3rd party client. The nature of the protocol is that everything is connected, but services of the protocol can be decentralized when a user chooses to use a 3rd party to do certain things for them.
rsynnott 1y ago
It is decentralised in the sense that it is not strictly dependent on Bluesky (in practice, because no-one else has really done this yet, Bluesky-the-network now consists of Bluesky-the-company, plus Blacksky). Most prior Bluesky 'decentralisation' has, in practice, been somewhat dependent on Bluesky.

alisonatwork 1y ago

There is a depressing irony about a story on an effort to decentralize social media being published on a centralized social media platform. It feels like decentralized blogging will never come back, even though we have Ghost (not to mention Wordpress) right there. With Bluesky being backed by VC it feels like only a matter of time till its inevitable enshittification, and it's not clear to me if users will be able to insulate themselves from that by moving to other instances. It would be cool if we start to see a bunch of blueskies, just like we have mastodons, lemmies etc. I haven't been too optimistic about Bluesky vs those other fediverse platforms because I wasn't aware of any other ATproto instances in the wild, but I guess someone has to be the first so I wish these folks luck.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
I wouldn't say it's too depressing. It's just that's the platform the interviewer uses. Often bluesky adjacent blogs are posted via Leaflet (atproto based blog) nowaday. It's not always but tbh I see them more than I see substack in my circles now.

JimDabell 1y ago

I know more about this than most, but I’m still confused about how I’m supposed to deal with federated social media. I have a Threads account. I have a Mastodon account. Then Threads added federation. What am I supposed to do with each account? They have different posting histories, they can’t be merged, but if I post the same thing to both of them, I’ll be repeating myself. Am I supposed to discontinue using one of them? If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. It’s a mess.

righthand 1y ago
Really though is this a real world issue? Tombstone one and use the other. No reason to quit just because you don’t have perfect agency. Post both if you want, people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.
- JimDabell 1y ago
  > Tombstone one and use the other. Like I said: > If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. > people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account. When people post the same thing to Facebook and Twitter, those posts don’t end up in the same feed. They do with federation and Threads / Mastodon.
  - em-bee 1y ago
    well, the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. and therefore if that is a concern you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. federation only works if everyone that you want to reach is in it.
    - JimDabell 1y ago
      > the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. It is federated for the people that want it. It’s a setting. > you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. But it’s federated for some people and not for others, so there isn’t a single behaviour I can take that consistently works.

mhh__ 1y ago

I might just be projecting from a certain phase of my life but if I had to bet on what social media will look like: TikTok for an infinite content/drug experience Twitter+offline meetups for everything else. Look at Reddit today for example. Any utility has basically arbitraged away outside of very niche subreddits. Almost no one I know has any energy for online community anymore.

al_borland 1y ago
Why Twitter? Every time I go on there it seems like people who are seeking an argument as a way to connect. Those aren’t happy people.
- mhh__ 1y ago
  Everyone I've met in person from twitter has been very well adjusted, smart, and surprisingly good looking.

spiritplumber 1y ago

Social media's next evolution: state-owned, built by politically connected firms, and working poorly but there's no alternative....

EarlKing 1y ago
And everyone must present ID to post, of course... to "protect the children".

dyauspitr 1y ago

I definitely don’t think this is the next evolution. Decentralized just means you have to do work to find places to post to and no one is doing that. The only decentralized social media is going to be stuff that is too gruesome, illegal and hateful to post in regular spaces.

NickNaraghi 1y ago
[flagged]

Zaylan 1y ago

A lot of decentralized projects focus on the philosophy, but most people just want something that works smoothly. Platforms like Blacksky probably grew not because of cutting-edge tech, but because they made it feel easy to use without overthinking.

echelon 1y ago
And yet Threads pushed past that number in half the time. Bluesky and Mastodon are still the fringe of human community.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  That's because Blacksky and Threads address wildly different markets. Blacksky's market is literally orders of magnitude smaller. That's quite a growth curve when adjusted for market size.
- vinyl7 1y ago
  Meta essentially forces every instagram user to install threads....so it's more forced growth than natural growth
  - badc0ffee 1y ago
    No, they don't. They do heavily push suggested Threads posts in the IG feed, though.
- krapp 1y ago
  That's fine. The mainstream is a cesspool of shit and stupidity, and the rest of the world is welcome to drown in it.

swayvil 1y ago

Decentralized must necessitate abandonment of moderators. To filter the bad stuff, to inform that algorithm, we will use a shared rating system. Rating the stuff and rating the raters too.

anon7000 1y ago
This is basically proof that you’re wrong: a separate entity hosts separate moderation, and anyone using a client of AT Proto (even the official app) can use this 3rd party as the moderation service for the content that they see. That’s decentralized moderation, where the user has choice over what moderation they use and what feeds they see.
- swayvil 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - KingMob 1y ago
    I think they're saying that delegating moderation to a third-party still constitutes decentralization, since it doesn't involve Bluesky proper.
    - swayvil 1y ago
      Ok. As I see it, the primary hazard of centralization, and the concomitant moderation, is that control over our communication is given to a central authority. This hazard exists whether it's a few centers or many. Therefore any meaningful decentralization will do away with moderation. Is this not obvious?
      - KingMob 1y ago
        > This hazard exists whether it's a few centers or many. I think the primary hazard to focus on is one vs many. The major danger of moderation is when you can't opt out. I would argue they're not quite the same here, because 3rd-party delegation can be revoked at any time, limiting the damage. > any meaningful decentralization will do away with moderation Perhaps if LLMs get way better than they currently are. Otherwise, there's too many things to do in a day to make every possible decision in life yourself, so optional, revocable delegation feels like an acceptable compromise to me. There's many cases where we just rely on others. Do you personally check all your lettuce for e.coli? Did you check your outlets for proper grounding? Did you examine your medications with a mass spectrometer to verify the chemical composition was correct? No, we rely on institutions, fallible as they are, because there's only so many hours in the day.

skybrian 1y ago

I wonder how they came up with two million Blacksky users. Who counts as a user? Do they host that many users' accounts? Is it any Bluesky user who subscribed to their feeds? Something else? Edit: > Feed subscribers + moderation service subscribers https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-blacksky-grew-to-millions-of/comment/149170171 https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-blacksky-grew-to-millio...

ItsHarper 1y ago
The vast majority of Bluesky users use a Bluesky-hosted PDS.
fouc 1y ago
The article reads so weird. "Blacksky grew to millions of users" and "new kind of social network", when it's really just a sub-set of bluesky. Also given that there's 36 million accounts in total, it seems hard to believe that 2 million of those accounts are following blacksky (5.6% of the bluesky user count) so something is off with the count here perhaps.

joegibbs 1y ago

If it's a decentralised non-profit platform which doesn't have future plans to monetise the users somehow, isn't spending $0 on marketing the default? You'd hardly want to throw a few mil into ads for something that will never generate revenue.

fuckaj 1y ago

$0 plus spinning out of one of the world's largest social networks and news propagators. But yeah... $0.

AuthAuth 1y ago

I hate that they say public benefit corporation like it actually means anything. This is a corporate social media with a fully centeralized userbase and full control of the protocol.

johnecheck 1y ago
The userbase is not fully centralized. It's mostly centralized, but users who care can manage their own data independently of bluesky. While it's true that they have 'full' control over the protocol, they've stated that the goal is to hand it off to a more democratic organization once it's stable. This seems like a reasonable choice and I see no reason to distrust their motives here. Even if they did try something underhanded, it's not hard to fork the repositories and force the enshittified version to compete with the original.
- johnecheck 1y ago
  Looks like the work to create a real standard via the IETF has begun. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-newbold-authenticated-transfer/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-newbold-authenticate...

NooneAtAll3 1y ago

I thought bluesky is simply facebook's version of twitter?

Kiro 1y ago
You're thinking of Threads.

bikamonki 1y ago

It's been many years without social networks for me. At gatherings, I'm often the only one without a phone in my hand, and it feels strange. Eventually, the "phoners" make eye contact and chat a bit, usually about something they all saw on a screen. But it never lasts. They always go back to the screen. It seems silence and quiet time make them uncomfortable. Even in a formal business meeting, screens are open, and attention is lost. Will decentralized social networks fix this plague? I don't think so. The only thing that works is disconnecting. Just a few weeks into it, you'll realize you have so much free time. Time for hobbies, time for loved ones, time for finding peace and joy, time for creating and sharing. You will regret the thousands of hours wasted on that useless addiction. A few months in, you'll hear the birds singing again. You'll notice the evening skies. You'll find comfort and joy. The time you get back will help you build incredible things.

medhir 1y ago
I agree there’s a ton of benefits from fully disconnecting. I’ve had periods completely off social media which were quite blissful, though I’ve always ended up coming back to some extent due the social aspects you described. Given the choice between apps controlled by large corporations preying on attention vs decentralized protocols, I’d much rather have the latter. I think having examples of apps that don’t demand one’s attention so fiercely, or provide better options for tailoring “the algorithm,” are an important step towards ending the mass social media addiction society is currently experiencing.
- Nevermark 1y ago
  > provide better options for tailoring “the algorithm,” Instead of a non-obvious "algorithm" with tailoring, just have a social app with a purpose (or per group purpose), and nothing but absolute direct control. I.e. follow/link with friends, family or whatever in groups. The feed is time-weighted to recent posts or communications. Any other filtering or prioritization can be done, by selection. I.e. deprioritize reposts by default, except persons A, B and C. Etc. There could be like/dislikes that accumulate into priorities, for those who think that is convenient, but those priorities are just private settings that can be observed and changed. No hidden/obscure/unclear algorithms, no third parties, no ads, and no Zuck's with any ability to access/impact/insert into the feed. A scrapbook group, that is just a scrapbook group. Etc. When did software products/services start "needing" boogymen?

rkda 1y ago

For a brief moment I thought it’s talking about the satellite company https://www.blacksky.com https://www.blacksky.com

aitchnyu 1y ago

Does it depend on the benevolence of Bluesky for its existence?

ItsHarper 1y ago
I think they're hosting their own relay, so not really (besides did:plc identity resolution. Hopefully that can be made decentralized at some point)

thatgerhard 1y ago

Can I have an invite code please

camgunz 1y ago

This is very cool, I'm glad someone else is doing the relay (or whatever it's called) hosting. But that's money right? Donated money is still money.

Rakshith 1y ago

its because of liberals and democrats who hates musk because he teamed up with republicans. They will buy poop if you sell them and you also hate republicans and Trump.