9 ms·

I was right about ATProto key management

• skybrian 9mo ago
  It's written in anger, but I'm optimistic that this will eventually get fixed, and documenting bad experiences like this will help.
  • echelon 9mo ago
    Peer to peer, not federation, is the way forward. We should only build peer to peer social protocols. Websites and communities should simply sample from the swarm and make it easy for non-technical users to post and consume. They should be optional and not central points of failure (or control). {Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord} should work like {Email, BitTorrent, PGP}. Bluesky and Mastodon are the wrong architecture. The web, fancy javascript UI/UX, and microservices shouldn't be the focus. The protocol should be the focus. A fully distributed protocol would dictate the solution to this exact problem.
    • anon7000 9mo ago
      Bluesky is designed the way it is because of scale. How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Bsky is designed so that the microservices themselves can be decentralized and so multiple different types of apps can be built on the same protocol/infra. Obviously, it’s early days, and hopefully there is even more experimentation in the p2p space. But atproto architecture is a very fair experiment in this space. I can store my data on my own server, use a client app I wrote, subscribe to a specific aggregation/feed service I prefer, use the moderation list I want… all while still being connected to the larger protocol & network. It’s pretty neat.
      • cluckindan 9mo ago
        You use routers as the beefy servers. Unicast, multicast, broadcast. Unfortunately that means the implementation needs to reach all the way into the network layer.
        • direwolf20 9mo ago
          Multicast doesn't work on the global internet, and can't, due to problems of scalability and billing. It's sometimes possible to negotiate with specific ISPs to use multicast in specific ways on their network.
      • walletdrainer 9mo ago
        > How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? You design it with those requirements in mind? There’s no fundamental technical limitation at play here.
        • dboreham 9mo ago
          There kind of is: the computers the "p" run don't allow incoming connections and don't allow long lived processes.
      • somat 9mo ago
        You invert the problem. People want to build store and forward systems because that is their mental model of the problem. store and forward system are fine, and there are many advantages to them, but direct request systems scale much better. basically have each user fetch their messages from the locations they want rather than delivering the messages to them. think how the web works vs how email works.
        • direwolf20 9mo ago
          RSS! But you can't make a personalized timeline with a pull model, and that's where the money seems to be.
          • azertify 9mo ago
            I think finding where the money _isn't_ is a fun way to find interesting projects.
      • fc417fc802 9mo ago
        > How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Presumably by fusing the P2P and federated models together. There's no particular reason those two models can't coexist within the same protocol. It just hasn't been created yet. Similar to how a good mesh networking implementation will make use a high bandwidth backhaul such as the internet if it's available.
        • bccdee 9mo ago
          ATProto may be the closest we'll get to that. PDSes are granular enough to serve individual users, and you can (theoretically) pull from a relay and index only posts from users you're interested in for your appview, if you're hardware-limited. Relays are fungible and pretty lightweight themselves, so you're not depending too much on any central server. But people don't want to run an always-online server to send their stuff to peers, so they host it on the main bsky servers. The problem with p2p is UX; people don't want to DIY their server.
    • jrm4 9mo ago
      So I agree with you that they should work like email -- but I've always said that Mastodon is better because it is like email; aka the power is in the nodes. What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? Genuinely curious because I also am super skeptical that ATProto brings anything that we really need.
      • mschuster91 9mo ago
        > What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? The same problems as always. Allow federation and you get... - federation wars and moderators conducting these wars using their own users as hostages - I left Mastodon years ago when some particularly dumb morons decided to do bitchfights regarding Israel / Palestine. No I'm not interested in your pointless squabble, but I do care when I suddenly don't see posts from a bunch of users without even getting a notification... - Mastodon-specific, when you move your account from one instance to another (e.g. as response to above-mentioned BS) your followings and followers migrate - but all your posts and media do not - spam, trolls and griefers abusing the system, up to and including sending around CSAM material that inevitably gets sucked in by your instance, making you liable in the eyes of the law - security issues. Mastodon has been full of these, no thanks I don't have the time to be constantly on guard lest I be exploited from above-mentioned griefers. - other instances not giving a flying fuck about moderation or abuse going out from their instances.
        • Angostura 9mo ago
          Sounds like you want to run your own private instance. That way you control your own moderation and federation policies
          • azertify 9mo ago
            I think the problem is that it's too onerous to run your own instance, but being on anything but the "default" instance means dealing with volunteer moderators imposing their worldview on the available discourse. Creating a Mastodon account shouldn't mean supporting the particular political affiliation of the moderators, but I think it feels that way for many of the instances.
    • direwolf20 9mo ago
      Unfortunately, the swarm is 99.99999% advertisements for penis enlargement pills. How can a P2P system filter them out? A federated system relies on each admin to filter them out. A centralised system does even better, relying on a single dictator to filter them out. A P2P system requires every user to filter every spam message, together consuming far more effort than the spammer needed to send it.
      • robcohen 9mo ago
        This isn't, and has never been a hard problem. Just pay for people's attention. People you follow don't have to pay, and make that transitive. Penalize people in your network who propagate spam by increasing the cost to get your attention.
        • echelon 9mo ago
          This is one of the most interesting properties of peer-to-peer networks. You can run your own ingestion algorithms, and one of the things you can do is set up inbound rules that incorporate micro transactions. We have to build a lot of infrastructure to make this work, but it seems ideal for a world full of agents and autonomous systems acting on our behalf.
          • direwolf20 9mo ago
            Do the outbound rules of other participants include microtransactions? And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.
            • echelon 9mo ago
              If you've got great content, I would just follow you. Or someone I follow would follow you, and through the network it would lead to discovery. I want your content, so unless you charge for it, nobody's paying anyone. If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee. I'd be free to choose to set that up as a part of my ingestion algorithm. Or maybe my peers do it, and if they "upvote" the content, I see it. If my peers start acting poorly and sending spam, I can flag disinterest and my algorithm can naturally start deboosting that part of the network. With such systems-level control, we should be able to build really excellent tooling, optimization, and statistical monitoring. Also, since all publications are digitally signed, your content wouldn't have to be routed to me through your node at all. You could in fact never connect to the swarm and I could still read your content if you publish it to a peer that has distribution.
    • hollow-moe 9mo ago
      Email is the prime example of federated communication. From protocol inception to painful expansion and aging protocol all until corporate apropriaton. But I still think federation is the way forward, absolute centralisation is bad I'll let you figure why, but absolute decentralization is also bad, limitations due to its nature, unusual working for most users... Meanwhile federation is right in the middle, and users already use it with email without even noticing!
      • BrenBarn 9mo ago
        People often mention email as an example of federated communication, but the way email works in practice doesn't entirely live up to that ideal. Good luck getting your own self-hosted email server to send emails that actually reach anyone using a major email provider; they'll just be blocked as spam. In practice, email is much less federated than it seems. A significant proportion of people are just using gmail. You probably don't have to include that many providers to cover a majority of people in the US. I think federation has promise, but federation in itself is not a solution. Technical approaches do not address the more fundamental issue that, regardless of the mechanics of the system, big players will have more influence on its operation and evolution. Thus we will always need sociopolitical mechanisms to restrict big players.
        • patmorgan23 9mo ago
          Federation does at least give you the choice of providers, even a little bit of competition goes a long way to improving a company's behavior.
          • BrenBarn 9mo ago
            But in practice in doesn't always give you a choice, because the biggest providers will embrace and extend and start providing things other providers don't. Or they'll just make it difficult to export your data, etc.
      • tsimionescu 9mo ago
        Email is by far the least secure form of communication in common use right now. It's trivial to impersonate others over email, and every MTA that processes your email has access to the full contents, because they are never encrypted except in flight (and except by a few tiny disparate groups using PGP, and even these groups can't authenticate one another). And not for lack of trying, I should add.
    • apitman 9mo ago
      We don't need large scale social networks in the first place. The Discord model of small communities is the way forward. Keep groups small enough for natural human social rules to apply. Slows down global dissemination of information for sure, but that's what the news is for, and anything important will eventually travel between communities anyway.
      • trinsic2 9mo ago
        Yep. Once a system gets too large, its starts to break down and everything you do to make work ends up centralizing the process just like in real life. If you want things to work you keep it small and distributed.
      • pythonaut_16 9mo ago
        I don't understand how you can seriously pose Discord as an alternative in this conversation as it's entirely centralized and full of all sorts of toxic behavior and failure modes. Like at least suggest old school forums, IRC, or usenet.
        • lmm 9mo ago
          Discord is technically centralised but in a way that mostly doesn't matter at the point of use, and its design avoids many of the failure modes of old school forums, IRC, or usenet where moderator cabals take control of any community and bully lowly users.
          • zeratax 9mo ago
            how does it avoid that? i have experienced just as many power tripping mods on discord as i have on irc. the only difference to me is that i have never seen an irc channel with over 20 million users
            • lmm 9mo ago
              By making it very easy for every user to start their own server, rather than the multiple tiers of ircops/server admins/etc. where some users genuinely do have more power (and/or a level of technical ability that becomes a difference in power) than others.
    • glenstein 9mo ago
      I don't disagree, but I'm baffled that, with P2P as your preferred outcome, your orientation toward federated infrastructure is one of opposition rather than support. It feels philosophically confused to me; they're your natural allies, they're a step in your preferred direction and they have an instance of real world success (well, to a degree) which is important. Whatever theory of change motivates this form of criticism of federated services can't be one that's, say, intentional or strategic about outcomes. It feels more first principles. One might also ask why P2P thesis statements only ever show up deep in the weeds in comment sections in response to the fediverse when logically speaking they would make just as much sense if not more in response to, say, any post about Facebook as a company or social media writ large, or business news about acquisitions, consolidation of web infrastructure into fewer hands, enshittification, or escalations of control over platforms. Again, I'm fully on board with the dream of P2P but it feels like Buzz Aldrin criticizing Neil Armstrong for not doing enough to bring humanity into the space age.
      • account42 9mo ago
        This is a flawed argument. If someone wants X they don't need to also support Y just because it's closer to X than other alternatives.
        • glenstein 9mo ago
          It's not a logical syllogism. And I would hope you have more to say about the coherence of a position than that it's merely not forbidden by logic, which is something less than an affirmative defense of its coherence and its motivations. It's about the perfect being the enemy of the good. "Well it's not forbidden by logic" is about as pathetically empty handed as it gets, in terms of accounting for which battles you're picking.
      • mariusor 9mo ago
        I think supporters of P2P as "the one true way" perhaps don't realize that federation is just as peer to peer if your user count is 1. The fundamental distinction between a communication network that is p2p and one that is federated is the storage mechanism. For p2p the network itself is the storage, and as a participating node you connect and retrieve what is addressed to you while the amorphous data blob that contains said messages remains to float in the network. While for a federated network, the receiving node needs to be present on the network at all times to be able to access/receive the messages addressed to itself, after which the messages are absent from the network (to some degree or another). Personally the overhead of having the network having to bear the weight of all its nodes data is too large to make it viable.
  • Dylan16807 9mo ago
    If you mean the buggy and badly documented process, sure. But the complaint it builds up to is that instance-wide bans can ruin you when there are super big instances, and that's not something that can be fixed.
    • direwolf20 9mo ago
      Any system that can ruin a spammer can also ruin someone who isn't a spammer, since the system can't tell the difference.
    • skybrian 9mo ago
      I see this as a mistake caused by really poor docs that should explain what to do and warn not to do the thing this person did. It's also true that big instances have a lot of power and it's going to require a lot of growth of alternative instances to fix that, which will take time. At least it's possible, though. It's an intended outcome.
  • davidgerard 9mo ago
    There's a bug about it, and it's already marked WONTFIX https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/3143 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/3143
• arjie 9mo ago
  My experience using ATProto is that it is somewhat like how the nascent blockchain apps were when they first came out: there's no written content that is viable. Instead, you're supposed to use ephemeral conversations and read a widely disparate set of notes in order to use it. In the end, the upshot of all this is that you get to use a slightly worse form of Twitter - which is already rather unpleasant to use for me because there's a lot of rage content there. Microblogs are fun, and very often I can't justify a whole blog post, but I have seen that others just post their thoughts intermingled and it makes me wonder if perhaps that is what I should do. There's not that much utility to the wide audience anyway. Talking to people who understand you is much nicer anyway.
  • mcdonje 9mo ago
    >you get to use a slightly worse form of Twitter The protocol can support all sorts of other social networks. People are building things akin to instagram, tiktok, medium, allrecipies, etc
    • maelito 9mo ago
      I'm building a place review system.
    • direwolf20 9mo ago
      Is there an advantage to using this protocol instead of a more application–specific one? Perhaps the shared identity?
      • steveklabnik 9mo ago
        A few things. Shared identity is one of them. Another is that applications can understand each other's data and mix them together, if they wish, or keep them separate, if they wish. An instagram-like client can read the posts made by the microblogging client and re-use posts that include images, for example. Same goes with the social graph: re-use one from another application, or create your own.
  • culi 9mo ago
• dfajgljsldkjag 9mo ago
  Complexity acts like a gate. When we make the code too hard to understand, we are telling regular people that they are not allowed to participate. True ownership of your data is only possible if you can actually afford to host it yourself. We should focus on making things simple enough for anyone to use.
  • chokolad 9mo ago
    Can you clarify - are you implying that BlueSky team made protocol hard on purpose, in order to "tell regular people that they are not allowed to participate"?
    • nightpool 9mo ago
      No, OP is saying that they have over-engineered the protocol, and that this acts as an *effective* barrier to participation, regardless of whether it was intended or not. Bluesky's protocol is focused on twitter-scale use-cases, where every node in the network needs to be able to see and process every other event from every other user in able to work properly. This fundamentally limits the people who can run a server to only the people who are able to operate at the same scale.
      • pythonaut_16 9mo ago
        Great, so what's the alternative? What's the "properly engineered" protocol?
        • kevinak 9mo ago
          https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/ ?
        • direwolf20 9mo ago
          Email, RSS, blogs, even Mastodon protocol (it's not ActivityPub) scales better. Anything that only sends data between interested parties, instead of to everyone.
• arghandugh 9mo ago
  The authors’ difficulty is legitimate and real, but there are less than 50 functioning did:web identities total on the planet. Working outside of did:plc is a choice - this project is on the very ragged, least baked edge of Atmosphere development.
  • wmf 9mo ago
    If Bluesky wants to be taken seriously they need to invest in decentralization themselves and not leave it as an exercise for the reader.
    • Kwpolska 9mo ago
      How many users actually care about decentralization?
      • direwolf20 9mo ago
        None, and it's okay to make a centralised platform but I wish people wouldn't fall for the decentralised marketing hype.
    • bramhaag 9mo ago
      Unfortunately most people couldn't care less. Bluesky has been lying about being decentralized since day 1, and yet they have millions of users.
      • wolvoleo 9mo ago
        I think a lot of those users do care but they don't know they've been lying.
      • danpalmer 9mo ago
        Bluesky has been asymptotically approaching full decentralisation. A few years ago the gap was everything except a decentralised design, then it was AppViews, now it's "tooling and documentation" for the bit of the PKI that only 50 entities have done. Meanwhile I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once, couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance, lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on, all classic signs of centralisation.
• bnewbold 9mo ago
  fair enough, the did:web flows are not documented even for technical atproto developers, and there needs to be a self-serve way to heal identity/account problems elsewhere in the network (the "burn" problem). I do think that did:plc provides more pragmatic freedom and control than did:web for most folks, though the calculus might be different for institutions or individuals with a long-term commitment to running their own network services. But did:web should be a functional alternative on principle. I'm glad that the PDS was easy to get up and running, and that the author was able to find a supportive community on discord.
  • Zigurd 9mo ago
    I wrote a Bluesky app in preparation for a client project. ATProto is over-engineered for my purposes, though probably justifiably carefully engineered for the purposes of a big social Twitter-like thing. But since I didn't have to do the engineering, so what? It's a very solid platform for many kinds of multi-user information-sharing systems. This article does give me the impression that I should make and use more test accounts than I currently do when mucking around with ATProto/Bluesky.
  • NoraCodes 9mo ago
    Thanks for responding, Brian. While I don't agree with a lot of decisions Bluesky and the broader ATProto community have made, I am very excited that progress towards real decentralization is happening; Blacksky's app view, for instance, was the trigger for me to try to finally try to set up an account. I would love to see more of a focus on the parts of the system that make this difficult, so that myself and other people who are tired of coupling ourselves to centralized systems can participate. It's hard for me to trust that this is the direction the community is interested in moving, but I hope you prove me wrong.
    • bnewbold 9mo ago
      Thanks for the response Nora. Because of your blog post I went through the process of setting up a did:web account myself this afternoon, and it was painful. Eg, I found a bug in our Go SDK causing that "deactivated" error (https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo/pull/1281 https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo/pull/1281). I kept notes and will try to get out a blog post and update to 'goat' soon. We've also been making progress on the architecture and governance of the PLC system. I don't know if those will assuage all concerns with that system immediately, but I do think they are meaningful steps in reducing operational dependency on Bluesky PBC.
• wolvoleo 9mo ago
  Key management shouldn't have to be difficult. Consider another open microblogging protocol nostr. There a keypair is crucial to the experience and every client automatically generates one if you don't have one to import. I think this part of the UX is just being neglected by bluesky.
• ddtaylor 9mo ago
  BlueSky has to be centralized right now because the quality of the federated network is too poor right now.
  • RobotToaster 9mo ago
    I am not convinced that is not by design.
    • OneDeuxTriSeiGo 9mo ago
      It is in a sense by design because the focus was creating a decentralize-able/federate-able protocol and infrastructure that can scale more or less indefinitely first and foremost, community second. The community is working on actually decentralising the network now that things mostly "just work" (assuming you are using did:plc/generally a happy path user). - Building out PDS communities that are trusted takes time and nowadays there's a few outside of bluesky PBC (one or two big ones and a bunch of smaller ones). People are eager to move off because a lot of users really really don't like bluesky PBC leadership but it's a matter of waiting for these third party communities to reach critical mass. - Relay infra is already pretty much decentralised. Lots of people still rely on the main relay but it's trivial to use a third party relay and there's more of them than you can count. - There are a lot of really high quality third party clients and afaict a lot of users do actually use third party clients but there's basically no metric for tracking these stats. - Appviews are expensive currently and there's work on making them easier to host but there's already one "full" alternative appview for bluesky. - There are a lot non-bluesky apps/services that are genuinely high quality experiences and they are gaining their own communities. The main technical barrier to true decentralisation outside of improving UX is introducing other did:methods and/or spreading trust of did:plc across the community (ex: clustered via raft or paxos across major operators) but there's just not a reason to pursue this over the other fires that need fighting in the ecosystem right now (and keeping did diversity low reduces another source of complexity the space just doesn't need to tackle yet). -------------- TLDR: it is intentional because the goal is to in order of priorities: 1. get the architecture for eventual decentralisation right. 2. make it exist. 3. make it good. 4. make it easy to use for normal people. 5. build community. 6. focus on decentralisation. Decentralisation in theory is the first priority but in practice it's the last priority. Being able to decentralise is always the utmost importance but forcing it to happen is not ever the top priority because that's on the community, not on the developers.
• Dwedit 9mo ago
  "View -> Page Style -> Basic Page Style" is required to read any of the text.
  • vog 9mo ago
    Indeed, it's a pity that the author placed so much focus on a cool looking font that they forgot to take basic properties like "good readability" into account. Form should follow function, not the other way around.
    • anonymous908213 9mo ago
      > Form should follow function, not the other way around. According to whom? It's their personal website, they're allowed to place value on whatever they want.
      • perching_aix 9mo ago
        According to them. They shared their opinion.
        • anonymous908213 9mo ago
          No, they asserted their opinion as a fact. There is a world of difference between "I prefer x" and criticising something while asserting "everyone should do x (because I prefer x)".
          • perching_aix 9mo ago
            > No, they asserted their opinion as a fact. Interesting idea, let's see if they confirm they were talking facts. I'll be very surprised. I'm the worst person to take issue with this. This has been my biggest pet peeve for the longest time as well. Right until my frame of mind flipped randomly, and I recognized that by getting upset over blatantly subjective matters being discussed with zero cushioning like this, I'm doing little more than intentionally misreading the other person, and upsetting myself on purpose. You're reacting to the smoke, not the fire. For example, this may have very well been a perfectly cromulent alternative reply: > Sounds subjective, and indeed, I disagree. Not a fan of dogma like this anyhow.
• nl 9mo ago
  > why is a centralized “burn” able to completely prevent me from interacting with people using Bluesky? Presumably to stop credential reuse attacks on Bluesky itself? Bluesky is one instance and they should enforce security on that instance. If you use a previously burnt ID, they have no way to tell it's you (indeed that's the whole point!) I've done some work in the DID space. Not really a fan, and the space is full of half working implementations like this post documents. But this particular criticism seems unfounded.
  • wmf 9mo ago
    It seems backwards to worry about attacks when basic functionality is undocumented/broken.
    • embedding-shape 9mo ago
      There are different types of attacks possible though, most broadly you can divide them into "design holes" and "implementation holes". This seems to be about preventing a design hole, and those you need to prevent with architecture/design, you can't just fix those once the implementation and documentation is done.
      • account42 9mo ago
        But the design hole is treating (IMO unfortunately) transient identities (the web's domain name system) as something that should persistently identify something. Adding hacks like this doesn't fix the underlying mismatch but creates new issues as seen in the article. Or to put it another way: Domain names changing hands is how the web works. If you design your system to support web identities in a way that domains can't change hands then you are not supporting web identities but rather something different.
        • a022311 9mo ago
          I totally agree. This is the fundamental reason I've stayed off there until now. I'm not about to tie my permanent identity to a domain which I might not own tomorrow. And did:plc is not an option for obvious reasons.
• jrm4 9mo ago
  This continues to confirm for me that there's nothing particularly valuable about ATProto, and that some of the percieved "flaws" in models like Mastodon's model are features just as much as bugs. Honestly, this is making me go further in the other direction, can we just do "twitter but owned by a trust" or something?
  • direwolf20 9mo ago
    Isn't that literally Bluesky? A PBC must act in the public interest.
    • nightpool 9mo ago
      Not exactly—a PBC is allowed to "balance" shareholder profit with "stakeholder interests. But at the end of the day, the money is still coming from the shareholders, and they're still looking for a return. They're required to be transparent, but that's about it. And there aren't really any penalties for not complying either.
  • RobotToaster 9mo ago
    Twitter but run by a bunch of NGO PMCs sounds even worse than twitter.
  • lilOnion 9mo ago
    No we can't. Beacuse at anytime people like Elon Musk can come in and mess everything up. If all of your data is in someones server you are one ban away from becoming noone. Of course that is still true with atproto since majority of users are on bluesky PDS's. But the whole tech is being designed in such a way to prevent such issues while still looking and acting qs traditional social media.
  • kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
    The bigots and sociopaths will need a place to exercise their freeze peach. Groups that don't want to be involved with that rancor need a way to evict such people when they are disruptive. Wikipedia hangs on with its NPOV policy. You can't do that on centralized open fora where opinion is the currency of the realm.
• smnplk 9mo ago
  This blog has a man page aesthetic. The problem is I immediately dont want to read it, because i dont like to read man pages.
  • jacquesm 9mo ago
    That's fine but we don't need to know about that. Comment on the article, not on the format in which it is presented.
    • dwaite 9mo ago
      The article that they are having trouble reading due to its format?
      • throwaway290 9mo ago
        I had no problem reading it but what browser these days don't have reader mode?
• sennalen 9mo ago
  "Because I use NixOS, this was very easy." First time I've heard someone say that
  • palata 9mo ago
    "I use NixOS btw"
• trinsic2 9mo ago
  Im sorry this is stupid. If you have to rely on one organization or a chain of systems where there is single point that can be effected, If your data does not live on your machine (PDS) then you are not in control. Decentralization is the new Centralization. For information ownership, the protocol needs to be distributed.
• Tepix 9mo ago
  Looks like the author solved some issues but didn‘t document them as part of this blogpost. A shame.
• blueflow 9mo ago
  > Because I use NixOS feels like the new "btw i use arch"
• HumanOstrich 9mo ago
  Bluesky also randomly bans new accounts saying they violated the ToS. Like right after signup before you do anything. It says you'll receive an email with details (never happens) and offers a form to appeal. The form goes nowhere and you never hear anything again. This happened to me a couple months ago so it's probably still an issue. It seems more like sloppy, careless engineering than malice, however.
  • embedding-shape 9mo ago
    Happened to me a few weeks ago. I replied/filled out the form, and after a day it was unlocked. Seems to be very hit and miss, maybe depending on who is seeing your replies? Regardless, definitely a sucky issue...
  • direwolf20 9mo ago
    This happened to me and I made a new account, which isn't banned yet but it could be any day now if they detect "ban evasion". Why I don't trust centralised systems.
• Schlagbohrer 9mo ago
  OMG that website's font choices, good god, my poor eyes
  • dxdm 9mo ago
    Well-deserved criticism. The colors, too. Without reader mode, this is the equivalent of someone shining a high beam into your eyes at night while trying to communicate with you. This is the kind of thing I click away from unless there's a strong outside signal that the content is worth engaging with. I hope the author reconsiders these stylistic choices. I'm sure they lose readers because of it.